Is ‘The Brutalist’ Based on a True Story?

As we zero in on the Oscars 2025 race, one title making its way to the top of every list is The Brutalist. After winning both Best Picture – Drama at the Golden Globes and racking up a whopping nine nominations at the Critics’ Choice Awards this week, this three-and-a-half-hour epic is looking like the film to beat.

Directed by Brady Corbet (Melancholia, Vox Lux), with a script co-written by Corbet and Mona Fastvold, The Brutalist is a harrowing epic that follows the life of a Hungarian-born Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor, named László Tóth. Oscar winner Adrian Brody stars in the lead role, and may just get another Academy Award for his portrayal of an immigrant struggling to achieve the American Dream, who has his life turned around by a wealthy industrialist named Harrison Lee Van Buren (played by Guy Pearce).

Also starring Felicity Jones, Joe Alwyn, Raffey Cassidy, Stacy Martin, Emma Laird, Isaach de Bankolé, and Alessandro Nivola, The Brutalist is a bleak historical drama that speaks to the way the trauma of World War II shaped decades of art and design. But how much of The Brutalist is based on a true story?

Is ‘The Brutalist’ movie based on a true story?

The Brutalist movie is not based on a true story, in the sense that none of the characters are based on real people. Adrien Brody’s character, László Tóth, is not based on one specific real-life architect. Guy Pearce’s character, Harrison Lee Van Buren, is not based on any specific, real-life wealthy industrialist. The story you see play out on screen between the two characters is made up.

That said, the Holocaust, immigration, and post-war modern architecture are all very real things. The Brutalist is a historical fiction drama inspired by the post-war architectural style known as Brutalist architecture, and the way it was inspired and shaped by the Holocaust.

“The film is about how post-war psychology shaped post-war architecture,” explained writer/director Brady Corbet in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “Even many of the materials that were used to construct these buildings — a lot of it was developed for wartime. These buildings would not exist if it were not for the trauma that so much of the world went through.”

In an interview with Adrien Brody for NPR, the star said that one key reference for the movie was real-life Hungarian-German Jewish modernist architect, Marcel Breuer, who immigrated to the United States in 1937. So, unlike Brody’s character, Bruer was able to escape before the Holocaust.

It’s also possible Corbet was inspired by Louis Isadore Kahn, and Estonian-born American Jewish architect whose family immigrated to the U.S. in 1906. There’s a 2003 Oscar-nominated documentary about Kahn, My Architect: A Son’s Journey, made by his son, which you can watch on streaming on the Criterion Channel.

But again, all of these are merely points of inspiration, not the actual basis for the story. As Brody explained in the NPR interview, “The Brutalist is a fictional story. And the reason it’s a fictional story is because when Brady and Mona [Fastvold, Corbet’s co-writer] were doing their research to try and write a film about a European architect who survived the Nazi occupation and carried on his work in America, there were none to be found because they’d all been killed.”

For his performance, Brody has also said he was inspired by his family’s own immigration story. Brody’s mother—photographer Sylvia Plachy, famous in her own right—was born in Hungary, and, when she was just 13 years old, fled to New York City with Brody’s grandparents during World War II.

“There’s a very interesting parallel with the character that I play, Laszlo Toth,” Brody said in that same interview with NPR. “I feel like my mother, as an artist and her beautiful sensitivity and empathy for others, all of that is enhanced from her own struggles and her own consciousness of the struggles of others. But she shared so much along the years with me, both stories of my grandparents and her having to say goodbye to her friends without —she was only told she was having to flee the day before they left.”