Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is a three-and-a-half-hour fable about a Hungarian-Jewish architect rebuilding his life in postwar Pennsylvania, and it looks the way it does because cinematographer Lol Crawley shot the entire thing on VistaVision, a camera format Paramount invented in 1954 and Hollywood quietly buried by the early 1960s. Nobody had shot a full English-language feature on it since Marlon Brando’s One-Eyed Jacks in 1961. Corbet and Crawley picked it back up anyway, on a budget under $10 million, and it won Crawley the Best Cinematography Oscar.
A Format Hollywood Buried in 1961
VistaVision doesn’t run film through the camera the normal way. Standard 35mm pulls the film vertically past the gate, four sprocket holes per frame on each side. VistaVision turns the film sideways and pulls it horizontally, exposing a much larger negative across eight sprocket holes. Paramount built it to compete with television and CinemaScope in the 1950s, and it produced some of the sharpest images of the era, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and North by Northwest. Then widescreen 70mm took over, VistaVision cameras stopped getting made, and the format survived mostly as a special-effects tool, not something anyone shot a whole movie on.
Crawley told Filmmaker Magazine that Corbet originally wanted 65mm, but it was too scarce and expensive to pull off. VistaVision became the workaround. “It’s an extraordinary format,” Crawley said. “It also gives you a bigger field of view, so it’s a bit like working with the large-format digital cameras we have now.” For a movie about an architect obsessed with scale and proportion, that wider negative meant Crawley could hold a building’s full geometry in frame without reaching for a distorting wide lens.
One Camera, Five-Minute Magazines
The catch is that almost nobody makes VistaVision cameras anymore. Per TheWrap, the production had access to essentially one working VistaVision unit for the entire shoot, rented through Camera Revolution, and because film runs twice as fast through the gate, each magazine held roughly five minutes of usable footage before it needed reloading. Crawley supplemented it with an Arri 235, the smallest 35mm camera available, for handheld work, and built his lens package out of an unlikely mix: Leica R stills lenses paired with Cooke S4s, plus Angénieux Optimos and vintage Cooke zooms, according to the Filmmaker Magazine interview. None of that is standard kit. It’s a cinematographer building a one-off machine because the one Hollywood used to make doesn’t exist anymore.
Grain by Choice, Not Accident
What makes this genuinely relevant to anyone who cuts on film-look presets: Crawley didn’t pick Kodak Vision3 250D and 500T for resolution. He picked them for texture. “My go-to film stocks,” he told Kodak. “If I had to suddenly shoot first thing tomorrow morning, they would be the ones I would choose because they have grain, and I like the feeling of texture in the image.” He went further: “There’s something beautiful about it in the way it obfuscates the image. It gives more of an impression of a time than being just a literal representation.” Crawley then push-processed the negative to knock down the format’s inherent sharpness, chasing blacks he compared to Bruegel paintings rather than clean digital clarity. That’s the whole argument for grain in one sentence from an Oscar-winning cinematographer: more resolution isn’t the goal, the right amount of noise is. It’s the same instinct behind a real 35mm grain pass over a digital sequence, just executed with an 8-perf camera and a marble quarry in Tuscany instead of a plugin.
Fifteen Minutes That Became Part of the Movie
The theatrical rollout matched the ambition. Prints struck in 70mm, a three-hour-and-35-minute runtime, and a genuine intermission built into the middle. Empire’s Ben Travis argued it wasn’t just “an acknowledgement that 200 minutes is a bit of a bum-number” but a structural device with “a very clear ‘before’ and ‘after,'” one audiences embraced enough to post intermission selfies online. In his review, Empire’s Jamie Graham called Crawley’s cinematography “ascetic images” that “speak to Tóth’s commanding creations,” singling out the film’s marble mine sequence as “spectacle as spiritual experience.”
Crawley won the Best Cinematography Oscar for it, the second year running the Academy handed that award to a film actually shot on film rather than digital. A Letterboxd user’s crowd-sourced list of every VistaVision film ever made now has to add an entry seven decades after the format’s heyday, right after White Christmas and The Ten Commandments. Grain wasn’t a limitation Crawley worked around. It was the reason to build the camera in the first place.
Sources:
Vadim Rizov, Filmmaker Magazine, “‘It Doesn’t Have to Always Cost $200 Million’: DP Lol Crawley on Shooting The Brutalist (Mostly) in VistaVision”
Kodak, “DP Lol Crawley BSC Harnesses Kodak Film and 8-Perf VistaVision”
TheWrap, “What Is VistaVision? How ‘The Brutalist’ Revived a Beautiful but Cumbersome Film Format”
Ben Travis, Empire, “The Cinematic Intermission Is Back in The Brutalist, and It Should Stay”
Jamie Graham, Empire, “The Brutalist Review”
kjacob73, Letterboxd, “Films Shot in VistaVision”
The Playlist, “Lol Crawley Wins the Best Cinematography Oscar for ‘The Brutalist'”
