One night last month, near the end of the Chicago International Film Festival, a particularly long line of moviegoers snaked down Southport Avenue by the Music Box Theatre. The hot ticket? This fall’s hottest ticket, in fact, all over the international festival circuit?

Well, it’s a 215-minute drama about a fictional Hungarian Jewish architect who emigrates to America in 1947 after surviving the Holocaust. The film’s title, “The Brutalist,” references several things, firstly a post-World War II design imperative made of stern concrete, steel, and a collision of poetry and functionality.

Director and co-writer Brady Corbet, who wrote “The Brutalist” with his filmmaker wife, Mona Fastvold, explores brutalism in other forms as well, including love, envy, capitalist economics and how the promise of America eludes someone like the visionary architect László Tóth, played by Adrien Brody. Corbet, now 36 and a good bet for Oscar nominations this coming January, says his unfashionable sprawl of a picture, being distributed by A24, is also about the “strange relationship between artist and patron, and art and commerce.”

It co-stars Felicity Jones as the visionary architect’s wife, Erzsébet, trapped in Eastern Europe after the war with their niece for an agonizingly long time. Guy Pearce portrays the imperious Philadelphia blueblood who hires Tóth, a near-invisible figure in his adopted country, to design a monumental public building known as the Institute in rural Pennsylvania. The project becomes an obsession, then a breaking point and then something else.

Corbet’s project, which took the better part of a decade to come together after falling apart more than once, felt like that, too.

Spanning five decades and filmed in Hungary and Italy, “The Brutalist” looks like a well-spent $50 million project. In actuality, it was made for a mere $10 million, with Corbet and cinematographer Lol Crawley shooting on film, largely in the VistaVision process.

The filmmaker said at the Chicago festival screening: “Who woulda thunk that for screening after screening over the last couple of months, people stood in line around the block to get into a three-and-a-half-hour movie about a mid-century designer?”

He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with Fastvold and their daughter. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Q: Putting together an independent movie, keeping it on track, getting it made: not easy, as you told the Music Box audience last night. Money is inevitably going to be part of the story of “The Brutalist,” since you had only so much to make a far-flung historical epic.

A: Yeah, that’s right. In relation to my earlier features, “The Childhood of a Leader” had a $3 million budget. The budget for “Vox Lux” was right around $10 million, same as “The Brutalist,” although the actual production budget for “Vox Lux” was about $4.5 million. Which is to say: All the money on top of that was going to all the wrong places.

For a lot of reasons, when my wife and I finished the screenplay for “The Brutalist,” we ruled out scouting locations in Philadelphia or anywhere in the northeastern United States. We needed to (film) somewhere with a lot less red tape. My wife’s previous film, “The World to Come,” she made in Romania; we shot “Childhood of a Leader” in Hungary. For “The Brutalist” we initially landed on Poland, but this was early on in COVID and Poland shut its borders the week our crew was arriving for pre-production. When we finally got things up and running again with a different iteration of the cast (the original ensemble was to star Joel Edgerton, Marion Cotillard and Mark Rylance), after nine months, the movie fell apart again because Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. We couldn’t get any of the banks to cash-flow the tax credit (for location shooting in Poland). It’s completely stable now, but at that time the banks were nervous about whether the war would be contained to Ukraine or not.

And then we finally got it up and running in Budapest, Hungary.

Q: That’s a long time.

A: Every filmmaker I know suffers from some form of post-traumatic stress (laughs). It sounds funny but it’s true. At every level. On the level of independent cinema, you’re just so damn poor. You’re not making any money, and yet from nose to tail, at minimum, a movie always takes a couple of years. With bigger projects, you might have a little more personal security but a lot less creative security with so many more cooks in the kitchen. Either route you choose, it can be an arduous and painful one.

Moviegoers wait in line for the Chicago International Film Festival screening of “The Brutalist” at the Music Box Theatre on Oct. 24 2024. (E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune)
Director and co-writer Brady Corbet introduces the Chicago International Film Festival screening of his film “The Brutalist” at the Music Box Theatre. (E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune)

Whether you’re making a movie for a million dollars, or $10 million, or $100 million, it’s still “millions of dollars.” And if you’re concerned about the lives and livelihoods of the people working with you, it’s especially stressful. People are constantly calling you: “Is it happening? Are we starting? Should I take this other job or not?” And you have 250 people who need that answer from you. Every iteration of the project, I always thought we were really about to start in a week, two weeks. It’s just very challenging interpersonally. It’s an imposition for everyone in your life. And then there’s the imposition of screening a movie that’s three-and-a-half-hours long for film festivals, where it’s difficult to find that kind of real estate on the schedule. So essentially, making a movie means constantly apologizing.

Q: At what point in your acting career did you take a strong interest in what was going on behind the camera?

A: I was making short films when I was 11, 12 years old. The first thing I ever made more properly, I guess, was a short film I made when I was 18, “Protect You + Me,” shot by (cinematographer) Darius Khondji. It was supposed to be part of a triptych of films, and I went to Paris for the two films that followed it. And then all the financing fell through. But that first one screened at the London film festival, and won a prize at Sundance, and I was making music videos and other stuff by then.

Q: You’ve written a lot of screenplays with your wife. How many?

A: Probably 25. We work a lot for other people, too. I think we’ve done six together for our own projects. Sometimes I’ll start something at night and my wife will finish in the morning. Sometimes we work very closely together, talking and typing together. It’s always different. Right now I’m writing a lot on the road, and my wife is editing her film, which is a musical we wrote, “Ann Lee,” about the founder of the Shakers.

I’m working on my next movie now, which spans a lot of time, like “The Brutalist,” with a lot of locations. And I need to make sure we can do it for not a lot of money, because it’s just not possible to have a lot of money and total autonomy. For me making a movie is like cooking. If everyone starts coming in and throwing a dash of this or that in the pot, it won’t work out.

A sold-out Chicago International Film Festival screening of “The Brutalist” at the Music Box Theatre. (E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune)

A continuity of vision is what I look for when I read a novel. Same with watching a film. A lot of stuff out there today, appropriately referred to as “content,” has more in common with a pair of Nikes than it does with narrative cinema.

Q: Yeah, I can’t imagine a lot of Hollywood executives who’d sign off on “The Brutalist.” 

A: Well, even with our terrific producing team, I mean, everyone was up for a three-hour movie but we were sort of pushing it with three-and-a-half (laughs). I figured, worst-case scenario, it opens on a streamer. Not what I had in mind, but people watch stuff that’s eight, 12 hours long all the time. They get a cold, they watch four seasons of “Succession.” (A24 is releasing the film in theaters, gradually.)

It was important for all of us to try to capture an entire century’s worth of thinking about design with “The Brutalist.” For me, making something means expressing a feeling I have about our history. I’ve described my films as poetic films about politics, that go to places politics alone cannot reach. It’s one thing to say something like “history repeats itself.” It’s another thing to make people see that, and feel it. I really want viewers to engage with the past, and the trauma of that history can be uncomfortable, or dusty, or dry. But if you can make it something vital, and tangible, the way great professors can do for their students, that’s my definition of success.

“The Brutalist” opens in New York and Los Angeles on Dec. 20. The Chicago release is Jan. 10, 2025.

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

Every day, the world over, we feel these things because we’re human: Longing. Peace, where we can find it. Belonging. Loneliness, sometimes. Unsteadiness in an ever-expiring present tense. If we’re city dwellers in a great urban center that feeds millions while starving millions more, we can feel desperate for an alternative because time is not limitless and “the city takes time away from you.”

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That quote comes from an unnamed resident of Mumbai, one of several anonymous real-life voices heard in the opening minutes of “All We Imagine as Light.” This is sublime work, with poetry and prose in unerring balance, thanks to writer-director Payal Kapadia. It’s now in a weeklong run at the Gene Siskel Film Center.

With great praise comes inflated expectations, often the wrong ones. Kapadia’s story, about three Mumbai hospital colleagues in overlapping states of yearning, takes its time. It leaves pat resolutions to other filmmakers. You barely detect the whirr of a narrative engine here.

All the same, “All We Imagine as Light” could be described as a straightforward, keenly observed tale of three women who become better friends than they thought possible. The story begins in Mumbai, full of so many people from other places, and moves to the lush coastal region of Ratnagiri in Southwestern India, where one of these three women grew up.

First things first. At the beginning, our Mumbai entry point is officious, eagle-eyed Prabha (Kani Kusruti, a beautiful anchor for this tale) who works as a head nurse. Her younger roommate Anu (Divya Prabha, the film’s sparkplug) offers plenty of contrast. She’s impish and brazen and not good with money, a Hindu with a clandestine Muslim boyfriend (Hridhu Haroon).

Prabha has her own half-buried secret: a husband, working somewhere in Germany. They haven’t seen each other in years, and haven’t spoken in nearly two. A fancy rice cooker, arriving at the doorstep of the nurses’ Mumbai apartment one evening, is the sole tangible reminder of Prabha’s vanished arranged marriage. It’s something Anu later says she couldn’t possibly live with herself — even though religious and caste traditions have other ideas about her progressive leanings.

The hospital cook Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), a widower, faces the most imminent crisis in “All We Imagine as Light.” The makeshift structure she calls home is about to be razed by developers whose latest Mumbai luxury condo tower, as we see later on a billboard, exemplifies the presumption that “class is a privilege. Reserved for the privileged.”

Meantime head nurse Prabha has found a suitor at work, a doctor (Azees Nedumangad, plaintive and affecting) who overcomes his innate timidity to offer Prabha a poem he wrote. In Kadapia’s small but sure ensemble of characters, this man — a stranger drastically at odds with the languages, noise and blur of Mumbai — sees in Prabha a possible romantic lifeline.

A Hindu nurse Anu (Divya Prabha, left) and her clandestine Muslim boyfriend (Hridhu Haroon) are two characters in the Mumbai-set “All We Imagine as Light.” (Janus Films/Sideshow)

Plenty happens to these people, but quietly. Kapadia lets everything breathe and flow like life, not like the kind of movies other people make. She’s drawn to difficult, elusive matters of the heart, and decisions made in between the spoken lines. Still, Kapadia, who spent part of her childhood in Mumbai, is a strong enough writer to make the lines stick. On the bus one day, Prabha opens up to Parvaty about her marital limbo, her husband in another country, intentions unknown. “When people go abroad,” Parvaty reflects, “they can lose their minds, or their memory.” By the end, all three women have gone through something significant, alone and yet together.

With a deceptively light touch, Kapadia’s film is a genuine “city symphony” ode to tantalizing, heartbreaking Mumbai, photographed by cinematographer Ramabir Das in the summer monsoon season, largely at night. The transition to the cook’s coastal village, to which Parvaty travels with her two colleagues, brings light but also a touch of existential mystery for Prabha in particular.

Das collaborated with Kapadia on the filmmaker’s previous project, a singular documentary/fiction hybrid called “A Night of Knowing Nothing.” I found that film utterly hypnotic, the peak screen experience of 2021. “All We Imagine as Light” operates far less experimentally and more as traditionally shaped story, but it too casts a spell. The soundtrack does, too, with Kapadia’s especially subtle use of “The Homeless Wanderer” by Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guébrou. None of the thousand or more separate strands in this mosaic scream for attention, or approval. It won’t be enough for some folks. Others, well … for others, “All We Imagine as Light” should be plenty.

“All We Imagine As Light” — 4 stars (out of 4)

No MPA rating (brief nudity and sexual material)

Running time: 1:58

How to watch: Now in theaters

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.