Vittorio Storaro

Vittorio Storaro, A.S.C., A.I.C. (born 24 June 1940), is an Italian cinematographer, widely recognized as one of the best and most influential in cinema history.

Over the course of 50 years, he has collaborated with directors like Bernardo Bertolucci, Francis Ford Coppola, Warren Beatty, Woody Allen, and Carlos Saura.

Storaro is one of three living people to have won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography three times, a position he shares with Robert Richardson and Emmanuel Lubezki.

Early life and education

Born in Rome, Storaro is the son of a film projectionist.

He began studying photography at the age of 11, and at the age of 18, he went on to formal cinematography studies at the national Italian film school, Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia.

Career Storaro's philosophy is largely inspired by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's theory of colors, which focuses in part on the psychological effects that different colors have and the way in which colors influence our perceptions of different situations.

He first worked with Bernardo Bertolucci on The Conformist (1970). He then worked on Dario Argento's first directorial feature The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), which is considered a landmark in the giallo genre.

With Francis Ford Coppola, Storaro made his American film debut with Apocalypse Now (1979), which earned him his first Academy Award for Best Cinematography.

Storaro went to win two more Academy Awards in the 1980s, one with Warren Beatty's Reds (1981) and one for Bertolucci's The Last Emperor (1987).

In 2002, Storaro completed the first in a series of books that articulate his philosophy of cinematography.

He was the cinematographer for a BBC co-production with Italian broadcaster RAI of Verdi's Rigoletto over two nights on the weekend of 4 and 5 September 2010.

Though working primarily with film cameras, Woody Allen's feature Café Society (2016) was Storaro's first project to be shot digitally.

In 2017, Storaro was honored with the George Eastman Award. The same year he also attended the New York Film Festival at which he debated with Edward Lachman on cinematography and its transition from film to digital.

With his son Fabrizio, he created the Univisium format system to unify all future theatrical and television movies into one respective aspect ratio of 2.00:1. As of 2023, this unification has not happened, and the universal replacement of 4:3 televisions by large, wide-screen displays greatly reduces the need to modify scope-ratio films for home theater presentation.

Personal life Storaro is known for stylish, fastidious, and flamboyant personal fashion. Francis Ford Coppola once noted, "Vittorio is the only man I ever knew that could fall off a ladder in a white suit, into the mud, and not get dirty."

Filmography

Feature film

Documentary film Year Title Director 1994 Roma imago urbis Luigi Bazzoni 1995 FlamencoCarlos Saura 2010 Flamenco Flamenco

Television Year Title Director 1971 Eneide Franco Rossi

Miniseries Year Title Director Notes 1974 Orlando Furioso Luca Ronconi With Arturo Zavattini 1983 Wagner Tony Palmer 1986 Peter the Great Marvin J. ChomskyLawrence Schiller 2000 Frank Herbert's Dune John Harrison 2007 Caravaggio Angelo Longoni

TV movies Year Title Director Notes1992 Tosca: In the Settings and at the Times of Tosca Brian Large Writing with Light: Vittorio Storaro David M. Thompson Documentary film 2000 La traviataPierre Cavassilas 2010 Rigoletto a Mantova

Awards and nominations