The Designer Behind László Tóth: Judy Becker’s vision for Oscar-winning The Brutalist

László Tóth’s story of migration may be the most American of all. Judy Becker, production designer of Carol and Brokeback Mountain fame, on how she developed the work of this truly American designer

The Brutalist won in the categories of Best Score and Best Cinematography, and lead actor Adrien Brody also won the Oscar for Best Actor

In Brady Corbet’s 2024 film, starring Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones, Judy Becker crafts a vision of America seen through starkly different perspectives—wealthy businessmen shaping the nation’s future and refugees struggling to carve out a place in the promised land. In conversation with Lampoon, she reflects on The Brutalist and its protagonist, László Tóth, an architect who never existed but feels unforgettable, with a story built from fragments of history, reinvention, and lost memories.

The Brutalist won in the categories of Best Score and Best Cinematography, and lead actor Adrien Brody also won the Oscar for Best Actor.

The Brutalist production designer Judy Becker in conversation with Lampoon

Annalise June Kamegawa: We will get into The Brutalist, but so many viewers grew up with the films that you worked on: Carol, Brokeback Mountain, American Hustle, just to name a few. I would be remiss if I didn’t include HBO’s Girls.

Judy Becker: “I only designed the pilot, but then they used some of those sets for a long time. I didn’t watch all the seasons, but I know that a couple of the sets lasted for a long time. So that was nice, because that doesn’t always happen.”

AJK: You’re based in New York, so I imagine it was a bit personal to design those sets.

JB: “It was personal. I moved to the city when I was like, 18, so I wanted to get it right. You know… what it’s like to move to the city and not have money. There’s all those crummy apartments that you live in.

It’s not the world of Friends! I know that’s a very attractive and romantic show to a lot of young people, but for me, it was like, “Where’d they get that apartment? I don’t believe that story about the aunt for one minute.” I was trying to do an antidote to the myths about living in New York.”

I moved from the suburbs, so it wasn’t a big move. But when I lived in the suburbs, it was like, “I can’t wait until I live by myself in the city.” And Lena [Dunham] grew up in the city, so all the things that we talked about were very familiar to her.

AJK: Well, Girls, is a bit of a tangent, but I’m glad I asked.

JB: “It’s the only thing I ever won an award for!”

The Brutalist as a continuation of Becker’s practice in historical films

AJK: A lot of the films that you work on are set in this bygone era of the United States. How did you find yourself in this niche of American period pieces?

JB: “I guess the work fed on itself. The first one I did was Brokeback Mountain—a biggie! I had only been designing for a few years when I did that film. I heard about this gay cowboy movie that Ang Lee was directing with Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal. I thought it sounded amazing! But I also thought, mistakenly, that it was about gay cowboys in the Old West. I didn’t think I had any idea how I would design something like that.

I found out that Brokeback Mountain wasn’t, in fact, the old west, but the 1960s. I felt more connected to that, so I just pushed myself to do it.

That was my first period movie. I got it and it wasn’t as daunting as I thought it would be. I’m pretty good at research. The internet had come along by then so it made things a lot easier. And eBay! I found it interesting to work within the past and its aesthetics.

I think a lot of good directors often make movies that take place in the past, because they’re making a story that wouldn’t have been told in that time period, but that can be told now. Like Todd Haynes [director of Carol]: he’s making stories about gay love that would never have been told at the time, but can be told now.

So [in terms of working on historical films], I think some of it is self-perpetuating, and some of it is I just find those stories interesting to tell.”

Researching The Brutalist and avoiding brutalism

AJK: To get into your most recent historical film, The Brutalist: I’m sure you had a relationship to brutalist architecture prior, but how did your emotional relationship changed as you began researching the field with the intent of making this film?

JB: “I did love brutalist architecture for a long time before this film. I was an early adopter! I don’t know when [my interest for it] started, but it was there when I began posting on Instagram in the early days of the platform.

First of all, when I looked at The Brutalist, I didn’t think it was going to be about Brutalism. I still don’t think it’s about brutalism—it’s about other themes.

But I didn’t research specifically a lot of brutalist architecture. I felt like whoever László was and whatever his work was, it was an early form of brutalism and it was his own. Maybe he was the first real brutalist architect! Maybe not.

But I felt like it was coming out of himself and his own experiences—ones that many other people at the time also shared. I didn’t want to copy anybody else. I looked at later works of brutalism more so than anyone that would have existed in László’s era. I looked at some Marcel Breuer—he did some brutalist buildings, but I don’t think of him as primarily a brutalist architect. Not like Paul Rudolph, who is more of a brutalist architect. I never looked at him either for László specifically.”

The origins of László’s church and the play of light

JB: “I did look at Tadao Ando a bit for his Church of the Light. I had to look at it because I was making sure we didn’t get to close to it [in the film].”

AJK: Was that feature, the light in the shape of the cross, written into the script?

JB: “It was written into the script. It’s different [from Ando’s], but I wanted to make sure that however it looked, it did not look like that. I looked at a lot of modernist chapels, just to make sure that we didn’t get too close to those.

I looked a bit at Louis Kahn. When I was first designing the [Van Buren] Institute for The Brutalist, I was thinking about the [Salk Institute for Biological Studies] in La Jolla. Someone pointed that out recently, but I never thought about it consciously. I didn’t do a deep dive into brutalist architecture. I often don’t research the thing itself because I want it to come out of my own mind.

I have a pretty big library in my head of inspiration and images. Unless I need to find out something specific or unfamiliar, I try not to get too influenced by something else, because I don’t want to copy it. I want to create my own thing.”

László’s first designs in American

JB: “When I was designing his furniture, I wanted it to be pretty Bauhaus looking. This is the first creation we see of his in the film, and it’s the first thing he does after getting out of the camps. I wanted it to feel the most Bauhaus inspired, because he’s at the lowest point of his creative powers at that point in the movie. I felt like he was going back, pulling what he could out of his memory and his roots, and getting inspired by what he sees around him in the furniture store [owned by his cousin, Atilla].

He uses materials from the furniture store: I’m not sure it comes across if you’re just watching the movie, but it was all planned. It was very motivated by what [already existed] there [in the shop]. I had it all planned out and I have pictures of the references next to the furniture.

I had a comprehensive encyclopedia of 20th century furniture. It was an obscure and expensive book that I bought. I wanted to make sure I didn’t copy anyone else’s tubular steel furniture. I went through it thoroughly because that chair has been designed a lot. I wanted the strapping and concept as a whole to be different.”

JB: “The table that’s in the window had two drawers taken from some of the American colonial furniture that was being sold in the furniture store. I don’t think Attila gave him a budget and said, ‘Go out and buy some nice wood, make what you need to make.’ He was just grabbing what he could and making something.

I ended up basing all of the strapping on American lawn and beach chairs. I placed those in the furniture store. Maybe you never saw them, but they were there! László got inspired by them. So that’s my take on it. And since I’m Lászlo I can say what I want, and I was inspired by those chairs!”

JB: “That [piece of furniture] was his first thing: that was the Bauhaus. And then he goes onto functional modernism for the library, and then it’s brutalism.”

AJK: In terms of creating Attila’s Pennsylvania furniture store—it acts as a fitting foil for László Tóth’s practice and character. Pennsylvania itself has a significant history with wood furniture, albeit in the modern day, it’s somewhat of a dying industry. What were some of the considerations when putting together this store?

JB: “I wanted it to look American, like middle class American. It’s just like how Attila has completely gone over to the other side. I thought, ‘What’s better than this? American traditional, American colonial, mass produced, and pretty ubiquitous.’

Those big companies produced it, like Ethan Allen, Sears, and Roebuck. A lot of people sold this furniture. I’m sure you could still buy it new. [This furniture] was an idea I had when I was thinking about the film. When we got to Hungary in January of 2023 [to film The Brutalist], I pitched it to Brady [Corbet] and he liked the idea.

But then we had to think about how expensive it would be to ship it over. It would have cost $35,000 to ship a container to Hungary, which was a lot of money for us. I’m sure it’s just a drop in the bucket for some of the other big movies of the year, but for us, that was a lot. My set decorator was still in Canada got a price of $5,000, which was reasonable for shipping a container. That got approved.”

JB: “She drove all over Ontario with her grown daughter buying this furniture from Facebook marketplace and from Craigslist and from wherever. and the furniture was cheap. I think she spent under $1,000 for all of the furniture. It was enough to fill up a furniture store, decorate Attila’s apartment, and take some apart.

Loading up the container, we put everything else that we thought we needed from the United States and Canada in it: vintage American wallpaper, fabrics, telephones.

The container came [into Hungary] three weeks before we needed it, but due to red tape, it didn’t actually arrive [on set] until the day before we needed it. By the day we planned to shoot it, we had it all set up. Everything was labeled to mark where the furniture went. We even got the wallpaper up and we got it done, which was great.”

On designing László’s Van Buren Institute

JB: “Designing the Institute was the first thing I did for Brady. It was around the spring of 2021 because that was when I got the job. I was thinking a lot about religious symbolism and how to incorporate that into the institute. At first I wanted to incorporate a Star of David as a subversive move against Harrison. Something that Harrison would never notice, but that was there the whole time. I couldn’t figure out how to do it though.”

JB: “Meanwhile, I was also thinking about all the ways in which László found himself immersed in the world of the cross and of Christianity, not just in Europe, but also when he comes to America. He’s asked to help out in the church services and the homeless shelter. Again, he’s asked to incorporate this chapel into the Institute. A member of the community in that way—of the Christian community.”

László and Franz Kafka’s parallel views

JB: “I remembered that something I’ve been inspired by were these postcards I have of the places where Franz Kafka lived when he was a young writer. One of the places is so crazy—it was an apartment with a window that opened into a church and it’s insane looking. He lived in that apartment and was just torturing himself. He was Jewish and so he lived in an apartment that looked right into a church.

I just thought of that in reference to László being in this situation that’s not his own environment. He’s forced to live in it. He’s kind of playing this symbolic game and fucking with Harrison, in a way. László’s  building this giant building that looks, at best, like a factory, and at worst, like a crematorium. The experience of entering the building is pretty much like entering a prison, and inside it feels like a prison at best, and at worst, like a concentration camp.

He’s fooling Harrison into thinking it’s this work of art with this chapel and all of these other things. It is a kind of avant-garde, subversive piece of architecture. And you know what? He’s giving Harrison what he wants, but there’s another message there too. When you think about brutalism as being this very forward-thinking style of architecture and devoid of historical references, consider a lot of those cases are purposefully escaping history and moving forward.”

Migration and histories that have been erased

JB: “I was also thinking recently about my own immigrant families that came over much earlier than László’s. It was maybe 50 years earlier. I knew my great-grandfather. That side of the family had kids very young so I got to know a lot of the generations. I would ask him, ‘Where were you from? Where were you born? In Romania?’ And he’s responded,  ‘I’m not telling you. Don’t think about that country. Don’t ever go there.’

That generation just wanted to think about America. They didn’t want to think about the country they escaped from. That was an erasure of the past. The erased so much I’m never going to know where my relatives came from. That’s all totally gone.

That was how people felt at the time. I think that things were better documented 50 years later. But [this mindset] was a motivation for a lot of the art that came after the war. It’s something that I’ve been thinking about a lot more. It is interesting to think about all these things, even in hindsight.”

Judy Becker

Judy Becker is an Oscar-nominated production designer known for her work on films like Carol, American Hustle, and Brokeback Mountain. Her most recent work on The Brutalist (2024), directed by Brady Corbet and starring Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, and Guy Pearce, follows Hungarian architect László Tóth’s journey to postwar America.

Annalise June Kamegawa