‘We were the magicians’: cinematographer Phedon Papamichael on 40 years of filmmaking
Phedon Papamichael is sitting in a sparse hotel room in New York, huddled in a puffer jacket and glancing at the window as his fingers play with an unlit cigarette. He’s in town shooting A Complete Unknown, the highly anticipated Bob Dylan biopic starring Timothée Chalamet – and today, at least, he seems to be channelling its subject.
The film, he says, at the moment largely involves “travelling to every corner of New Jersey on a bus”. For Papamichael, king of the road movie, this is a very good thing.
Other than the buses, two things excite him especially about the project. It’s his seventh collaboration with director James Mangold, after the likes of Walk the Line, 3:10 to Yuma and Knight and Day. Plus, there’s the chance to immortalise on screen “a kid who wrote lyrics so incredible they could be dictated by God”.
A Complete Unknown is set in the early years of Dylan’s burgeoning stardom, as he travels from Minnesota to New York and finds a home in the folk community before alienating them by going electric. “It’s about a kid who leaves his family and makes a new family and leaves them,” says Papamichael. Himself a child of the 60s, he believes Dylan’s story will resonate with the socially activist youth of today. He’s concerned more widely about their prospects. His advice to budding cinematographers comes with a note of bruised resignation: “Don’t just set your sights on Hollywood.”
He elaborates: “I think the best days of cinematography are behind us, but interesting changes are happening.” The job will evolve alongside the tech: less travel, more adventures in digital. “Back then we went everywhere,” he says, mournfully. “We were the magicians.” If his cigarette was lit, this is the moment he’d blow a smoke ring.
Born in Athens to Greek parents in 1962, Papamichael moved to Germany as a child and grew up in Munich. Limited to three Bavarian television channels, he gorged himself on John Wayne movies and spaghetti westerns before exploring the cinema on his doorstep. “German movies were always a bit cringey,” he chuckles. “I was much more fascinated with the French. We would get on a train and go to Paris for a weekend just to sit in Gare du Nord and look at the Citroëns.” Films starring Jean-Luc Belmondo were his gateway to the French New Wave, but it was Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris that changed his life. “It is the film that made me,” Papamichael maintains.