Variety’s 10 Cinematographers to Watch

Christophe Beaucarne had established his own “theory of moviemaking” before he turned 16. His father bought a JVC camcorder and for three years, he and his cousins shot movies on the weekends. “Without knowing, it we did some editing, some close ups,” Beaucarne says. “I explained what I was doing to a sound designer friend of my father’s, and he said, ‘I think you want to be a cinematographer.’ ”

Beaucarne then learned a more traditional film theory at Insas in Belgium, and went on to shoot 1997’s “Nous sommes tous encore ici,” directed by Anne Marie Mieville, Jean-Luc Godard’s wife. “Godard was an actor in the movie and they pushed me to use only natural light and slow film stock, with less granulation,” Beaucarne says. “I learned a lot.”

In 2009, he shot both “Coco Before Chanel” and “Mr. Nobody,” helmed by Jaco Van Dormeal. “I experimented with everything on that great movie,” Beaucarne says.

“I describe my approach to cinema like an Indian looking at the sky,” he says. “I observe nature a lot.”

To get a natural look for 2013’s “Beauty and the Beast,” Beaucarne used an arc light as a nod to Henri Alekan, d.p. for Cocteau’s 1946 version of the story. “The light of those arc lights seems to be less perfect than others in studio, and makes a sunlight effect on skin.”

Beaucarne just wrapped filming on Mathieu Amalric’s “The Blue Room,” based on the novel of the same name by Georges Simenon.

—Jaime Netzer

Frankie DeMarco is not exactly green; he was crewing for John Waters in the ’80s, back in his hometown of Baltimore. But it’s his very recent work — on “Margin Call” and “All Is Lost” — that’s attracted the kind of attention DeMarco goes out of his way to avoid.

“I’m not a star,” says the 53-year-old d.p. who adds that he didn’t really “get going” until he was about 32. “I’m there to make the director’s movie. People might remember how great a movie looked, but people will remember my movies because they were good movies,” including two key collaborations with John Cameron Mitchell: “Rabbit Hole” and “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.”

Both J.C. Chandor films have been unorthodox efforts: “Margin Call” shot entirely at night, in the glass towers of Manhattan; “All Is Lost” on open water, some of it in tanks at the Rosarita stages in Baja California. “We had two weeks of prep,” for “Margin Call,” DeMarco says. “J.C. and I barely talked. He was too busy working with this great cast to communicate much to me, so we were working in unison but separately in a way, and what he saw on the monitor he liked.”

On “All Is Lost,” he says, “We should have been wearing hard hats.”

A New Yorker since the ’80s, DeMarco, currently shooting a pilot in L.A. for Nat Faxon and Jim Rash (who co-wrote “The Descendants”), keeps busy, sometimes working second unit, or as an operator. “I like working,” he says. “I don’t want to sit around. It’s a lonely business in a lot of ways. When you become a full d.p.-only, you cut yourself from the world.” 

— John Anderson

The striking photography in “Ida” — mostly tableau black and white images in boldly atypical compositions within a squarish 1.33:1 frame — turned heads and took home the Golden Frog at the 2013 Camerimage Intl. Festival of the Art of Cinematography. “Ida” also earned the pair the inaugural Spotlight award from the American Society of Cinematographers. 

The story follows an orphaned novitiate sent to the city to learn about her fraught Jewish past from a dissolute aunt before taking her Catholic vows as a nun.

Ryszard Lenczewski started the project with director Pawel Pawlikowski, his frequent collaborator, but health problems forced the cinematographer to turn the camera over to his operator, Lukasz Zal.

Both Lenczewski and Zal are graduates of the Polish National Film School. Lenczewski took more than 3,000 photographs during six months of testing and design.

“We chose black and white and the 1.33 frame because it was evocative of Polish films of that era, the early 1960s,” says Lenczewski. “We designed the unusual compositions to make the audience feel uncertain, to watch in a different way. We trust intuition first. Then we come to intellectual thinking, but in the end, we come back to intuition.”

In addition to his work with Pawlikowski, Lenczewski has made films with Rowan Joffe (“The Shooting of Thomas Hurndall”), John Crowley (“Intermission”) and Kenneth Lonergan (“Margaret”), among more than two dozen narrative credits. He previously earned awards from BAFTA for two television dramas, “Charles II: The Power and the Passion,” and “Anna Karenina.”

Zal has a background in documentaries. He took the Golden Frog in the documentary category in 2011 for “Paparazzi.” He avoided conventional coverage on “Ida.”

“Pawel and I shot using ‘poster storytelling,’ where a scene is presented with tableau shots that are not connected by a master. Each frame was carefully designed to suggest the wider world beyond, and to communicate the characters’ sense of strangeness and loss. 

“The close collaboration with Pawel was like a dream for me,” Zal adds. “It gave us the courage to take risks, to make a film that has authenticity and significance.”

— David Heuring 

There are alien-invasion movies, and then there’s “Under the Skin,” one of the most visually striking science-fiction movies of recent years thanks to the remarkable collaboration between writer-director Jonathan Glazer, star Scarlett Johansson and cinematographer Daniel Landin. Typical of how far “Skin” is from sci-fi conventions is how Landin and Glazer created what Landin terms a “clandestine” shooting atmosphere for much of the action.

Since Johansson’s beautiful, completely human-looking alien roams the byways of Glasgow looking for male prey to use in “experiments,” “we had to make sure that she wasn’t noticed by people on the street. There was a tiny crew of five in the van she drove, and the only added light I used was some enhancement to street lighting. She would pick up total strangers, non-actors, and we couldn’t use any lights that would give away that we were shooting.”

Landin’s versatility, both in features (“The Uninvited”) and musicvideos (for Radiohead, Madonna and Massive Attack), gets a workout in “Under the Skin.” In contrast to the clandestine shooting, the British d.p. created an astonishing, inky black-box space for the alien’s lair: “I used a huge overhead lighting rig with maximum reflectors, remote-controlled for direction and levels. Filming darkness, trying to get close to total black, was a huge challenge.” 

— Robert Koehler

When she was 11, Nathalie Durand announced to her parents that she was going to work in the movie business, “so I could go to the movies whenever I wanted.” A love of the visual image led her to study cinematography at the Louis-Lumiere National Film School in Paris, where she has lived for 30 years. 

Her first feature of note, “Blame It on Fidel” (2006), was directed by Julie Gavras, daughter of Costa-Gavras. As film critic Roger Ebert noted about the film — about family disruption in early ’70s Paris when a young girl’s parents become radicalized — it’s often shot at eye level from the daughter’s point of view. “This is particularly effective when her parents take her along on a political demonstration, and what she sees are blue jeans, running shoes and tear gas,” Ebert wrote. 

Durand’s more recent work on “Le Week-End” (2013), also set in Paris, came about when the helmer, Roger Michell, wanted a local d.p. “It’s comfortable to shoot in your own city,” she says. “We were a very small crew with small equipment, so we could be mobile.”

For “Le Week-End,” about an elderly couple who revisit the site of their honeymoon, Durand’s lensing of the City of Light is devoid of cliche, using the wide screen in unusually intimate ways. 

Michell was “precise about framing,” Durand says, and the only monitor on set was a 9-inch BTLH wireless for the helmer. “I love this movability, so the framing can adapt to the actors and line up with the mood of the scene.”

— Jaime Netzer

“Every time I’ve started work on a film and have made the creative decisions in terms of story and character and emotional point of view, my mind turns to light, how it will perform and sculpt the story’s themes,” says British-born d.p. Rob Hardy.

For the Ralph Fiennes-directed “The Invisible Woman,” exploring Charles Dickens’ secret love affair with young mistress Nelly Ternan (Felicity Jones), Hardy came upon an ingenious concept.

“I was drawn to late Rembrandt for interiors because the light and faces are natural but suggest immense emotions, and you constantly believe the light,” he says. “His late masterworks pointed to a subtle, organic, instinctive use of light.”

On the other hand, Fiennes and Hardy went for a tougher, brighter exterior look. “We wanted the viewer to get used to the interiors, and then when you go outside, it startles you, wakes you up, making you squint.” This optical leap rarely happens in period pics: “Very few of them make you feel like you’re actually there, and that was our goal.”

Hardy’s desire to thrust the viewer into other times or places is dramatically clear in such highly charged work as “The Forgiveness of Blood” with director Joshua Marston, “Red Riding: 1974” with Julian Jarrold and “Shadow Dancer,” helmed by vet documaker James Marsh.

“If I have a guiding principle, it’s that I want to make people feel more than watch. If they leave the cinema and can only say, ‘Well, the cinematography was very good,’ then I’ve failed.”

— Robert Koehler

Florian Hoffmeister, whose lensing will soon grace “In Secret,” the Elizabeth Olsen starrer based on Emile Zola’s hot-blooded “Therese Raquin,” seems to thrive in the realm of period romance: He won an Emmy, a BAFTA and an ASC award for the miniseries “Great Expectations” (2011) and accomplished several miracles of light that same year with Terence Davies’ much-lauded “The Deep Blue Sea.” But he started his cinematography career in a much more topical, urgent and controversial project, Antonia Bird’s “The Hamburg Cell,” a dramatized portrait of the 9/11 hijackers.

“That was a game-changer,” Hoffmeister says. “It opened doors for me to work internationally. Antonia had a very energetic sense of visual blocking. Also, the political nature of the film added gravitas to our daily work.”

Based in his native Germany, Hoffmeister sees the camera in somewhat romantic terms, as something that “connects the present to the past, the moment with memory.”

“In this sense it is probably the only technical apparatus which comes close to fulfilling the human desire for a time machine,” he says. “In film, the camera is the eye of the needle through which the feelings of the protagonists make their way into the hearts and minds of the audience.”

— John Anderson

Autumn Durald’s first big job was with photographer Melodie McDaniel and Harris Savides on the Levi’s (“Go Forth”) campaign, ads with a dreamy/funky black-and-white elegance. Her film work has been called “moodily sensuous,” and after the Telluride premiere of “Palo Alto” — the upcoming Gia Coppola-helmed adaptation of a James Franco short story (starring Franco) — Variety’s Peter Debruge agreed, giving a shout-out to the “gifted female d.p.” Her “striking Steadicam lensing,” he wrote, “buffers everything from harsh realism, allowing a slightly dreamlike quality into the proceedings.”

“That’s so funny,” says the 34-year-old AFI grad, “because I didn’t use any Steadicam. But I made it look like that. There’s feeling to this movie that Gia and I wanted in the visual language, very poetic. It has that smooth nature, and it all flows together. So I can see why he’d say that.”

Durald, who is continuing to do commercial work and will shoot a feature for director Andrew Droz Palermo this summer, says she finds inspiration in director-d.p. teams like Woody Allen and Gordon Willis in the ’70s and ’80s.

“I watch their films and there’s such a  synergy — wonderful characters, together with wonderful camera work,” she explains. “Any job I approach, what’s important is having the cinematography work with the story so you feel something; you don’t feel like you’re watching a film. If I don’t believe it, if it doesn’t feel real, it’s hard to fake that.”

— John Anderson

On a roll in more ways than one, the British-born, London-educated Jess Hall lensed fellow cinematographer Wally Pfister’s directorial debut,  the upcoming Johnny Depp vehicle “Transcendence,” which was shot on Hall and Pfister’s favorite medium — 35mm film.

“It’s a format that I’m very comfortable with. Wally is extremely pro-film, too,” Hall says of the Oscar-winning d.p. known for his work with Christopher Nolan. “So it just seemed like the natural format.”

All Hall’s features — which have included  the radiant “Brideshead Revisited” of 2008, the much acclaimed “Son of Rambow” (2007) and the underappreciated “Stander” (2003) — have been shot on film, and he’s particularly enthused about having shot two of his bigger-profile films in the directors’ hometowns.

“ ‘The Spectacular Now’ by James Ponsoldt was shot in his home town of Athens, Georgia,” Hall says, “ ‘Hot Fuzz’ was shot in Edgar Wright’s Wells, England. The specificity that one can communicate when you know the subject intimately is infinite.”

Serving as d.p. for somebody of Pfister’s stature  seems daunting, but Hall sees it as an important opportunity not only to shoot on film, but to follow through with a photochemical finish.

“Digital intermediate, when it first came out, was an exciting tool,” Halls says, but I have been dissatisfied with some results. So I grabbed the opportunity when Wally suggested it. It was a great chance to do something very pure.”

— John Anderson