When Brady Corbet first met with Lol Crawley to potentially work together on his first feature “The Childhood of a Leader,” he had wondered about how Crawley would go about filming the final shot of the film. A harrowing encapsulation of being swallowed up by a mob of people, Corbet believed that for insurance purposes they would need a number of camera operators embedded within the crowd to hand the camera from one to another, all while protecting the pricey equipment. Crawley had steadily built a reputation for rising to such challenges, first making a name for himself in film when capturing the melancholy along the Mississippi delta in “Ballast” before heading out to Alaska for “On the Ice” and counter the silliness of Chris Morris’ terrorist sect black comedy “Four Lions” with straight-faced grit, and suggested an alternative, the only one of the cinematographers that Corbet met with to do so, believing they could craft a cage around the camera that would enable it to be passed around by the extras without any fear that it would be dropped.
It was the start of partnership in which limitations always seem to be the mother of invention, with Corbet’s predilection towards efficient shoots with less than a handful of takes for any given scene result in Crawley plotting out gasp-inducing tracking shots and light is treated as a precious commodity. In a literal sense, the two have gotten audiences to look deeper into the frame, with the very film they’ve used on each successive shoot has had a higher resolution than the last, first employing 35mm on “Childhood of a Leader” when Corbet had wanted to get completely lost in blacks to chronicle the upbringing of a fascist, an effect that only the photochemical process could properly render, and subsequently shooting “Vox Lux” on 65mm with a taller aspect ratio to capture the overwhelming nature of being a pop star, particularly one who has buried the trauma of surviving a mass shooting. Their third collaboration, “The Brutalist” revived VistaVision, a version of 35mm with uncommonly high resolution that hasn’t been in use since Marlon Brando’s lone directorial effort “One-Eyed Jacks” in 1961, but was developed to pull people away from their TV sets decade earlier, around the same time as the fictional Hungarian architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) first steps onto American shores in the drama.
A shared belief in what the big screen is capable of allows Corbet and Crawley to have it both ways, projecting larger-than-life characters that can hold the frame while also emphasizing a world that’s a constant threat to diminish them. The film is engrossing from its staggering opening sequence, in which Tóth woozily emerges from the trenches of a boat that’s carried him across the Atlantic to follow him through a life in which a feeling of safety is relative when he may have fled the Nazis in Europe, but faces a treacherous path to find stability in the States as an immigrant where resuming a career in architecture would seem to be a pipe dream. Whether it’s channeling the high of heroin to dull the pain or capture the rough terrain Tóth attempts to smooth over as he is commissioned by a wealthy patron Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce) to build a compound called the Institute in Pennsylvania, the camera picks up the feeling of the ground constantly shifting beneath his feet.
The notion that the American dream is an illusion is embedded into the very production of “The Brutalist” where Budapest stands in for Doylestown when the three-and-a-half-hour epic had a budget just over seven figures and Crawley had to create the magnitude of Tóth’s architecture out of savvy framing that could lean on the imagination to fill the rest in. However, Crawley is constantly creating images that are as tangible and immoveable as they come to reflect what Tóth carries with him all the time, separated from his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and daughter Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) and only able to pursue his chosen profession at the whims of those that yearn to have the vision that he does. Unlike Tóth, Crawley is quick to credit the band of collaborators that Corbet has built up the years, all working at the top of their game, to have the trust necessary to pull off such a remarkable cinematic feat as “The Brutalist” and with the film now in theaters, he spoke about the physical demands of the shoot working a camera large enough to process VistaVision film, having the wherewithal to shoot handheld and embracing the elements.
Even though you’ve worked with Brady all these years, what’s it like when you get the script for this?
It’s always a wonderful invitation to receive. We wrapped on “Vox Lux,” and we were in a parking lot in upstate New York on the last night. We wrapped, and then he handed me a book on brutalist architecture and said, “This is the next one.” We all dream of that collaboration, and it’s been great to have Brady and Mona as dear friends but also as collaborators because we’re like a merry band of pranksters. We’re collecting people along the way — Daniel Blumberg, our composer, has been with us. Raffey Cassidy, Stacey Martin — and it’s very unusual. I’ve never experienced anything else like it. So it’s tremendous and then when I got the script, it was such a big story on the page. The intermission and everything was already in there, so I definitely got a sense of the scale right from the very beginning.
Was the idea to shoot in a format like VistaVision there from the start?
Most of the films I’ve ever shot have always been on film, and I think a lot of my boldest work is often on film. I tend to work with quite low exposures, and I tend to push process the film and stuff like this to achieve a certain look. So we always knew that it was going to be on film. That was always a given with Brady. But he wanted to explore the idea of a different format with the VistaVision because a lot of the film takes place in the ‘50s, so he really wanted to explore a camera system that existed at that time. VistaVision was used by Hitchcock amongst other filmmakers, so that was part of it. And then also VistaVision gives you a greater field of view for the same focal length, so to get a wider field of view, you don’t have to go on a wider angle lens, which would have its own potential distortions. It seemed to make perfect sense to support the story that we would use VistaVision.
I have to imagine this equipment is quite large and you like working with handheld and steadicam. Logistically, did that make this tricky?
Yeah, Brady said from the beginning, “Oh, hey, could we put the VistaVision on a Steadicam?” And I was like, “Oh, wow.” [Because] if it’s ever been done before, certainly not many people have done it. We had a terrific Steadicam operator, Attila Pfeffer, in Budapest who we’ve used before and there’s one scene in the movie where László Tóth is hung over, walking the streets and he picks up this cat and he’s walking with the cat and then the Van Buren’s driver comes to pick him up — that was all VistaVision on the Steadicam. And Brady often has these kind of very audacious ideas for single shots using Steadicam or handheld, but what you see in the movie is pretty much what we shot. There’s not a lot of coverage. Brady really doesn’t like to over-cover scenes, which also goes a long way to allowing us to shoot a movie like this in 33 days.
What motivates movement in a scene? It was fascinating to see when go into a handheld mode versus those gliding shots.
Those things were very clear from the beginning, certainly in Brady’s mind. For example, at the end of the movie when Erzsébet accuses Van Buren [in his house], all of those spaces in the Van Buren house, there’s very little handheld in there. There’s a formality to those spaces, and even that accusatory scene, Brady was very clear that he wanted it to be all one shot. We didn’t want to cut, but he wanted it to be steadicam and then turn into a handheld shot and then steadicam. So I was like, “Wow, how do we do that?” And Attila, our steadicam op, took the whole rig and started to handhold it when Erzsébet is being dragged through the hallway and then went back to steadicam again.
Then there are other scenes like in the boat at the beginning that needed to feel disorientating and had to have a certain intimate connection with László and I love operating handheld. I insist in the films that I do it myself. I just think it’s that undefinable kind of connection that you have with the character, like a dance in that moment. There’s a musicality to it and a rhythm, so in those moments — and there are others, like in the Carrara marble quarries or the scene where they’re dancing at the party and [it’s said] “You are my destiny,” it’s got this Fellini-esque [quality] — that’s all handheld, but then when you cut to Van Buren, it’s on a dolly and we’re very formal as he’s tracking in on him as he’s voyeuristically staring down at László.
You also have this beautiful way of moving into light in the film — both in the marble quarry scene, you ultimately reach outside with this perfect beam of sunlight cast down on the characters and in the scene where László’s brother Atilla, played by Alessandro Nivola, is about to kick him out of the apartment, he catches this perfect sliver of light from the doorway so he’s cloaked in darkness. Was it difficult to block out scenes like that?
Yeah, that one you mentioned when Alessandro’s character kicks him out, that was a really tricky one because it was a very intimate scene in a very, very small space. Story-wise, the light is the motivation and most of the time I’m quite naturalistic and dependent on motivated light. It’s very tricky to create that subtle lighting in that regard Alessandro stood in the doorway, so [when the scene starts] Alessandro stood in the doorway, so he’s blocking the light, but then when you cut back to him [after a shot of László], he’s completely in darkness. And Brady [said], “I don’t want to be able to see him or be able to read him.” That was a bold decision and it’s quite tricky to get those things right because you can easily go a little too far or not far enough with it, but what you see is what we achieved in camera on the day.
Another shot that is quietly remarkable is a walk-and-talk between Adrien Brody and Isaach de Bankole, only they’re several stories above ground on a narrow bridge during the construction. You actually shoot both sides of the conversation when it seems like the bridge is too narrow to walk past either, so how did you end up with it?
Yeah, when they’re up high, that was funny because that’s steadicam up there and it is really narrow. Our steadicam operator, Attila, who is a knight in shining armor — like six foot something and unflappable, we got up there, and I realized he really didn’t like the height. I called it his “Attila’s heel.” [laughs] But he really pulled it off. It was very, very high and difficult to achieve, but we did it very successfully and very safely and that sequence is remarkable. The final moment where they look down and see Van Buren’s car arrive, that was off the Steadicam as well and we didn’t want to take two cameras up there and all more equipment, so we managed to shoot that off the same rig.
Unbelievable. Is it true the first day of the shoot was at the jazz club? That seems like it must’ve been a great way to kick off a shoot like this where it’s a bit experimental and quite energetic.
It 100% did. That was on a Tuesday afternoon that we shot that on day one with Adrien, and, we were trying to make it feel like this hedonistic, heroin and alcohol-fueled Friday night at an avant garde jazz club. We had a 10-mil lens on the camera, and I was on my back, throwing it left and right. Daniel [Blumberg, the composer] had got these wonderful musicians there, so the music was live and often you’d cut the music [into the scene later in post-production], so you could actually hear yourself think or hear dialogue, but Brady was directing us over that.
I had two cameras out to make sure that the second camera that I wasn’t operating was matching the feeling that I was doing, and I was going a little crazy with it. I thought it would be very unlikely the other camera was really matching, [that it] would be a little bit more conservative in some way because I was definitely untethered when I did that scene. But I felt like that was the scene that Adrien [Brody] was like, “Okay, these guys are serious.” It went a long way to really convince the actors at that point that we were really committed to how we were going to execute this film.
Was there anything, especially when it’s a long-time collaboration like this, that you thought about trying before that you were able to pull off here?
I keep coming back to the sequence in Italy. I’m very proud of that because I wouldn’t want it to be any other way. That whole sequence — from when we first start in Carrara, and then to the point of the brutal act that Van Buren carries out against László, to the handheld of them coming down at the end — goes together so well, and it’s just such a pivotal and important part of the movie that we couldn’t mess it up. It’s really interesting that when they’re led through the blocks of marble by this strange character who’s talking about beating the corpse of Mussolini and things like this, it’s very dreamlike, [the landscape] shrouded in clouds. When we turned up, we obviously had no idea. We were sort of disappointed that we couldn’t see the landscape because it was all just foggy, but now when you look at it, you’re like, “Oh, it clearly couldn’t be any other way.” With filmmaking, it’s often the case that what you think you really succeeded on on the day maybe in the cut isn’t as strong and vice versa, so the accidents become happy accidents. And then it gets put in the hands of the audience, and you don’t have any control anymore. It’s theirs, you know?
“The Brutalist” is now in theaters.