PRODUCTION THE BRUTALIST
CONCRETE PARTNERSHIP Thanks to several shared projects, Crawley and Corbet enjoy an intuitive and efficient dynamic
One of the solutions was to shoot on VistaVision, a large format film system with a native aspect ratio of 1.5:1 that Crawley describes as ‘almost like a big slab of celluloid’. This choice allowed for a wider field of view, but without the distortion that you’d get with ultra-wide lenses. “It’s a beautiful tool for capturing the architecture and landscape in as true a form as possible, without aberration,” suggests Crawley. “The allegations might be that it’s sort of gimmicky – an affectation,” he acknowledges. “But I felt from the beginning that VistaVision had earned its place. Brady wanted to tell a story that takes place mostly in the fifties, so he wanted that correlation, and it’s also just the perfect camera system for capturing what we were hoping to.” FOUNDATIONS The Brutalist is Corbet and Crawley’s third collaboration, with the pair previously having teamed up on Childhood of a Leader (2015) and Vox Lux (2018). “The
FILMMAKING IS an alchemy, AND THAT’S ESPECIALLY TRUE WHEN YOU’RE shooting on film ”
night we wrapped on Vox Lux , Brady presented me with a book on brutalist architecture and said: this will be the next project,” recalls Crawley. “So I knew that one of the main themes would be brutalist architecture, but there’s so much more going on in this movie. Brady’s a filmmaker who always takes big swings, in both the execution and themes of his films. “When you get into cinematography, you hope to work on films that are close to your heart. Films that are a big event at the cinema, which you can see and then have a discussion about afterwards,” he
adds. “I’m really lucky that Brady invited me to be part of these kinds of movies.” The key to their partnership, Crawley explains, is their shared sensibilities and tastes, which make for an efficient and intuitive dynamic on-set. That’s all the more vital on a film like The Brutalist , which, for all its sweeping ambition, was shot in just 33 days with a budget of less than $10m. “You have to find a way of working that allows you to achieve these things. One way we do that is by shooting less coverage than a lot of other directors and cinematographers do. That’s evident in the film, which
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