Lol Crawley
-
“It Doesn’t Have to Always Cost $200 Million”: DP Lol Crawley on Shooting The Brutalist (Mostly) in VistaVision
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 […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Feb 11, 2025 -
“Blue Screen? Process Trailer? LED Screens?” DP Lol Crawley on White Noise
Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise was for years considered too difficult to bring to the screen. With its jaundiced view of academia, intimate domestic melodrama, obsessions with cults and an eerily prescient pandemic, the novel spans genres and styles. Working for the first time in his career on an adaptation, writer and director Noah Baumbach started shooting primarily in the Midwest in June 2021. Starring Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, and Don Cheadle, White Noise premiered at Venice and opened this year’s New York Film Festival. This is the first collaboration between Baumbach and cinematographer Lol Crawley, BSC. They faced enormous […]
by Daniel Eagan on Dec 9, 2022 -
Shadows Under Strain: DP Lol Crawley and the Cipher of Vox Lux
When it comes time to “punish” the image of a film, say with filtration, grease (generously applied to the front of the lens), or underexposure, cinematographers regress from their dear and safe technical jargon and assume the barbarous dialect of medieval executioners. They don’t just underexpose their picture to see how it reacts under strain, they “suffocate” it, “break” it, and “destroy” it — sometimes in spite of itself. The digital image is nary embraced and mostly worked against, its sterile lines deliberately corroded and beaten to a duller moosh. Cinematographer Lol Crawley BSC (Ballast, 45 Years) tortures the film […]
by A.E. Hunt on Jan 21, 2019 -
Fabled: The Childhood of a Leader
Youthful innocents relish playing the part of amateur cartographer for school assignments, drawing prats, or, even more fun, molding contours from papier-mache. Seven-year-old Prescott (Tom Sweet), the subject of Brady Corbet’s astonishing debut feature, The Childhood of a Leader, is no innocent. The film, adapted from Jean-Paul Sartre’s short story of the same title and co-scripted by Norwegian Mona Fastvold, charts his rocky path from angel in his church’s Nativity play to one of the signature faces of the diabolical: totalitarianism. The scene in which the boy slides his fingers across a wall map of Europe just as it was […]
by Howard Feinstein on Jul 21, 2016 -
Golden Years
In his review of Andrew Haigh’s 2011 drama Weekend, in which two men meet and fall in love over the span of three days, New York Times critic A. O. Scott writes, “Each one, without quite saying so, is grappling with basic questions about love and identity. What can I mean to another person? Whom do I want to be with? Who do I want to be?” In Haigh’s new film, 45 Years, Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay are a couple about to celebrate their 45th anniversary for whom these same questions prove as necessary — and the answers as […]
by Peter Bowen on Oct 28, 2015
