'The Brutalist' DP, Lol Crawely, breaks down how they were able to execute shooting in a real mine using the practical lighting they had on site and improvising shots that weren't in the script.
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00:00Hi, I'm Lol Crawley. I'm the cinematographer on The Brutalist.
00:18So it's my third collaboration with Brady. Brady asked me to shoot his first feature,
00:23The Childhood of a Leader. After that we shot another movie called Vox Lux and then when we
00:28wrapped on Vox Lux, his wrap gift to me was a book on Brutalist architecture and he said,
00:33this is the next one. It's what we hope for in a collaborator. The next movie began like that.
00:39We've always shot on film. Obviously it's a third film together. We definitely have a shorthand
00:45and a very good way of working. We have a commonality of ideas. Our tastes sort of align.
00:50We looked at a lot of Brutalist architecture and how that had been photographed. And one thing
00:55that came across was obviously photographing any sort of architecture. Generally you tend to
01:00want to have minimal distortion from the lenses, for example. So you may use sort of rectilinear
01:08lenses, which are lenses that correct and mean that you don't get the same sort of distortion
01:13when you shoot with wide angle lenses, things like that. So that kind of, I think, led Brady to the
01:18idea of, well, VistaVision really, which is a large format version, still 35mm stock, but you're
01:25shooting like a stills camera as opposed to pulling the film down vertically in a motion
01:31picture camera. It's actually pulling it horizontally across eight perforations at a time.
01:35So you end up with a bigger format. You're not forced to shoot on wider angle lenses for a wider
01:40field of view. You know, you can get the same field of view on a longer lens, which is obviously
01:45minimizes distortion. That was something that Brady was very keen to do. And also VistaVision
01:51was an early format. Hitchcock used VistaVision. They were cinematic processes that kind of
01:58competed with television or were a way of when television, the advent of television, a way of
02:03sort of drawing audiences back to the cinema, you know, more of a spectacle, you know. Given that
02:08the movie takes place after the Second World War through the 50s, 60s, 70s and ends in 1980,
02:15it seemed an obvious choice to use this format largely for the movie. We also used other formats,
02:20some 16 mil, some standard 35 and some digi beta cam for the end of the movie also. We're going to
02:26talk about the sequence when Laszlo Toth takes Harrison Van Buren, his benefactor, to Italy to
02:34select the marble that they will use within the institute that Laszlo Toth is building for Van
02:40This is magic. Thank you.
02:49Brady and myself have always shot 35 mil, never been in consideration to shoot the film on anything
02:56other than Saudi Lloyd. We had a range of cameras available to us. We had an Arri 235, which is a
03:00small handheld camera, which I used for only one sequence that I remember, which is the beginning
03:06of the movie where Laszlo ascends from the bowels of the ship up into the New York harbour. So I used
03:13that and then a 435, an Arri Cam LT and ST and obviously the VistaVision and the digi beta. And
03:20then we shot on Cooke S4 lenses, which we had shot on previous movies. We keep gravitating back to
03:26them despite how much testing we do. We just really love them. And Leica R lenses that we used on the
03:33VistaVision also. We chose 250 daylight and 500 tungsten stock. So they're balanced for interior
03:40artificial light or exterior daylight. We knew those stocks very well. They're a fantastic
03:45starting point in the sense that all of the other colour work that's done on top of that is either
03:51done through the lighting, through the design, grading of the dailies and then grading of the
03:55final film. I mean, there are certainly sections where, you know, it's motivated by time of day,
04:00it's motivated by tone of the story or tone of the scene. Certainly the first scene of the second
04:05half of the movie when Laszlo greets Elisabeth from the train, there's definitely a warmer,
04:10more optimistic feel to those. Obviously, there's seasonal elements. It takes place over a long
04:15period of time. Generally, I tend to sort of, where possible, lean into, like, for example,
04:20if we're doing day exterior scenes, I don't tend to overly like the day exteriors. For example,
04:27we're filming in autumn and it's supposed to feel like spring or something like this. I'm really
04:30trying to override what the natural light is doing. Generally, I tend to lean into what the
04:34day is doing. Tonally, there's lots of shifts within the movie. The beginning of the introduction
04:40to the quarry is sort of shrouded in mist and mystery as we sort of follow this mysterious
04:45character that takes us to the marble. A lot of the time in a situation like that, it's about taking
04:53light away, you know, so trying to shape it by removing light. Not only is that the way I tend to
04:58work with day exteriors, it was also a very difficult environment to work in. It's quite
05:02a dangerous environment. It's a working mine, so we had to have quite a small footprint,
05:07so we couldn't really bring in generators and things like this. Certainly for the images
05:11where they arrive in daylight, it was just purely available light for that.
05:21That was also something that wasn't necessarily in the script. It was something as we were driving,
05:26as we actually arrived to do the scout, we were like, this is incredible. It's a road cut through
05:31the hillside and it has this kind of vaulted arch-like quality to it. I think we just rigged
05:36it safely, but inside the car, almost like boxes and straps, and we strapped it down and got the
05:42frame and then just drove it through. It's the same with a lot of movies, but specifically like
05:46this with Brady, where we're alive to the moment. You have to be open to things offering themselves
05:50up and just seeing the opportunity, not just visually, but how that visually ties into the
05:55movie. We'd obviously shot the scenes in Budapest and it felt like a great tie
06:00between the two. It felt like it had one camp in the exteriors in Italy and then we were sort of
06:06descending into this catacomb within the mine. There's another sequence of a party scene where
06:12Laszlo has this flirtatious dance with this young Italian lady and is being observed voyeuristically
06:19by Van Buren. That actually all took place in Budapest, where the majority of the film was shot.
06:24It worked seamlessly. It was a catacomb that was a vast storage area underneath part of Budapest
06:30that was available to us. Now, when Judy Becker, the designer, and Brady found this space, they
06:35were like, okay, this is how we want it to feel. Now, obviously, it was a very low light situation.
06:40We knew that it was going to be a handheld scene, so I needed to kind of move the camera in a 360
06:45without seeing artificial lighting. There's a cinematographer who I greatly admire, Harris
06:50who sadly is not with us anymore, but he always had this approach of lighting the space and lighting
06:55the room. And so what I did was there was practical lighting already there and I swapped out just the
07:00bulbs, bare incandescent bulbs, with photo floods. If they weren't photo floods, it was certainly a
07:05brighter just to get a shooting stop. We're shooting on lenses that I think, you know, around
07:11about sort of T2, so wide open. And then I was also push processing the stock, so it's 500T,
07:16shot wide open, wonderful focus pullers, first ACs who are able to kind of keep it all in focus.
07:22Brady and I really like to kind of underexpose the stock where possible, certainly when we're
07:26shooting period work because, you know, the Kodak stocks are fantastic, but they can be a little
07:31clean and potentially with very rich blacks and feel quite a little modern sometimes. So we're
07:36trying to kind of like distress the film a little bit and make it feel more painterly or more
07:41archival in some way. So by underexposing and then push processing, we're actually kind of like
07:46forcing the film to do things it doesn't quite want to do chemically. That was the idea of more
07:51of a sort of impressionistic image, you know. I find if I want to have a little space, if I'm working
07:56handheld, it's a balance between trying to allow the actors to go where they want and then where
08:01they end up going in dark areas for larger amounts of dialogue or whatever it might be. Obviously
08:05these actors are very experienced. I'll gently try to guide and suggest and bring them out of the
08:10shadows for certain moments. Sometimes it's obviously very nice if they go into shadow.
08:13The rehearsal is that sort of negotiation as it were.
08:24It's a really pivotal moment in the movie. It's kind of an example of the most brutal
08:30behavior of one character to another. I also feel that it's a clip that just sort of illustrates
08:36many different things in terms of kind of handheld. It's got a few different looks going on.
08:41It illustrates the VistaVision beautifully and why we use the VistaVision. There's a fabulous
08:47kind of like a very ghastly celebration of these minds in some ways. A lot of the landscape that
08:53just has been carved away. VistaVision was an incredible format for capturing that.
08:57Once you finish shooting the movie, it's a case of then really coming back to the final grade,
09:01which was a couple of weeks, and then worked with Photochem with Andrew Oren, who was amazing,
09:07who basically guided us through and created the 70mm prints for us. They struck a 70mm
09:13print that was in Venice. So I was involved in that as well.