“A cinematographer has to design and write a story, starting at the beginning, through the evolution to the end. That’s why I consider my profession is as a writer of light.”
Vittorio Storaro was born in 1940 in Rome where his father was a projectionist at Lux Film, and at the age of 11, on his father’s urging, he began studying at the Istituto Tecnico Fotografico “Duca D’Aosta.” He gained a diploma as a master of photography and from the age of 16 to 18 studied at the Italian Cinematographic Training Centre before being accepted into the two-year cinematography course at the state film school Centro Sperimentale di Cinemotagrafia in 1958. At the age of 20 he became an assistant to cinematographer Aldo Scavarda. Marco Scarpelli made him the youngest Italian camera operator at age 21, but a lull in production in Italy slowed his career down before he returned to work as assistant cameraman in 1963 on Bernardo Bertolucci’s directorial debut Before the Revolution (1964).
He used the long gap in his young professional life to study all the arts. He took his first cinematography credit in 1969 on Giovinezza, giovinezza directed by Franco Rossi. In 1969, Storaro was hired as cinematographer on Bertolucci’s The Spider’s Stratagem (1970), which began a long collaboration between the two that continued with the seminal The Conformist (1970) and six further films: Last Tango in Paris (1972), 1900 (1976), La Luna (1979), The Last Emperor (1987), The Sheltering Sky (1990), and Little Buddha (1993). He developed other close director relationships and shot the mammoth Apocalypse Now for Francis Ford Coppola in 1978, as well as One from the Heart in 1982, Tucker: The Man and His Dream in 1988, and a segment of New York Stories in 1989. He also worked three times with Warren Beatty—on Reds (1981), Dick Tracy (1990), and Bulworth (1998). Most recently, he has shot six films with Spanish director Carlos Saura beginning with Flamenco in 1995, Taxi (1996), Tango (1998), Goya in Bordeaux (1999), I, Don Giovanni (2009), and Flamenco, Flamenco (2010). He won Oscars for Apocalypse Now, Reds, and The Last Emperor.
