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Shutter Angles
Conversations with DPs, directors and below-the-line crew by Matt Mulcahey
“It Doesn’t Have to Always Cost $200 Million”: DP Lol Crawley on Shooting The Brutalist (Mostly) in VistaVision
The Brutalist In The Brutalist, a creatively uncompromising Hungarian-Jewish architect (Adrien Brody) immigrates to Pennsylvania after World War II and struggles to complete an ambitious project financed by a wealthy industrialist (Guy Pearce). Creating a three-hour epic in 34 days for under $10 million doesn’t allow the luxury of boundless obstinance, yet it’s easy to draw parallels between the protagonist’s unyielding artistry and a team of filmmakers that insisted on using the VistaVision format whose heyday ended more than 60 years ago.
With the film, which is up for 10 Academy Awards, still in theaters and now also on VOD, Oscar-nominated cinematographer Lol Crawley spoke to Filmmaker about Pieter Bruegel blacks, his fondness for Julien Donkey-Boy era digital aesthetics and why he hopes that The Brutalist serves as a clarion call for filmmakers to strive for the epic even without epic budgets.
Filmmaker: You’ve now shot all three of director Brady Corbet’s films. How did you first start working together?
Crawley: My agent in the U.K., Rebecca Fayyad, knew Brady. He was looking for a DP for his first film and we had a two-hour Zoom call and at the end of it were like, “Okay, let’s do it.” It really was that easy. Even though Brady was a first-time filmmaker at that point, he had such a clear vision. Some creators can be quite dogmatic in their opinions or dogmatic in their creativity. I’m somebody who has strong ideas, but also really enjoy facilitating and bringing to life people’s visions. I’ve never quite understood this idea as a DP that a director—who has spent a long time thinking about a script, thinking about the themes and the ideas behind it, helped to raise the money—would then invite a DP on board who thinks they have a better idea of how it should look. It’s a collaboration for sure, but if someone has a great idea—as Brady does—about how a camera move should be, then great, let’s figure out how we’re going to do it. It’s a process of building on his ideas and coming up with my own, but he very often has these key, momentous visual signatures within the movie that are completely Brady Corbet moments. When he has a vision for one of them, my job at that point is to realize it.
Filmmaker: Obviously, the big story with the film from a technical perspective has been the use of VistaVision. You shot 35mm on all your previous films with Brady, but how did you end up gravitating toward resurrecting VistaVision for The Brutalist?
Crawley: Whenever possible Brady shoots film—certainly when we’ve worked together, there’s just been no question from the beginning. On our second film together, Vox Lux, Brady began asking about 65mm film, which is quite difficult because of not only the expense of the negative and the processing and all that goes with that, but also the film cameras themselves are quite thin on the ground. Unless it has changed in the last few years, Panavision doesn’t have a lot of 65mm film cameras, and Arri probably has even less. It’s quite difficult, especially on a lower budget, to ask these companies to commit those cameras to a production like this. So, looking at bigger formats, another thing out there was VistaVision, which still uses 35mm film. It’s the same negative that you would put through a 35mm film camera, but on [a standard 35mm film camera] you’re pulling the film through vertically. With VistaVision you pull it through horizontally instead, like you would with a stills camera.
Filmmaker: But you’re using more stock, right, because it’s 8-perf 35mm? So, it’s still going to be more expensive than standard 35mm.
Crawley: It is more expensive, but not as expensive as 65mm. However, you end up with over twice the image area [with VistaVision compared to standard 35mm] because you’re pulling through eight perforations. It’s an extraordinary format. It also gives you a bigger field of view, so it’s a bit like working with the large-format digital cameras we have now. It gives you this wonderful, almost medium-format quality to the picture. On one hand, we wanted to use VistaVision to show the incredible scope and scale of the buildings and for locations like the wonderful Carrara marble quarry. At the same time, we also used VistaVision quite intimately. For the very first images of the movie where Zsófia is being interviewed, we used it as a portrait camera as well, which gives a different look to the portrait work.
Filmmaker: So, you’re still just using the standard Kodak Vision3 stocks?
Crawley: Yeah, the difference is just how the mag sits on the camera. If you’re working with a 35mm camera where the mag sits vertically, you can easily put that on your shoulder. With VistaVision the mag sits horizontally off the back of the camera. So, it’s not the most ergonomic set-up. It’s more like an IMAX camera, though obviously not as big.
Filmmaker: Which of the Kodak stocks did you end up using?
Crawley: I generally use the 250D and the 500T. They are my go-to [stocks].
Filmmaker: In terms of processing, you underexposed on The Childhood of a Leader quite a bit, then push-processed to combat the cleanness of modern stocks. One of the selling points with VistaVision originally was how crisp the image was compared to some of the early anamorphic processes. Did you push-process on The Brutalist again to counter that cleanness?
Crawley: I did, partly to add grit. Every film I’ve shot for Brady has been a period film. Vox Lux is period, even though it’s a recent period. For me, personally, when I’m trying to shoot a period film and feel like the stocks are so good, there’s a lot of conversation about photographic black. I don’t want photographic black; I want the black that I find in a Pieter Bruegel painting, a purple black or a brown black. I want to pull up the colors. Bruegel would not just have used black [paint] as black. It’s about building up these shades. For Childhood of a Leader I looked at Rembrandt paintings and how his shadows are created, and I was like, “If we distress the negative and force it and abuse it in some way, push it down in the exposure and then pull it up in post, we can hopefully get a much more painterly image as opposed to a photographic image.” That’s something Brady and I have run with since.
Filmmaker: You said one of the hindrances to shooting 65mm is that there aren’t that many camera bodies around. I would have assumed there aren’t that many VistaVision bodies still hanging around either. I love that movie One-Eyed Jacks, and I believe it’s the last American studio movie fully shot in VistaVision. That’s more than 60 years ago, though effects work continued to be done in the format for years after that on modified VistaVision cameras. Where did you track down your camera from?
Crawley: A company called Camera Revolution based in London. We ended up prepping that camera at Movietech in Pinewood Studios. We had to send technicians from Budapest [where much of the film was shot] over there to prep it. We had these wild and wonderful ideas of using it on Steadicam and things like that, which were very, very ambitious. We didn’t do it very much in the end. The first time I ever used VistaVision was when I was a camera assistant on The Phantom Menace and we used one of these cameras that ILM used to have for the VFX work, but they were loud. They really were not great for sync sound work. Other filmmakers now are using VistaVision and there are solutions and workarounds for that, things in post in terms of algorithms for sound that you can use to kind of offset, but it would be a big offset. It’s not like you can hear the gentle purr of the film going through. They sound like a sewing machine. (laughs)
Filmmaker: I did read about that with Poor Things, where they used VistaVision but only for one non-sync scene because, much like an IMAX film camera, it was too noisy. So, did you find a VistaVision camera that was quiet enough to be practical?
Crawley: We did, but the film is also a mixture of [traditional] 35mm, some 16mm and, at the end, some DigiBeta as well. The majority was VistaVision. We used it as much as possible, wherever we could. Sometimes there was a Steadicam or handheld sequence that was just wholly impractical to do with VistaVision. The [VistaVision camera] viewfinder is really hard to see through, so you’re relying on the video tap. There are several beautiful Steadicam sequences and handheld sequences that I operated on that I’m very proud of that had to be, by necessity, standard 35mm.
Filmmaker: You ended up getting a small 70mm release for the film, which included a 70mm premiere in Venice. I believe the original VistaVision was usually optically reduced to work with standard 35mm projectors for release. You went the opposite way and blew it up to 70mm.
Crawley: As I remember it, that wasn’t the initial inception. It was something that came up as Brady and our editor Dávid Jancsó were cutting the movie. Andrew Oran at FotoKem was incredibly supportive. It was absolutely extraordinary to have it premiere in 70mm in Venice. I know it’s probably not my place to say it, because I’m involved with the film, but I really hope that it’s inspiring that you can make a movie for this amount of money and have it be epic and have it take big swings thematically and creatively. I think it helps to raise the bar and says, “We can really have fun with inventive, passionate, big-scale movie-making, and it doesn’t have to always cost $200 million.”
Filmmaker: From a fiscal perspective, how do you minimize costs on your end to get something like this in at under $10 million?
Crawley: The amount of movie that we got for the money is incredible, but I don’t remember feeling like I had to make massive concessions. I used a lot of available light. I like to think that I work quickly. I know I have a shorthand with Brady. We plan and shot list and storyboard. I think it’s just preparation, working with people you know and being decisive. I’m very decisive on set about what I want and hopefully we take the shortest route to get there.
My lighting packages aren’t huge. I tend to be pretty bold with my exposure. A lot of my stuff is quite low light. We’ve picked a location because we love the way that it feels and the way the light feels there. One of my approaches is just saying, “How do I not screw this up? How do I protect what we like about this location and make the light consistent enough for the period of time we have to shoot the scene?” I don’t go in all guns blazing, thinking “Okay, I’m going to do this shaft of light through here.” Some situations require that—for example, there’s a scene where a cross of light is projected onto a marble block. Things like that can be hard and fiddly to achieve, but they’re not expensive. Brady is a very pragmatic director and I’m very conscious of trying to make our days. If we don’t make the day, I care about it as much as anyone else. I’m not selfish in that regard. I’m not like, “It looks good, so I don’t care if we’re behind.”
Filmmaker: What was your lens package like?
Crawley: For the VistaVision camera, the lenses were Leica Rs, stills lenses that came with the package. Brady and I have always really loved Cooke S4 lenses. Every movie we do, we test and then keep coming back to the S4s. So, it was a mixture of the Leica Rs and Cooke S4s on this one. We throw in a few zooms here and there, which tend to be the Angénieux Optimos or older Cooke zoom lenses to match.
Filmmaker: For the epilogue set in the 1980s where you do digital, what did you shoot on?
Crawley: I actually really love the look of tape. Anthony Dod Mantle is a guy who I really rate. I love the work that he did on Julien Donkey-Boy and 28 Days Later. I’m from that late 90s/early 2000s school. That’s when I graduated; I love that aesthetic. At that time they were playing against this idea that if you shoot, it had to be 35mm. It felt punk when people started using different formats. We’re at a point now where everything—Alexas, Reds, Sonys—are all trying to emulate 35mm, which is great and I understand why they do it, but I feel like our palette has been reduced. When I started out, you could have MiniDV all the way through to 65mm. You had this wonderful palette to work from. I don’t see that many movies like Julien Donkey-Boy existing aesthetically anymore. I don’t know, maybe it would feel dated, but I like the philosophy that you can work on a format and it doesn’t to be (or emulate) 35mm.
That said, I think Brady in that epilogue was using DigiBeta counter to everything I was just talking about. (laughs) He was almost exploring the crassness of the image. Brady’s always playing with these ideas of modernity versus classicism. It’s like, “We used to have this, and now we have that.” We had this beautiful VistaVision and now we have DigiBeta. He does that in Vox Lux as well.
Filmmaker: An image that really stuck with me from the film is the low angle shot of László Tóth [Brody] with the sparks in the foreground as he creates a chair for his cousin’s furniture shop. When you cut to the wide, there’s another striking image with this big pool of water reflecting the work being done. Talk about that moment, which is him taking his first steps to being an artist again now that he’s in America.
Crawley: Those are VistaVision shots. The wide shot was done early on, maybe day three or four of filming. We were still coming to grips with the technicalities of the VistaVision camera. That was done largely with available light. That wide shot was the last shot of that day. We didn’t know if we had it or not or if we’d left it slightly too late. With low light stuff there’s a tipping point that is very brief. The shot looking up with the sparks was done on almost the last day, a pickup somewhere else.
Filmmaker: You talked earlier about there being some handheld shots in the movie you were proud of, and I have to imagine that long oner as László arrives in New York for the first time has to be one of them. The camera follows him up from below deck and the shot ends with an inverted Statue of Liberty. I’m guessing that wasn’t done on the bulky VistaVision camera.
Crawley: Yeah, that was actually the opposite of the VistaVision camera. That was an Arri 235, which is the smallest 35mm camera you can use, on a boat that was moored on the Danube that they were renovating as a party boat. It was basically this husk of a ship. I used very, very low lighting because if I lifted the ambient up too much you’d see what the ship actually was. So, the idea was that they were going through these small spots of light, and I would just catch moments, which worked perfectly well. There’s this evolution as it gets brighter [as he gets toward the deck]. I operated all of the A Camera work on the movie and for that shot at the end I had to climb up this steep stairwell. So, I’ve got one hand on the camera and the other pulling myself up on this railing. Then you get out [onto the deck] and there’s Adrien spinning around, and we pan off and they seamlessly cut to additional footage that we did of the Statue of Liberty. I really love shooting handheld. I love the idea that you’re working with the performer and responding and connecting. It’s a very magical thing, to be in sync with somebody. In between action and cut, it’s just you and them.
Filmmaker: When Tóth and Van Buren (Pearce) visit the Carrara marble quarry in Italy, they spend the evening at a party in some sort of underground space. Where did you shoot that?
Crawley: In Budapest, but it works beautifully as the quarries of Italy. It’s this completely subterranean storage space, quite damp as you can imagine, with white walls. Brady was like, “I don’t want to light it too much and want to be able to shoot 360.” I ended up putting almost photo flood bulbs in these preexisting wall mounts. I had maybe eight of those, then our gaffer put light through these holes in the ceiling. It was just like, “Hang on for dear life and try to coax the actors as best you can into good areas.” I love that scene. It feels like a Fellini movie.
Filmmaker: How was the experience of shooting in the actual quarry?
Crawley: There’s a handheld moment there that I really like, where we’re following this intriguing character as he leads [Tóth and Van Buren] through the mist to the marble. That wasn’t intended to be that way. We thought we’d turn up and be able to see the vista of the marble behind them, but all of this fog was completely sucked in. On the day, we were like, “Oh no!” But now when you watch it, it’s like, “Oh my goodness, how perfect.” That’s the wonderful thing about filmmaking—once it’s out there, nobody could ever imagine it any other way. The audience owns it now. That’s what continues to be exciting about making movies. Things you thought were correct on the day often end up not to be so and things you thought were terrible actually end up being amazing. The fact that you don’t always know is what keeps you very much on your toes.
