Becker X The Brutalist
interview with
the brutalist
production designer
judy becker
Imagine you’re in a foreign country, working as a production designer and you can’t build your set because there is a lumber shortage and a war. You have been tasked with creating one of the most important moments in the film. Your lead character, a visionary architect escaping the holocaust must prove his brilliance in a new country, America, and save his creative soul.
The reveal of his work, an updated library, is an astonishing moment in the acclaimed film The Brutalist, crowning László Toth as a visionary architect. Back to the problem, imagine you can’t find any wood to make the magic happen!
Read on to find out how the vastly talented Judy Becker turned challenges into adventures as she shares moments from her working life.
Judy’s work is in countless films, American Hustle, Carol, Amsterdam, Brokeback Mountain, the list goes on and Judy is currently nominated for an academy award for her work on The Brutalist.
The Brutalist courtesy A24
THE LAB MAG: What was your first remembered moment of cinema that changed you, that turned on the lights for you?
JUDY BECKER: When I was 13, I started watching a series of films that were on public television with my friends, and they were all foreign films. And I think the first one was The 400 Blows. Oh, Wow. I'd seen films with subtitles before; my parents did take me to a few. But that film, especially the ending, when he gets to the sea and then turns towards the camera, really made an impression on me. And it turned me onto the French New Wave, obviously. And just how powerful film could be, especially in terms of image. So that was really the beginning of my film education. It brought me beyond just being a viewer of film as entertainment and into something as art. That was the moment.
LAB: What or who would you say was the biggest cultural influence in your life? When did you feel that you had woken up to a certain idea of what you wanted to be as a young person?
JB: For as long as I can remember, I wanted to be an artist. But that was a very cliched idea of an artist. A painter in a garrett with a window and a beret. Probably Bugs Bunny had played an artist in a cartoon. I think that was really, honestly, true for a lot of people. I was a pretty eccentric, socially awkward child starting from the age of three. And I didn't have a lot of friends. So, I turned to art as my companion in many ways. Art has always been a huge part of my life.
I went to an arty high school and so I did fit in better. I always loved a lot of different aspects of the arts. It was only when I was graduating college, where I had studied music, which, by the way, was totally irrelevant to the rest of my life, that I found out that there was such a thing as the art department in cinema and that there was such a career as a production designer. And that was a big watershed moment because that's when I realized there was this job where I could help make films and also pull together all my interests.
The Brutalist courtesy A24
LAB: Give us a day in your life on location, working on The Brutalist, from the moment you woke up, what did you do, how did you make your coffee?
JB: It's really hard because every day was very different. Some days, I would go to my apartment in Budapest, which was right across the street from the office, which was really great for me because I am not a morning person. So to be able to not make my coffee, but go across the street and buy a coffee, then go up to the office, that was great. We had a one room office for everyone in the art department and set decoration department. So it was very communal. Things in every country have a different way of working. And I really tried to embrace that because it was my first experience working anywhere but North America.
And so we were all at a long table with our laptops. And, I'm a very organized person, but I don't work in a way that looks organized. So one little space for my laptop is not enough for me. I have a lot of papers and research, and it's all spread out, and before long I needed another little folding table, you know. And every time I would go out for a couple of hours to go location scouting, I'd come back and someone would be in my chair. And finally, I had to impose the hierarchy and say, I just need my space. That was a little stressful for me, because I'd leave my papers out and I knew where everything was, but you know, they would just get disrupted.
LAB: I love that. Everyone thinks it's a mess but you can find anything.
JB: I should say my father was was an academic and his office was chaotic, I mean, way worse than anything I've ever done. And he knew where everything was, so I must have inherited this from him.
The Brutalist courtesy A24
I look at the graphic design, how that was going and the set design. This is all going on at once while I'm also scouting locations. It's a layered process. So people are drawing sets, scouting locations, and then I’m giving notes on those. And some of the art directors are going out to survey them, which means taking measurements. Then we'll talk about what needs to be done, and they'll start drawing it. I'm not a multitasker, so fortunately for me, I see this as one big task of being a production designer and overseeing all and making decisions..
I'm also doing research and designing a lot too but I had to do that at home because I can't have any kind of noise going on around me. And there was no way of avoiding a lot of ambient noise in that environment. And that was why it was great that my apartment was across the street because I had a big work table set up and people would come and have meetings with me there.
On a typical day, it would be a few hours at the office and then location scouting. And we would be looking for something very specific, something planned that we were going to try and find. For example a building for the diner. We did create that diner in a location.
The Brutalist courtesy A24
We were always looking for pieces that could play as part of the institute. There was an empty holocaust museum that had never been opened to the public because of a lot of political disagreement. It was fascinating. Very few people had ever been inside. And I was like, I want to see what's in there, I’m also curious as a designer. You get to see some things that other people don't. So even though I saw none of the tourist attractions of Budapest, I, I did get to see a lot of interesting things.
That led to some really great locations for the movie. Like the reservoir, which is the underground water chamber that you see in the movie that a lot of people have asked me about.
That’s a very long answer. The real answer is that it changes from day to day.
The Brutalist Courtesy of A24
LAB: I want to ask you what references you used to build the world of The Brutalist? Was there a moment where you discovered a book that inspired you? I know that there are particular forms of architecture that influenced the world, Brutalism obviously, but was there something that was an unexpected ‘oh wow, this is going to be great’ moment?
JB: Well, there were two books that I liked a lot, and they weren't really for the architecture so much because the architecture was mostly influenced by stuff that was already in my head. I really did know a lot about the various styles of architecture that are in the movie, as it is something I've been interested in for a long time. And of course I did additional research, but it wasn't the biggest part of what I had to do.
For the construction site in this period, I found a really great book called Building Brasilia. Brasilia was built in 1950s, so it was very relevant to what we were doing. And I loved that book and it had so many great images of construction in that time period. So that was a great reference..
The Brutalist courtesy A24
And there was another book called Reyers Bohemia, which had a lot of pictures of interiors of both Marcel Breyer's life, his personal life, and the interiors of his friends and of his clients. And I took a lot of inspiration for the way that László himself decorated his own living spaces in the movie, which you ultimately don't see a lot of in the finished movie, but we did build all his furniture that he designed for himself. I took a lot of inspiration from what Marcel Reyer did for himself in that. So those were the two books that I really loved for the project.
LAB: Excellent. A shout out to the analog world, to the books.
JB: You can do internet research, but you can only find what you're looking for, you know, and it won't lead you to the things that you don't know about. Ultimately you will find the surprises in books, things that you don't expect to find. I've looked for photos that I know exist and I can't find them on the internet. So that tells you something.
LAB: I've never thought of it in that way, you are hunting when you're on the internet and you know what you are hunting. Whereas you are gathering when you're in a book. There's always the happy surprise.
JB: That's so true. Exactly. My books are not organized in my little library. And one of my excuses is that when I have to go through them, when I’m looking for something, I see other books that I might get an idea from. And it happens all the time. If I had more time, it would probably be even better.
The Brutalist Courtesy of A24
LAB: Can you tell us the most challenging moment that you had when making The Brutalist?
JB: It was getting the wood for the cabinets in the library. Due to the invasion of Ukraine, wood became extremely scarce in Hungary because they get their wood from Ukraine. And so getting any kind of wood we needed was difficult. You can get particle board but it doesn't look very good and making the cabinets out of particle board would be a very postmodern thing to do, and inappropriate for the mid-century cabinets.
So I didn't want to make them out of particle board, which by the way was used for most of the sets. It was either that or foam. The choices were slim and there was a kind of very cheap alternative. I don't even know what it was, it wasn't particle board and it wasn't plywood. It was something in between. And there was an attempt made to stain it, to look good. And it really did not look good at all. I had to find a quick solution. It was a very stressful period, and it was a lot about communication and availability and budget.
It was a scary challenge, and it was all about money and availability and the war, and it was awful for everyone. But we ultimately had a great solution. We found this veneered wood that looks beautiful in the movie. It took a bit of searching to find the quantity that we needed. Then the challenges were just normal challenges. The cabinets were high, like 18 to 20 feet high, so we had to figure out how to seam two planks of wood together when they were making these huge cabinet doors. And when they were done, they looked real. They looked really good in real life. It wasn't movie magic that made them look good. They looked great, and I was so happy.
And then the special effects guy put in this rig, and he pressed a button and they all fanned open. And I took a video and it was just gratifying, like a great moment for me. Then when I saw the movie at Venice, I was like, Wow! Lol did such a beautiful job of lighting it and Lazlo looks so happy, you know, in the movie, for the only time. So all that led to something truly beautiful.
The Brutalist courtesy A24
LAB: It’s one of the most striking visual moments in the film. And there are so many. But it’s an extraordinary design. Do you employ any of these great things in your own home?
JB: I'd like to employ more of them. We bought an apartment a few years ago in the most inexpensive part of Manhattan, which is Washington Heights. We kept a lot of the old tenement details and did some renovation. And the most expensive part was the cabinetry, which I designed in the bedroom.
So it's just a wall of cabinets. And then there's closets behind there, which I've always dreamed of doing. And I deliberately didn't do that for the books. It's all open shelving, but it's on every single wall of our one spare room. And I really like the way that looks, but I would also like it to be all hidden. So I go in between having everything on view in a very uniform way, like it's all books or it's all hidden, like one or the other. So I would call myself a minimalist, but a minimalist who lives in New York City. It's a really hard challenge, you know!
Intermission in The Brutalist Courtesy of A24
LAB: During the film, was there a particular thing that was a new learning experience for you?
JB: If I didn't learn something on every film, I think I'd be bored out of my mind. It's the great thing about our business. Every film is a new story and has new challenges. And I mean, I'm trying to think some something specific on The Brutalist... I mean, I learned some words of Hungarian.
I knew a lot about brutalism, so that wasn't the thing. I had never designed a building before, I've designed a lot of sets, but I've never studied architecture and or even set design. And I've certainly never designed a building inside and out. But I actually did design this building and we built a model of it that was the interior and the exterior. And it could actually be built. So you know, I've joked about it before, but it would be fun to start a Kickstarter and see how much money we could get to actually build it, or at least rebuild the model because the model of the building got destroyed, not the prop model.
LAB: How did it get destroyed?
JB It was huge. It was 10 feet long and it was really heavy because it was coated with something that looked like concrete. You couldn't lift it. It was very, very intense. This is what happens on film, stuff just gets thrown in the dumpster because no one wants to lift it, get it to a storage space and then pay for it to be stored. So the furniture didn't get destroyed, but the models did. And the movie didn't have a studio at that point, no one owned the movie. So a lot of that stuff just went away.
LAB: Such a shame. It would be great to have an exhibition with all the goodies.
JB: I know.
LAB: Is there a motto you live by?
JB: There's a lot that I live by and one of them is tattooed on my arm. It's ‘the art is in the concealing of the art’, and I have it in Latin ‘ars est in occultatione artis.
Kevin Kline said it at the New York Film Critics Circle years ago. And I thought, that is a good quote. I really like that because it is what I live by. That's how I approach my art, my design. And then I went and had it tattooed so I wouldn't forget it.
LAB: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
JB: The advice my father gave me. It's not like one piece of advice, but it was something I was brought up with. You should find work that you really love and then work is not a job. Find work that you enjoy because that's really your life. That's how he felt about his work. So the fact that I was brought up that way I think was a very fortunate thing for me.
Note to our members: Judy generously shares her favourite things in the Cabinet of Curiosities and one of them is spooky. You’ll have to log in to find out.
very laboratory