“When I look through the camera, I feel as if I am the first person seeing the movie. Now, of course, a director can see a video monitor, but I still feel I am seeing the film for the first time when I look through the camera.”
Peter Suschitzky was born in 1941, the son of famed UK cinematographer and photographer Wolfgang Suschitzky whose credits include Entertaining Mr Sloane (1970), and Get Carter (1971). The younger Suschitzky attended IDEC in Paris at the age of 18 but left the cinematography course after a year to return to London where he became a loader at one of the UK’s first commercial studios. From there he moved to become an assistant cameraman on TV documentaries and then, at the age of 21, moved to Latin America where he became lead cameraman on a series of documentaries.
Having seen some of Suschitzky’s still photographs, taken while in Latin America, Kevin Brownlow recruited him to be the cinematographer on his ultra-low-budget feature It Happened Here (1965). From there, his career moved fast and he shot Peter Watkins’ Privilege (1967), Albert Finney’s directorial debut Charlie Bubbles (1967), and Peter Hall’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1968). Throughout the 1970s, he worked with renowned directors such as Joseph Losey (Figures in a Landscape), John Boorman (Leo the Last), Jacques Demy (The Pied Piper), and twice with Ken Russell (Lisztomania, and Valentino). He also shot the legendary musical The Rocky Horror Picture Show in 1975 and the box office blockbuster and now classic The Empire Strikes Back (1980).
He worked on both sides of the Atlantic in the next two decades, including some high-profile Hollywood titles such as Ulu Grosbard’s Falling in Love, George Sluizer’s remake of The Vanishing (1993), Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! (1996), and Randall Wallace’s star-studded The Man in the Iron Mask (1998). But he found his groove as David Cronenberg’s cinematographer when he stepped in for Mark Irwin during the pre-production of Dead Ringers in 1988. The two have made nine films together since then: Naked Lunch (1991), M. Butterfly (1991), Crash (1996), eXistenZ (1999), Spider (2002), A History Of Violence (2005), Eastern Promises (2007), A Dangerous Method (2011), and the forthcoming Cosmopolis (2012). His son Adam is also a cinematographer, marking the third generation of Suschitzkys behind the camera.
