“You have to be driven, but you also have to listen, and getting that balance right is what makes you good or not so good, or good on the film and not so good on the film.”
Born in 1940, Chris Menges is the son of composer and conductor Hubert Menges. He began his career in the 1960s as a camera operator for TV documentaries for directors such as Adrian Cowell and John Irvin, moving on to features such as Ken Loach’s Poor Cow (1968) and Lindsay Anderson’s If… (1968). His first film as a cinematographer was Loach’s Kes in 1969 and he shot Stephen Frears’ first feature Gumshoe in 1971.
He continued to work with Loach on Black Jack (1979), The Gamekeeper (1980), Looks and Smiles (1981), Fatherland (1986) and the more recent Route Irish (2010). He also continued with Frears on Bloody Kids (1979), Walter (1982), Walter and June (1986), and Dirty Pretty Things (2002). He is perhaps most famous for his two films with Roland Joffé—The Killing Fields (1984), and The Mission (1986)—which each won him an Oscar.
His distinguished career has also seen collaborations with Neil Jordan on Angel (1982), Michael Collins (1996), and The Good Thief (2002); Bill Forsyth on Local Hero (1983) and Comfort and Joy (1984); Jim Sheridan on The Boxer (1997); Sean Penn on The Pledge (2001); Tommy Lee Jones on The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005); and Stephen Daldry on The Reader (2008), and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2012).
Menges is also an accomplished filmmaker in his own right, and his first film, A World Apart, won an acting prize in competition at Cannes in 1988. He also directed CrissCross with Goldie Hawn in 1992, Second Best with William Hurt in 1994, and The Lost Son with Daniel Auteuil in 1999.
