Andrew Laszlo The Warriors (1979)
Andrew Laszlo, ASC (January 12, 1926 – October 7, 2011) was the cinematographer of The Warriors (1979). His night-for-night photography of New York City — sodium-vapor street lamps, fluorescent station platforms, neon-lit boardwalks — defines the film's look as much as the gang costumes do.
A Hungarian-born refugee who became one of New York's defining DPs
Laszlo was born in Hungary in 1926 and survived a Nazi labor camp during the Second World War; he emigrated to the United States in 1947 and entered the American film industry through television documentary work in the 1950s. By the late 1960s he was shooting features. The Warriors came near the middle of his career and is among the films that have most lastingly defined his reputation.
The other Walter Hill (in The Warriors) collaboration came in 1984 with Streets of Fire, the explicit "rock-and-roll fable" sibling to The Warriors. Hill and Laszlo's two films together represent two extremes of stylized urban photography: The Warriors uses the actual city as found, lit by what the city happens to have; Streets of Fire builds a hyperreal alternate city on Universal's backlot and lights it as theater. The two films are often paired in discussions of Laszlo's range.
The Warriors is a film almost entirely shot at night
The visual contract of The Warriors is almost wholly a night contract. The film opens at dusk on Coney Island and does not move into daylight until the dawn beach sequence at the very end. Everything between — the Van Cortlandt Park meeting, the subway tunnels, the Riverside Park chase, the Lizzies' candlelit clubhouse, the Union Square bathroom under fluorescent light — is photographed in available darkness or in the available darkness as augmented by Laszlo's lighting plan.
The signature passes of the film:
- The Van Cortlandt Park gathering, lit by torches and by carefully placed augmentation that reads as torchlight, with Cyrus's platform brought up enough to register face but not enough to lose the surrounding crowd in shadow.
- The Bronx subway tunnels, in which the Warriors walk under low-Kelvin tungsten work lamps and the rail beds catch enough fill to define the route without becoming theatrical.
- The Riverside Park chase with the Furies, which uses sodium-vapor street-lamp warmth at the edges and silver moonlight (or the cinematographic equivalent) on the open lawns to give the chase its visual snap.
- The Lizzies' brownstone, lit substantially by candle-and-lampshade practical sources to give the trap-scene its hospitable warmth before it turns.
- The Union Square bathroom, the film's coldest and harshest light, fluorescent tubes overhead bouncing off white tile and mirrors — a deliberate visual descent to maximum harshness for the night's hardest fight.
- The Coney Island dawn, the only daylight sequence, lit by the actual rising sun over the Atlantic, which Laszlo and Hill caught across multiple mornings of pre-dawn arrivals on the beach.
The 4K UHD release in 2024 gave the cinematography its first home-video presentation in HDR, and reviewers noted that the night cinematography — long compromised on DVD and even on the 2013 Blu-ray — gained substantial detail in the fluorescent and sodium passes when the dynamic range was finally there to carry it. See Physical Media Releases (The Warriors).
Other major credits
| Year | Film | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 1969 | Popi | One of his early features |
| 1976 | The Man Who Fell to Earth — second unit | Some second-unit work |
| 1979 | The Warriors | With Walter Hill |
| 1981 | Southern Comfort | With Walter Hill (note: this credit is sometimes attributed to Andrew Laszlo and sometimes to Andrew Lazlo Jr.; the standard reference works credit the senior) |
| 1982 | First Blood | The original Rambo |
| 1984 | Streets of Fire | With Walter Hill |
| 1985 | Thief of Hearts | — |
| 1986 | Poltergeist II: The Other Side | — |
| 1992 | Newsies | His final major studio feature |
First Blood (1982) — the first Rambo film — is the Laszlo credit that has reached the largest audience, and his Pacific Northwest woods photography on that picture is the contrast partner to The Warriors' urban night work. Streets of Fire and Poltergeist II are the most stylized.
Death and legacy
Andrew Laszlo died on October 7, 2011, at the age of 85. He was a longtime member of the American Society of Cinematographers and a frequent author and lecturer on the craft. The Warriors and First Blood anchor his cinematic legacy; Streets of Fire the cult one.