Cinematographer who shot Close Encounters for Spielberg
VILMOS ZSIGMOND, who has died aged 85, was a Hungarian cinematographer celebrated for his work during the 1970s and 1980s with directors such as Steven Spielberg, Robert Altman and Woody Allen.
Szigmond was listed in the Top 10 most influential cinematographers of all time by the Camera Guild. But in addition to his many box office hits and an Academy Award for his work on Spielberg’s extraterrestrial drama Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) he also shot one of the biggest flops of all time, Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s
Gate (1980). The epic, about empire building in 19th-century Wyoming, went so over budget that it is reputed to have nearly brought down its studio, United Artists. “We were thinking that we were making a masterpiece and in the end it was a disaster,” Zsigmond recalled.
His camera skills were used to great effect in seminal 1970s works such as Michael Cimino’s The Deer
Hunter (1978) and John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972). Filming in Thailand and the wilds of South Carolina respectively, he created an atmosphere of rural menace for both films.
He continued to work until the end of his life, capturing the autumnal hues of New England for The Witches of Eastwick (1987), the game reserves of Kenya for The Ghost and the
Darkness (1996) and the seamy side of Los Angeles for The Black Dahlia (2006).
In later life he noted that the shift from celluloid to digital technology had affected his craft: “It’s a new style, but a lot of filmmakers lack artistic ideas. I don’t know why. You just turn this camera on, the image is already there, and they want to shoot that, not thinking about what the scene is about.”
Vilmos Zsigmond was born on June 16 1930 in the city of Szeged, Hungary. His father was a footballer and coach, his mother an administrator. Vilmos studied at the Academy of Drama and Film in Budapest where, in the early 1950s, he was cinematographer on several short films.
During the 1956 Hungarian uprising Zsigmond and his friend László Kovács (later the director of photography on Easy Rider and Ghostbusters) shot some 30,000 feet of film of the street battles in
Budapest. The pair subsequently fled Hungary and in America sold their footage to CBS.
Zsigmond settled in Los Angeles and worked in photographic labs and as a photographer, moving into film on B-movies such as The Sadist (1964), The Time Travellers (1964) and Psycho a Go-Go (1965). His break came in 1971 when he filmed The Hired
Hand for Peter Fonda on the recommendation of Kovács. That year he also worked on Robert Altman’s western McCabe & Mrs Miller, starring Warren Beatty and Julie Christie.
He was in great demand over the following decade, working repeatedly for some directors, including Spielberg, with whom he first collaborated on The Sugarland Express (1973).
After The Deer Hunter he teamed up with Cimino again for the ill-fated
Heaven’s Gate. The critic Leonard Maltin noted that the film was “stunningly photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond” but that was “to little effect, since the narrative, character motivations and soundtrack are so hopelessly muddled”.
Zsigmond worked on four films with Brian De Palma, including Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) and The Black Dahlia, and three for Woody Allen: Melinda and Melinda (2004), Cassandra’s Dream (2007) and You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010). In addition to his Academy Award for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, he was nominated a further three times. He also won a Bafta for The Deer Hunter.
Zsigmond’s first marriage was dissolved. He is survived by his second wife, Susan, and by two children from his first marriage. Vilmos Zsigmond, born June 16 1930, died January 1 2016