Conrad Hall

One of the great cinematographers and a master of light, Conrad Hall had a long career during which he won Oscars for two films, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and, 30 years later, American Beauty (1999).

The director of the latter film, Sam Mendes, was extravagant in his praise of Hall's work and the contribution he made to the success of the film, Mendes's first. Hall photographed the second film directed by Mendes, the period gangster movie Road to Perdition (2002), produced by Richard Zanuck, who said, "With Road to Perdition, you could virtually take every frame of his work and blow it up and hang it over your fireplace. It was like Rembrandt at work." Other films enhanced by Hall's photography included Cool Hand Luke (1967), Electra Glide in Blue (1973), Day of the Locust (1975) and Tequila Sunrise (1988).

Born in Tahiti in 1926, Hall was the son of James Norman Hall, co-author of the books Mutiny on the Bounty and The Hurricane (both filmed more than once). He attended the University of Southern California with the intention of taking up journalism, but, after showing little aptitude in creative writing classes, he looked for another subject. Last year he told The Los Angeles Times that he did so by flipping through the university's course catalogue:

It started with A for astronomy, B for biology and C for cinema. I thought, "Cinema? You mean like movies? Rubbing shoulders with stars? Making all that money?" For all the wrong reasons, I signed up, and then had a love affair with the visual language and learned to tell stories like my dad.

One of Hall's teachers at USC was the Yugoslavian montage expert Slavko Vorkapich. After Hall's short film Sea Theme won first prize for photography in a USC amateur contest, he formed a small production company, Canyon Films, with some fellow students, and, after adapting a short story My Brother Down There into a screenplay, they raised money to make a movie version. Hall said:

When it came time to decide who would do what, we all wanted to be the director. We couldn't do it by committee, of course. So we thought about what other jobs would need to be done to make the movie: producer, editor, cinematographer. We wrote them all down and put them in a hat. I happened to draw "cinematographer" . . . Eventually I learned what a great opportunity it is to be able to tell a story visually. I've found that I can be a storyteller, like my father, by using visuals and not be in competition with him.

Canyon Films proved short-lived, and Hall then worked in several capacities in the industry, including photography, editing and production, contributing to commercials, industrial films and features, including providing 16mm footage for Disney's acclaimed "True-Life Adventure" The Living Desert (1953).

He was given his first screen credit as one of three photographers on a low-budget black-and-white thriller, Edge of Fury (1958), but he continued to serve as camera assistant and camera operator with such noted cinematographers as Ted McCord, Ernest Haller, Floyd Crosby and Hal Mohr. For Robert Surtees, he was camera operator on the 1962 version of Mutiny on the Bounty, starring Marlon Brando.

Also in 1962, he worked with Ted McCord on the television series Stoney Burke for the producer Leslie Stevens. Stevens admired Hall's work, and retained him to photograph episodes of the science- fiction series The Outer Limits (1963-65), after which Hall was the cinematographer on Stevens's feature film about the occult Incubus (1966). Starring William Shatner, it was notable for having its dialogue spoken entirely in Esperanto (a would-be universal language developed in 1887) and though considered stilted and pretentious at the time the film now has a cult following.

One of the first major films on which Hall received sole credit was Morituri (1965) starring Marlon Brando as an anti-Nazi German. Directed by Bernhard Wicki, a German director working for the first time in Hollywood, the black-and-white film was poorly received, with only the cast (Yul Brynner and Trevor Howard co-starred) and Hall's strikingly vivid camerawork winning praise. The film won Hall his first Oscar nomination.

Another black-and-white film lauded for Hall's photography was Richard Brooks's true crime story In Cold Blood (1967), based on Truman Capote's book about two psychopathic killers. "I started off my career in a sort of naturalistic style, as opposed to an operatic style," said Hall, "and I've refined that over the years to fit the stories."

Hall preferred to work in black-and-white, but by the mid-Sixties most of Hollywood's films were being made in colour, and Hall's work on Harper (1966), The Professionals (1966) and Cool Hand Luke displayed his mastery of the form. Disliking the artificial style of Hollywood lighting, he favoured a naturalistic or impressionist approach. His superb, dream-like rendering of the Old West in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid won him the Academy Award, and he also won the film's leading lady Katharine Ross, to whom he was married from 1969 to 1975.

Able to be selective in his assignments, he liked to work on projects about "moral and ethical dilemmas". "I look for stories about humanity," he said,

about choices a person has to make. I don't like thrillers. They're not made about the human condition. They exist to torture you. I'd rather do something like Day of the Locust about the losers who don't make it in film, but make their lives worthwhile by pretending.

After shooting Marathon Man (1976) Hall spent a decade running a production company making commercials with his fellow photographer Haskell Wexler, though he shot Bette Midler's concert scenes for The Rose (1979). He returned to feature-film making with the thriller Black Widow (1987), and subsequent films included Love Affair (1994) and A Civil Action (1998).

Hall was to receive nine Oscar nominations during his 50-year career (and may well receive another for Road to Perdition). He won his second award for his surreal evocation of the world of a dysfunctional family in American Beauty. "This was Sam Mendes's first film," he said,

but it never felt like his first film. He's actually a kind of control freak. I mean that in a good way. It's one thing to be directing. It's another to be directing and to have a vision and communicate that. Sam has vision. I helped contribute to that vision and to that wonderful screenplay.

The dream-like shot of cascading rose petals featured in the film has already become an iconic image of Nineties cinema, but Hall confessed to some initial trepidation with the project. "I kept asking Sam, 'How are we going to light these people? They're all so unlikeable.' " He was also perturbed to discover how much was cut from the film in its final editing. Though he came around to the final version ("When he showed it to me on the big screen, it was a revelation") Hall hoped that some of the cut material would be put back for the film's DVD release.

In 1994 Hall, whose son, Conrad W. Hall, took up the same profession and shot The Panic Room (2002), received a lifetime achievement award from the American Society of Cinematography. "Every film that he worked on was something beautiful to the eye, and very imaginative," said Zanuck. "Connie was not known for his speed, but neither was Rembrandt. He was known for incredible genius."

Tom Vallance