Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart. It's time to start reading our February Get Lit with All Of It book club pick. This month, we'll be reading Imani Perry's new book, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People. It's an exploration of the relationship between Black Americans and the color blue, from the role of indigo dye in the slave trade to R&B. Imani joined us on the show yesterday to preview the conversation, and she'll be joining us on Wednesday, February 26th for an in-person and virtual event at the New York Public Library. New Yorkers can borrow an e-copy of the book, thanks to our partners at NYPL. Tickets to the event are free. They tend to go really fast, so make sure you reserve yours today. Head to wnyc.org/getlit or go to our Instagram, @allofitwnyc.

Now that's in the future. Let's get this hour started with the Oscar-nominated cinematographer of The Brutalist.

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Alison Stewart: Part of the magic of the movie The Brutalist is in its ambition. That ambition is in the size and scope of the story. It follows Hungarian architect Laszlo Toth over the course of many years, the highs and the lows. That ambition is also in the technology used to shoot the film, technology handled by my next guest that's often Oscar-nominated cinematographer Lol Crowley. Lol and director Brady Corbet used this division on The Brutalist. The technology was invented in the '50s and used by filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock before eventually falling out of use.

The Brutalist is the first American film in more than 60 years to shoot with this division to achieve these epic scenes. Lol worked with this technology to shoot in Italian marble quarries, rainy work sites, empty furniture stores. He is nominated for an Oscar for Best Cinematography for his work on the film. The Brutalist has been nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Lol Crowley joins me now as part of our series, The Big Picture. That's when we speak to Oscar nominees who work behind the camera to create amazing films of 2024. Lol, welcome.

Lol Crawley: Thank you, Alison. It's very nice to be here. Nice to meet you.

Alison Stewart: Nice to meet you as well. This year, third movie with Brady Corbet. What makes him a good collaborator for you?

Lol Crawley: Yes, exactly right, third film. Very proud to say. Brady, from the very first time I worked with him, I realized what an assured filmmaker he is. He's incredibly assured but also very pragmatic and sort of-- As long as the themes within the scene come across, he's very happy to-- He's a very strong collaborator. He's very happy to find different ways of achieving it. He's not overly precious. As he would say, he moves the sand around in the sandbox in order to put the budget where he feels it needs to be to tell the story. Yes, he's a fantastic collaborator to work with. It's a real honor.

Alison Stewart: All right. We're going to talk VistaVision for a while. What was your reaction to learning that Brady Corbet wanted to shoot this film on VistaVision?

Lol Crawley: I was incredibly excited. We've always shot 35 mil celluloid on the three films. Each film is a period film, obviously, in different periods. Vox Lux, the last film we made was a more recent period. We've always felt the film helped to serve that purpose and tell that story. We've always been interested in larger formats. When Brady invited me to shoot The Brutalist, he was very excited about the idea of VistaVision.

I had worked with VistaVision cameras as a camera assistant on a Star Wars movie a long time ago, 25 years ago, if not more. It could be that that same camera that I loaded was the same camera that I shot with. No, there aren't that many of those cameras around. Also, I think for a movie like this, the VistaVision camera system, even though it's still 35 mil, it essentially shoots horizontally like a stills camera would, so you end up with a larger negative area and subsequently a larger field of view to capture, as you said, the vistas and the architecture that Laszlo Toth creates. I firmly believed from the very beginning that VistaVision was not an affectation or a gimmick, that it really earned its place with The Brutalist.

Alison Stewart: What did it allow you to do creatively as a cinematographer?

Lol Crawley: Traditionally, if you were trying to photograph architecture, you'd work with a system called swing and tilt or swing and shift lenses, which is basically a way of not distorting the true lines of the architecture. Now, obviously, filming the Institute and filming these architectural spaces, when we used VistaVision because you have this wider field of view, it meant that you weren't forced onto a wider angle lens in order to photograph it, if that makes sense. You can work on a longer lens but still see far more of the space.

Therefore, with Judy Becker's designs, which were obviously Laszlo's designs, and these concrete spaces, these brutalist spaces, these wonderful spaces of architecture, it meant that we could photograph it without distorting it by being forced onto a wider lens. Along with the fact that Brady wanted to use a camera system from the 1950s to tell a story that largely takes place in the 1950s, they seem two incredible reasons to me to shoot the movie that way.

Alison Stewart: Do you understand why it isn't used as much at all?

Lol Crawley: It's like all these things. These things develop in terms of technology. It's a less ergonomic camera system, shall we say. There are other camera systems that also fell out of favor, should we say. If you look at the Nouvelle Vague, the 1960s, smaller cameras, smaller Artons cameras in Europe were being used by Goddard that then translated back across the Atlantic to America and informed Gordon Willis and use of available line. There's always this back and forth in this kind of evolution. Unfortunately, they can be quite noisy, can be quite cumbersome. We successfully used it on The Brutalist, but we also supported it with other camera systems occasionally. If I needed a very small handheld camera to follow Adrien through the ship, for example, early on, then we were able to lean into those technologies as well. The beauty of the VistaVision far outweighed some of the technical disadvantages or older technology that we were forced to work with.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Lol Crowley. He is a cinematographer. He is nominated for Best Cinematography in this year's Oscar race. It's part of our Big Picture series. You shot the film in a short amount of time. What challenges did those time constraints put on you?

Lol Crawley: Yes, we shot the movie in, I think, 33 days. Budget-wise, it was also around 10 million, which I know sounds a lot, but for a movie of this scope and scale, it was very, very ambitious. It was very ambitious.

Alison Stewart: Ambitious has become another word for-- It means something else a little bit.

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Lol Crawley: Yes. You know what I have to say? With the support of the producers and all of the heads of department really being aligned on this project to serve-- I've said it before, but everybody needs a director. It's not just about directing the performance. Everyone needs that singular vision. Having shot three films for Brady helps a lot because there's less contradiction on set. You're esthetically aligned. The other thing is that what you see in the movie is largely what we shot. When practitioners in the industry talk about coverage, you're obviously talking about within a scene, the number of shots it takes to tell that part of the story.

Now with Brady, he'll often embrace one shot or maybe three shots, but it's very, very minimal coverage, which, again, is akin to that. What we've come to recognize within almost like 1950s melodramas of that time or what we regard as that type of studio or American cinema of that era. What I mean is that even though it was hard often to shoot an entire scene in one shot, once you got it on its feet and you started shooting it, then the whole scene was complete. There are some five-minute-long takes in this movie that there's no cuts in there. I think that goes a long way. Just being very, very minimal in the coverage really, really helped us to get through each shooting day.

Alison Stewart: You got to love a one-take Jake.

Lol Crawley: [laughs] Exactly. Brady has always, as I say, thrown down the gauntlet to me. He's like, "This is what we are doing with this scene." Sometimes with a collaborator, there's a back and forth and it evolves and goes somewhere else. My job is to execute that, that one intention and that one desire, and that's just fine. I certainly don't want to be there contradicting the director. A healthy back and forth and a robust collaboration is very nice.

Alison Stewart: I think people don't realize this, but a cinematographer, part of your job is lighting a scene. It's not just taking a picture of a scene or going after it. Tell people why it's important, the lighting.

Lol Crawley: Certainly within this film, it's incredibly important because the more I talk about this film, the more distance I have from it in so many regards. The whole movie is about light and dark. It's extraordinary. Even when Laszlo seems at his most hedonistic or joyful or having these kind of moments, he's actually in a very, very dark space. There's lots of scenes within a jazz club or scene early on where he's at a brothel, or obviously at the beginning of the scene where he's in the ship. It's all about being devoid of light and then reaching for the light in some regard. Light within this film is incredibly important. I had to work very closely with Judy Becker, our production designer, because all of those scenes reflect the design of the institute that Laszlo eventually constructs in the second half of the movie.

Talking about light, as a cinematographer, I'm also somebody who-- I learned early on that some of the time I'm employed as a cinematographer to leave the lighting truck doors closed, it's not always about imposition. In some regards, it's almost like having an insurance policy having a lighting truck. I don't always have to use. I don't always have to make a claim. I think part of my job is to recognize when it's appropriate to the scene to use available light. I've also been very heavily influenced by a lot of cinematographers that work the same way, like Robby Müller and Robbie Ryan and people. Sometimes the way the light is behaving, the natural daylight is more than enough.

Alison Stewart: This might sound a little bit like a tangent, but I've heard you talk about the film, and it struck me that you might be someone who takes photographs. Do you?

Lol Crawley: Yes, I am. It's interesting, though, because I see some cinematographers taking photographs on set and I think, "Oh, wow, what wonderful mementos." People sometimes ask me if I do that. This isn't unusual for a cinematographer. We all feel this way, but you're so focused in the moment of shooting 24 frames a second, 24 photos every second. I sometimes worry that if I enjoy the moment of stepping back and taking a photo, something will go awry, if that makes sense. There's two different headspaces for me. I enjoy taking photographs, but alongside the responsibility and tension of shooting a scene, it's a little hard for me to do both.

Alison Stewart: How did you get into this business? How are you a cinematographer?

Lol Crawley: Yes, it's a good question. It was an evolution from-- I was in school. I loved art, and then art turned into photography, and photography to moving image. Then I went to study in the northeast of England in Newcastle, filmmaking. At that time, they had 16 mil for cinematography. I really did that. Then met some great people at university that I, after we graduated, continued to shoot short films with whilst also working in the industry, because I realized that partly it's what you know, so what you're taught at university or wherever you pick up that knowledge. The second thing is confidence. When you step onto a film set, you're invariably in somebody's way because everyone knows their position and craft, and you're always in the way. It took me time. It takes different people different time, and that's fine, but it took me a certain amount of time to have the authority, to have the confidence to be able to know what I'm saying. Then the two came together.

Alison Stewart: I'm speaking with cinematographer Lol Crawley. His work on The Brutalist has earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Cinematography. We're speaking to him as part of our series, The Big Picture. Let's talk about the opening scene. People have seen it on the poster, and the Statue of Liberty is upside down. I love this scene in the movie. First of all, what did it look like on paper, and how did you transfer that to cinema?

Lol Crawley: Again, it was a sort of evolution. It was definitely scripted in this way. The reality, as we all know, that is if you-- Oh, all of us, but if you've been lucky enough to see the Statue of Liberty from New York Harbor, you'll know it's a very specific thing. If we had shot it in a way that had been a literal way and a continuation of what is quite a literal scene, handheld, following Adrien Brody's character up to the deck of the ship, that literal continuation possibly would have been slightly underwhelming in the sense that you're seeing the statue upon a plinth upon an island. Sure, of course, but it's not as arresting as, I think, what we ultimately came up with.

The idea also of this-- I was talking about it last night, but it's interesting because if you-- I know this seems like a strange reference, but if you look at Ghostbusters or Planet of the Apes and Brutalist, the thing is those three movies, the strangest thing is the way that the Statue of Liberty has been reinterpreted, and something is very much amiss when-- I didn't grow up in America, and yet the Statue of Liberty represents such a firm thing, something that cannot be ripped out from its moorings and cannot be upturned and end up in a beach in California or be untethered in the way that we did.

The idea evolved, and then Dávid Jancsó, our editor, flipped and rotated the image. Between us, we had this idea. What's interesting is that it's not a literal representation of what Laszlo would see, but it represents-- People have different theories of it, but it could be seen to represent, to an immigrant, the solidity, the hope, the stoic liberty that she represents is not necessarily what will evolve for Laszlo.

Alison Stewart: You told The Hollywood Reporter that one of the most difficult scenes for you to shoot was the scene where Van Buren is showing the group the property that he wants to turn into this community center that he wants Laszlo to design. They're walking up this big hill, and it's-- Well, people can't see my hands, but they're walking up a big hill. What was challenging about getting this scene right so that people could understand where they were and what was happening?

Lol Crawley: It wasn't necessarily anything geographically disorientating for the viewer, but the tricky thing-- The scene that precedes it, basically the light is fading, the light is fading. We're in this wintertime. In reality, it would be half an hour to 45 minutes of available light between sunset and darkness. Van Buren just says he has an announcement, and they all leave the house. There's this one shot of them crossing the bridge which we shot actually as the light was fading because you can. If it's one shot, you can achieve that. It's very difficult to shoot a scene that follows in available light because there's lots of shots to achieve it.

However, in this one instance, we actually did. It's quite remarkable. We had an amazing Steadicam operator called Attila Pfeffer in Budapest, and a really amazing camera assisting team and fantastic performers that nailed this. The supporting actors, obviously, Guy Pearce and Adrien Brody, nailed this scene under Brady's direction in 45 minutes. It was a rare thing where had we not achieved it, we would have had to come back and the weather may have been different, but we managed to achieve it all in that time and it was extraordinary. It was a very exhilarating but stressful scene to shoot.

Alison Stewart: There are just all these beautiful, beautiful setups in the film, whether it's the marble mines in Italy, whether it's a reunion scene, whether it's the gorgeous library. I'm curious about Adrien Brody's face. What is it about Adrien Brody's face that a cinematographer loves?

Lol Crawley: Brady has alluded to this and I would completely agree. There's one of the-- I think it's an image that is on a lot of the press and the posters in the cinemas. The moment where Adrien steps up in this shower of sparks from his welded modernist furniture and he steps forward in the glow of that, Brady has said he looks like a '50s icon. He looks like that. I think it's an absolute pleasure to shoot. He also has this arresting quality, magnetic quality. Obviously, he just feels like Laszlo Toth. It's funny, I can't divide the two now, even though Laszlo is a fictitious character, which is also quite remarkable because it's such an incredibly well-rounded performance and well-rounded piece of direction and writing from Brady and Mona.

It's just extraordinary. He just has an incredible feature. He has wonderful features, but also there's this real often pathos or a kind of melancholy and just the torture. You really get a sense through his expression, really what this character has been through.

Alison Stewart: The film has been beloved by critics, beloved by audiences. It's three-plus hours with an intermission. What has it been like seeing a film like The Brutalist become such a success?

Lol Crawley: It's been extraordinary. It's been so many things. The awards and the nominations are one thing in themselves. Of course, they are wonderful to achieve. I've never experienced anything like this, but I really firmly hope that this film will be also an inspiration to other filmmakers that want to shoot on film, to other filmmakers that want to make a longer film. I hope it'll be easier for Brady on his next film. I'm really, really proud of that, that hopefully, it will--

We love shooting film. There have been times, as we all know, over the last 15 years or so, that film has really, really had a tough time. We've had wonderful filmmakers like Tarantino and Christopher Nolan and Paul Thomas Anderson and Brady, who have really tried to shoot film. The way to keep film alive is to shoot film. Use it or lose it, as they say. The reception has been incredible. I hope it makes the conversation a little easier about having a film of this length. I think Brady has been unapologetic about just really embracing event cinema again. Guess what? People seem to be going and seeing it, so that's great. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: My guest has been Lol Crawley. His work on The Brutalist has earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Cinematography. It was really nice meeting you.

Lol Crawley: You too. Thank you so much, Alison. I appreciate it.