Principal Photography

By using photography as a storytelling medium, the cinematographer plays a key role in translating a screenplay into images and capturing the director’s vision of the film. This text presents interviews with 13 cinematographers, who discuss their careers and the art and craft of feature film cinematography. The interviewees – who represent the spectrum of big-budget Hollywood and low-budget independent filmmaking from the sixties through the nineties – talk about their responsibilities, including lighting, camera movement, equipment, cinematic grammar, lenses, film stocks, interpreting the script, the budget and schedule, and the psychological effect of images. Each interview is preceded by a short biography and a selected filmography, which provide the background for a detailed analysis of the photographic style and technique of many films.

Author Biography

VINCENT LoBRUTTO is an Editing and Production Design Instructor in the Department of Film, Video and Animation of the School of Visual Arts, in New York City. He has worked as a postproduction coordinator for the ABC television network and as a film editor for the Fox and HBO networks. He is a contributing writer for American Cinematographer and Films in Review and the author of several books, including Selected Takes: Film Editors on Editing (Praeger, 1991), By Design: Interviews with Film Production Designers (Praeger, 1992), and Sound-On-Film: Interviews with Creators of Film Sound (Praeger, 1994).