‘The Brutalist’ Cinematographer Lol Crawley Breaks Down Filming in VistaVision in an Active Marble Mine in Tuscany

There was never any question about what format director Brady Corbet would shoot “The Brutalist” on. Cinematographer Lol Crawley says, “We’ve always shot on film.”

“The Brutalist” tells the story of Hungarian Jewish architect László Tóth, played by Adrien Brody. He escapes the Holocaust and moves to the U.S., where he gets a taste of the American dream after meeting a wealthy industrialist who changes his life.

Brady and Crawley researched architecture photography and examined how it had been photographed. Speaking with Variety’s Inside the Frame, Crawley says, “One thing that came across in photographing any sort of architecture, you tend to want to have minimal distortion from the lenses. You may want to use rectilinear lenses so that you don’t get the same sort of distortion when you shoot a wide-angle lens.”

The idea led Brady to choose the rarely used VistaVision film, a large format stock created by Paramount Pictures in the 1950s to improve image quality.

Crawley explains, “As opposed to pulling the film down vertically in a motion picture camera, it’s actually pulling it horizontally across eight perforations at a time. So, you end up with a bigger format, and that means that you’re not forced to shoot on wider angle lenses for a wider field of view.”

It was a format also adopted by Alfred Hitchcock who shot “To Catch a Thief” and “Vertigo” using that format. Crawley notes, “They were cinematic processes that competed with the advent of television and was a way of drawing audiences back to the cinema.”

With the epic taking place after World War II and ending in the 1980s, the format seemed an obvious choice.

In the film, László Toth meets Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce) who tasks him with building a monumental public institute. In a key scene, László takes Harrison to Italy, and a quarry to select the marble that will be used.

However, the location (the Carrara Marble Mine in Tuscany) was a real working mine that came with its own set of challenges. “It was a dangerous environment because it’s a working mine, and we were very lucky to shoot there, but we had to have quite a small footprint so we couldn’t really bring in generators.”

Rather than add to or even remove the light, Crawley utilized the available natural light.

The sequence is one of Crawley’s favorite moments in the film. He says, “It’s a really pivotal moment in the movie. Without giving too much away, it’s an example of the most brutal behavior of one character to another. So, I think in that way, story-wise, it’s a very important pivotal moment.”

He adds the scene illustrates the benefits of using a handheld camera but highlights “VistaVision beautifully.” Crawley adds, ”If there was ever a charge that VistaVision was in some way an affectation or didn’t earn its place within the movie, I think these scenes prove otherwise.”

The three-hour-plus epic has been screened in 70mm. FotoKem’s Andrew Oran (senior vice president of feature sales and marketing) worked with Crawley to create the prints which carry four miles of celluloid film and weigh a whopping 259 pounds. Says Crawley, “He was amazing and created the prints for us.