Brian Tufano and Middlemarch
‘Poetic’ cinematographer who worked on Trainspotting, Quadrophenia, Billy Elliot
BRIAN TUFANO, who has died aged 83, was a British cinematographer who worked on some of the most dynamic and successful domestic films of the past half a century.
After years working for the BBC, he had early success with Franc Roddam’s Quadrophenia (1979), loosely based on The Who’s rock opera, one of the best movies on British teenage life. He was in the vanguard of the British filmmaking boom of the 1990s, working on Damien O’donnell’s East is East
(1999), and Stephen Daldry’s Billy Elliot (2000), the Telegraph critic observing of the latter that Tufano’s “poetic cinematography lifts it far above the usual grimy realism of North Country dramas”.
He was particularly known for the productive partnership he forged with Danny Boyle, working on his feature debut, the black comedy Shallow Grave
in 1994, which led to their groundbreaking Trainspotting in 1996.
The idea of making a film based on Irvine Welsh’s cult book about Mark “Rent Boy” Renton and other junkies in 1980s Edinburgh was dismissed by many in the industry. Yet Tufano’s combination of grungy social realism and wildly imaginative visual imagery contributed to Trainspotting becoming regarded as a landmark of British cinema – as well as establishing the reputations of both Boyle and Ewan Mcgregor (as Renton). Robert Carlyle, who played Renton’s psychopathic friend Begbie, described Tufano as “the unsung hero of the piece”.
Tufano recalled in an interview with The Daily Telegraph in 2001: “Danny Boyle’s brief to us was ‘Francis Bacon’ – on Shallow Grave it had been ‘Edward Hopper’ – so we took it from there, really.”
Brian Richard Tufano was born in Shepherd’s Bush, west London, on December 1 1939. During the war he and his mother evacuated to a mining village in Wales, where she often took her infant son to the cinema.
Back in Shepherd’s Bush, he took to hanging around the nearby Gainsborough (later BBC) Studios in
Lime Grove where, after leaving school aged 16, he got a job as a pageboy, then as a projectionist at Ealing Studios, home of the BBC film department.
There, he got to know the film crews and sometimes accompanied them, teaching himself the arts of camera work with borrowed equipment at weekends. He also spent long hours studying films such as the early landmarks of the French New Wave, “to see where the light was coming from”. By 1963 he had been promoted to cameraman.
Tufano stayed with the BBC for 21 years, winning a reputation, in the words of Sir Alan Parker, as “the stand-out cinematographer”, having worked with many other star directors.
In 1975 Parker, a novice director at the time, worked with Tufano on The Evacuees, an episode of the BBC’S Play for Today series, which nabbed a Bafta and an Emmy. “What he taught me,” Parker recalled, “was that however little time there was, everything ... could be a little better if you didn’t settle for what was easy and obvious.”
Tufano’s first feature as a freelance was The Sailor’s Return (1978), with Jack Gold. During the 1980s he spent time in America, working on commercials and films such as Blade Runner (1982), directed by Ridley Scott.
Returning to England in the early 1990s, he became the leading cinematographer of the resurgent British cinema, his other credits including Danny Boyle’s A Life Less Ordinary (1997), Menhaj Huda’s debut Jump Boy (1999), his Kidulthood (2006) and Everywhere and Nowhere (2011), and Late Night Shopping (2001), a beautifully shot romantic comedy from the debutant director Saul Metzstein.
He also worked on short films and television series including the Baftanominated 1994 BBC adaptation of George Eliot’s Middlemarch.
From 2003 to 2016, Tufano was head of cinematography at the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield, fostering the careers of younger cinematographers.
Asked in 2001 by The Guardian for his 10 top tips for filmmaking, Tufano advised: “Start with the script... it all comes down to a good script. Maybe it’s a personal thing, but if the script grabs me then I want to be involved.”
In 2001 Tufano won the Bafta for Outstanding Contribution to Film and Television, and in 2002 the Special Jury Award at the British Independent Film Awards. In 2020 he was given a lifetime achievement award by the British Society of Cinematographers.
In 1964 he married Pamela Copeland, who survives him with a daughter.