section_path: Production/Writing
section_name: Writing
paragraph_text: Writing
  
  Corbet had long had an interest in architecture. His uncle is an architect who studied at Taliesin West, which Corbet frequented as a child, while Fastvold's grandfather was a mid-century designer. Corbet stated that the film is about the parallels between the artistic experience and the immigrant experience, and that brutalism, in addition to its highly cinematic nature, would work as the perfect visual allegory for exploring post-war trauma. Fastvold's own experience as an immigrant from Norway also informed the writing of the film. Furthermore, Corbet considered architecture and filmmaking to be similar processes, as they are both "forms of artistic expression that require an extraordinary amount of participation from other people, collaboration and lots of money".
  
  The character of László Tóth was inspired by several real-life architects and designers, including Marcel Breuer, Paul Rudolph, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, László Moholy-Nagy, Louis Kahn, and Ernő Goldfinger. During their research, Corbet and Fastvold consulted architectural historian Jean-Louis Cohen (who died in 2023); Cohen noted that no actual examples of architects that emerged from the war with a career like Tóth's in fact existed. Alongside Cohen's Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War, Hilary Thimmesh's Marcel Breuer and a Committee of Twelve Plan a Church: A Monastic Memoir, a book chronicling the construction of Saint John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota by the Hungary-born, Bauhaus-trained Breuer, was an additional point of reference. Corbet further cited the writings of W. G. Sebald and V. S. Naipaul (whose novel The Enigma of Arrival lends its name to the first part of the film) as influences.
  
  Corbet had long had an interest in architecture. His uncle is an architect who studied at Taliesin West, which Corbet frequented as a child, while Fastvold's grandfather was a mid-century designer. Corbet stated that the film is about the parallels between the artistic experience and the immigrant experience, and that brutalism, in addition to its highly cinematic nature, would work as the perfect visual allegory for exploring post-war trauma. Fastvold's own experience as an immigrant from Norway also informed the writing of the film. Furthermore, Corbet considered architecture and filmmaking to be similar processes, as they are both "forms of artistic expression that require an extraordinary amount of participation from other people, collaboration and lots of money".
  
  The character of László Tóth was inspired by several real-life architects and designers, including Marcel Breuer, Paul Rudolph, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, László Moholy-Nagy, Louis Kahn, and Ernő Goldfinger. During their research, Corbet and Fastvold consulted architectural historian Jean-Louis Cohen (who died in 2023); Cohen noted that no actual examples of architects that emerged from the war with a career like Tóth's in fact existed. Alongside Cohen's Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War, Hilary Thimmesh's Marcel Breuer and a Committee of Twelve Plan a Church: A Monastic Memoir, a book chronicling the construction of Saint John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota by the Hungary-born, Bauhaus-trained Breuer, was an additional point of reference. Corbet further cited the writings of W. G. Sebald and V. S. Naipaul (whose novel The Enigma of Arrival lends its name to the first part of the film) as influences.