“I really think the lighting is the most important element in the movies. Without good lighting, I don’t think there’s good cinematography.”
One of the most influential cinematographers in the medium, Vilmos Zsigmond was born in Hungary in 1930. He studied cinema at the Academy of Drama and Film in Budapest, received an MA in cinematography in 1955, and then worked as assistant cameraman, operator, and director of photography at Hunnia Film Studio. During the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, he and his friend László Kovács were among the cameramen chronicling the dramatic events in Budapest, smuggling the footage out of the country and into Austria.
Zsigmond and Kovács moved to the US and settled in Los Angeles, where Zsigmond found work in photo labs as a technician and photographer. During the 1960s, using the name William Zsigmond, he shot a number of low-budget cult horror movies including The Sadist (1963), The Nasty Rabbit (1964), and The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies (1964).
On the advice of Peter Fonda, his director on The Hired Hand (1971), he returned to his original name and throughout the 1970s shot some of the most significant films of the era: McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), Images (1972), and The Long Goodbye (1973) for Robert Altman, Deliverance (1972) for John Boorman, Scarecrow (1973) for Jerry Schatzberg, and Steven Spielberg’s first feature The Sugarland Express (1974).
The 1970s also saw him win an Oscar for Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), begin long collaborations with Brian De Palma and Mark Rydell, and shoot two seminal masterpieces with Michael Cimino—The Deer Hunter (1978) and Heaven’s Gate (1980).
He has worked at the highest level since, alongside directors including Richard Donner, Phillip Noyce, Sean Penn, Kevin Smith, and Woody Allen, for whom he shot Melinda and Melinda, Cassandra’s Dream, and You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger.
