“The closest that I can think of to what I do visually is what a symphony does. It’s really like music—it has different movements.”
A five-time Oscar nominee, Caleb Deschanel was part of a group of young American filmmakers who came of age during Hollywood’s creative renaissance of the 1970s, inspired by the avant-garde work of French New Wave directors such as Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. Going to the University of Southern California in 1967 to study film and then later to the American Film Institute, Deschanel befriended two film students at nearby UCLA: Francis Ford Coppola and Carroll Ballard. With Coppola executive producing and Ballard directing, Deschanel shot The Black Stallion (1979), one of cinema’s greatest family films and which earned him a Best Cinematography award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. Deschanel’s gorgeous, quietly observant shooting style—inspired in part by his earlier work shooting education films—was later incorporated into the muted comedy of Being There (Hal Ashby, 1979), the docu-drama realism of The Right Stuff (Philip Kaufman, 1983), and the mythic wonder of The Natural (Barry Levinson, 1984). He has shown an ability to work on both large-scale action movies, such as National Treasure (Jon Turteltaub, 2004), and intimate love stories such as Message in a Bottle (Luis Mandoki, 1999), but one of the consistent hallmarks of his work is an emphasis on stories with inspirational or humanistic themes. A director of both film and television, Deschanel won the ASC award for The Patriot (Roland Emmerich, 2000) and in 2010 was honored with the organization’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
