‘The Brutalist’ Cinematographer Lol Crawley on Shooting 3.5 Hour Film on 35 mm: “What You See Is What We Shot”

A three-and-a-half-hour run time didn’t change the way The Brutalist cinematographer Lol Crawley worked. The low budget (under $10 million), the fact that he had worked with director Brady Corbet before (on 2015’s The Childhood of a Leader and 2018’s Vox Lux) and Corbet’s directorial approach all contributed to a concise way of shooting the film.

“I think filmmakers are like, ‘I didn’t know you could do that anymore: shoot on 35mm, have this thematically epic film — but also scale and length of run time with an intermission — for less than $10 million,” Crawley tells The Hollywood Reporter of the A24 release. “It didn’t feel dissimilar to the way that I have worked with Brady in the past, and there was never a discussion about the run time.”

The Brutalist — about Hungarian Jewish architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody), who escapes the Holocaust and moves to the U.S., where he meets a wealthy industrialist who changes his life — was shot in the VistaVision format, which is rarely used today. The higher resolution, because of the rotated image, allowed for 70mm prints to be created for film festivals and screenings even though Crawley never shot on a larger format than 35mm.

The movie was shot in 34 days. “I’m very conscientious of time, and Brady is a very pragmatic director. He doesn’t shoot a lot of coverage, and he doesn’t give himself a lot of options,” Crawley explains. “Basically, what you see in the movie is what we shot. He really knows what he wants, and some of the most pivotal scenes in the movie are shot in one shot.”

One of those scenes — spoilers ahead — involves Felicity Jones’ character Erzsébet accusing Guy Pearce’s Harrison Lee Van Buren of being a rapist during a dinner party at Van Buren’s house. The sequence starts out calm but ends in chaos as she is violently attacked by Van Buren’s son (played by Joe Alwyn) and ejected from the house. Hungarian Steadicam operator Attila Pfeffer shot that sequence, which Corbet wanted to feel like a Steadicam-to-handheld-to-Steadicam shot. That scene was also a 360-degree shot, often lensed in single takes.

“Attila was holding the Steadicam and was operating it like it was a handheld camera, with the Steadicam hanging off of it,” Crawley explains, adding that in terms of blocking that scene, “it was very challenging, but we managed to hide things where we could,” using lighting as a resource.

To help Crawley prepare to shoot some of the film’s brutalist buildings, Corbet gave him a book about a particular building’s style and Crawley studied the images before going out on location. He also looked at the works of modernist painters like Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper for inspiration.

The most challenging scene for Crawley was one that he didn’t light at all and relied on nature to do the work for him. In the scene, Van Buren takes his guests up the hillside, where he plans to build what is known as The Institute.

“It was like a six-page scene, but it was all shot in about 40 minutes because of available light,” says Crawley. “It’s supposed to feel like twilight going into night, so we couldn’t have any hard sun. Once the sun set, we had to achieve it all in this period of time, and it’s an absolute testament to the actors and to Brady that we managed to pull it off. If they had failed, we would have had to come back and there would be lighting or weather discontinuity.”

Weather caused an issue in a different scene, as well. During their location scout at the Carrara marble quarries of Tuscany, there had been no fog, but on the day they returned to shoot László and Van Buren searching for the marble piece to complete The Institute, the entire quarry was enveloped in a thick fog.

“There was a lot of available light, and we just really embraced what was there,” he says, “but we had a different idea of what that place would feel like. When we showed up, we couldn’t see anything. But now it’s the beauty of the film. That whole sequence just takes on this really strange, dreamlike quality.”

He adds: “This is probably my favorite sequence in the movie, and it starts with these VistaVision images, almost like the photographs of Sebastião Salgado, where you see these South American mines where hundreds of people are working. It’s interesting, because it’s the environment where the most brutal act of the movie happens — where László is assaulted by Van Buren — but the landscape itself is also brutally attacked by humanity.”

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This story first appeared in a December stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.