Gilbert Taylor

Gilbert Taylor, B.S.C. (12 April 1914 – 23 August 2013), sometimes credited as Gil Taylor, was an English cinematographer. He had notable collaborations with directors Stanley Kubrick, Roman Polanski, Richard Lester, J. Lee Thompson, and the Boulting brothers, as well as George Lucas on the original Star Wars.

He was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Cinematography twice, for Repulsion (1965) and Cul-de-sac (1966), both directed by Polanski. A founding member of the British Society of Cinematographers, Taylor received the Society's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001. As a teenager, he studied architecture before deciding to pursue a career in film. While his father disapproved of the film industry, populated he thought by "harridans, whores and gypsies", it was his mother who consented to their son's altered career plans.

A neighbour offered Taylor, aged 15, a job as a camera assistant to William Shenton, a cinematographer working for Gainsborough Studios at their Islington base. In 1929, Taylor worked on the studio's final two silent films. He then worked at Elstree for British International Pictures, where he was clapper loader on the Alfred Hitchcock film Number Seventeen (1932). Despite his junior status, formally a second camera assistant, Taylor was entrusted with some of the special effects work, including the use of mattes, to disguise the roofs of poorly maintained buildings. Taylor recalled: "This was requested by Winston Churchill, and my material was delivered to 10 Downing Street for him to view. He was keen for the public to see what our lads were doing. I did 10 of those operations, including raids on Cologne and Dresden".

Career After demobilisation, he worked for Two Cities Films. In Fame Is the Spur (1947), he worked on a dream sequence using deep focus. The Boulting brothers were the co-producers of the film and they placed Taylor under contract. For the Boultings, Taylor, now promoted to full cinematographer, or director of photography, shot The Guinea Pig (US, The Outsider, 1948), Seven Days to Noon (1950) and High Treason (1951). From this point, Taylor began to use bounced and reflected light gaining a more naturalistic look, whereas the use of direct light was still the common practice by his contemporaries.

He commented later: "Strangelove was at the time a unique experience because the lighting was to be incorporated in the sets, with little or no other light used". Concerning the war room set designed by Ken Adam: "Lighting that set was sheer magic, and I don’t quite know how I got away with it all". He continued: "Much of it was the same formula based on the overheads as fill and blasting in the key on faces from the side". Although Kubrick and Taylor had a rapport, he found the director to be autocratic. An easier project to work on was the Richard Lester film with The Beatles which was heavily improvised.

With Lester, Chris Pizzello wrote in 2003, Taylor "adopted a roving, multiple-camera technique (aided by new, versatile 10:1 zoom lenses) so that the Beatles could move about freely and not worry about technicalities like hitting marks. This fast, fresh brand of filmmaking was a perfect fit for the film’s tiny budget, tight schedule and simple black-and-white aesthetic". Taylor and five other operators on the film used hand-held Arriflex cameras. "The key is not to hold the camera completely still", he once commented "but to let it 'breathe' with you, to move with it". According to Polanski in his 1984 autobiography, Repulsions executive producer Michael Klinger "protested that Gil Taylor was one of the most expensive cameramen in the business, but I held out for Taylor and I got him".

Later work in colour Hitchcock requested Taylor work on his penultimate film Frenzy (1972). Despite a claim in Bergan's obituary of the cinematographer that Hitchcock was unaware the two men had worked together forty years earlier, according to Taylor they had stayed in touch. Differences of opinion between the director and cinematographer led to 20th Century Fox, for whom Taylor had shot The Omen, intervening to retain him on the picture.

Taylor was a founder member of the British Society of Cinematographers, receiving their lifetime achievement award in 2001.

Filmography Film

Television Director Year Title Notes 1969 Department S Episode "The Man from X"

Cinematographer Year Title Notes 1965 The Man in a Looking Glass TV movie, combination of episodes of The Baron series 1966-67 The Baron 13 episodes 1966-69 The Avengers 8 episodes 1969 Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) Episode "My Late Lamented Friend and Partner" 1972-73 Pathfinders 4 episodes 1973 The New-Fangled Wandering Minstrel Show TV special 1978 Breaking Up TV movie

Awards and nominations