This year’s field of ASC Award winners had a wide range–not just creatively and visually but also in terms of industry award pedigree. On one end of the spectrum, Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC, won his third career ASC Award for Feature Film Excellence, this time for Skyfall, the James Bond film directed by Sam Mendes. Deakins’ first two ASC Awards came for The Shawshank Redemption (1995) and The Man Who Wasn’t There (2002). He has a total of 11 ASC Award nominations over the years, the others coming for Fargo (1997), Kundun (1998), O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2001), No Country for Old Men (2008), The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2008), Revolutionary Road (2009), The Reader (2009) and True Grit (2011). Deakins was also the recipient of the ASC’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011.
By sharp contrast, the other ASC Award categories this month–all in television–were topped by first-time winners: Bradford Lipson took the Half Hour Episodic Series honor for the “Truth” episode of FX Show Wilfred; Florian Hoffmeister earned TV Movie/Miniseries distinction for the PBS Masterpiece presentation of Great Expectations; and two cinematographers, Balazs Bolygo, HSC, and Kramer Morgenthau, ASC, tied for first in the One-Hour Episodic TV Series category for, respectively, the “Mort” episode of Cinemax’s Hunted, and “The North Remembers” installment of HBO’s Game of Thrones. The category tie was the first in the history of the ASC Awards.
Hoffmeister and Bolygo were all first-time ASC nominees while Morgenthau now has a total of four career nominations.
All the category winners–except for Deakins–attended the ASC Awards ceremony in Hollywood. Deakins was in Atlanta at the time, shooting the feature Prisoners, directed by Denis Villeneuve and starring Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal and Viola Davis.
Meeting Expectations In their acceptance remarks, the first-time ASC Award winners were all gratified by the recognition from their peers. Hoffmeister’s win capped a memorable awards season. Last year, he won his first Outstanding Cinematography Emmy Award for Great Expectations (Part 2), a BBC/Masterpiece Theater co-production. That was his second Emmy nom, the first coming in 2010 for AMC’s The Prisoner.
For Hoffmeister, Great Expectations represented a coming together of his experience–which spans his work in British television with The Hamburg Cell and in the feature arena with the Terence Davies-directed film The Deep Blue Sea starring Rachel Weisz. During this past Emmy Awards season, Hoffmeister told SHOOT, “Working with Terence was revisiting the starting point of my career–putting me back in a concentrated filmic, artistic atmosphere. I later re-entered the grueling reality of TV production which has a completely different pace and pressure. Great Expectations married these two–television that has to be of feature film quality, epic in scale, yet done on a very tight schedule. The expectations were high for one of the classics of literature.”
Great Expectations was also the first drama Hoffmeister shot with the ARRI ALEXA. He previously had a favorable experience shooting a couple of commercials with the ARRI digital camera and that carried over to this ambitious BBC/Masterpiece project. “There’s an immediacy to the process that I enjoy,” said Hoffmeister of digital cinematography. “But I still think there is something magical about film and the discipline it requires from everyone involved.”
Hoffmeister is also no stranger to short-form fare. He shot short films for writer/director Tony Grisoni, with whom he collaborated on Kingsland–The Dreamer which copped a BAFTA nomination. Hoffmeister also got more heavily involved in commercials in 2009, beginning a two-year run which saw him lensing in the U.K. for such directors as Saam Farahmand, Kim Gehrig, Samantha Morton, Lynn Ramsay, Walter Stern and Daniel Wolfe. He also began to shoot stateside, including an Allstate job out of a52.
Upon garnering his first Emmy nomination for The Prisoner, Hoffmeister came out to L.A., meeting with his agent Claire Best & Associates, which happens to be in the same building as commercial production house Picrow (Pictures in a Row) founded by director Peter Lang. Claire Best knows Lang and introduced him to Hoffmeister. The two struck up a rapport, resulting in Hoffmeister coming aboard Picrow for representation as a commercial director.
While he’s open to gaining traction as a spot director, Hoffmeister values his work as a cinematographer in short and long form. “When you’ve done a feature,” he observed, “you enter commercials with a different openness. You have time to focus on all the details for a :30 during a two-day shoot, for instance. It’s almost like you can take the artistic sensibility of long form and dwell on the commercial because of time and resources. You can dwell on craftsmanship, explore and test the limits. Then when I return to long form, my craftsmanship is honed based on the commercialmaking experience. It’s great how one feeds the other.”
Game of Thrones In accepting the ASC Award, Morgenthau said he was grateful that Game of Thrones is a TV project that allows him to be cinematic in his work and approach. The fourth time proved to be the charm for Morgenthau in winning his initial ASC Award. His prior three ASC nominations were for The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2005), Life on Mars (2009) and Family Limitation (2011).
Like Hoffmeister, Morgenthau has an Emmy track record as well as experience in lensing commercials. On the latter score he has shot regularly for director Luis Gerard who is on the roster of Uber Content. As for his Emmy history, Morgenthau has been nominated five times, including twice in 2010–in the Outstanding Cinematography for a Single-Camera Series for the season one finale (“A Return to Normalcy” directed by Tim Van Patten) of Boardwalk Empire on HBO; and in the Outstanding Cinematography for a Miniseries or Movie based on the HBO film Too Big To Fail (directed by Curtis Hanson).
Morgenthau’s three previous Emmy noms came in 2005 for The Five People You Meet in Heaven, in ’09 for an episode of Life on Mars, and in ’10 for an episode of Flash Forward.
Beginnings First-time ASC Award nominee and winner Lipson began his career as a gaffer on such TV series as House, Without A Trace, The Office and Ugly Betty. His cinematography credits include the series The Forgotten, Ugly Betty, Factory, and of course Wilfred.
Fellow first-time nominee and winner Bolygo, a native of Hungary, started out in the U.K. as a clapper loader and then worked as a focus puller and operator. He has shot commercials, music videos, feature films and TV series. His cinematography credits include the series Doctor Who and MI-5 as well as his ASC Award-winning effort for Hunted.
Special recognition Outside the feature and TV competition categories, several special honors were presented during the ASC ceremony.
Dean Semler, ASC, ACS; Rodney Charters, ASC, CSC; Robby Muller, NSC, BVK; and Curtis Clark, ASC, were honored by their peers during the ASC proceedings. Semler received the 2012 ASC Lifetime Achievement Award. Muller was presented the International Achievement Award. Charters got the Career Achievement in Television Award. And Clark accepted the President’s Award for distinguished service to the ASC.
Angelina Jolie presented the Lifetime Achievement Award to Semler who shot her directorial debut, In the Land of Blood and Honey. Semler won an Oscar and an ASC Award in 1991 for his imagery in Dances With Wolves. In 2007, he earned a second ASC Award nomination for Apocalypto. Semler’s nearly 70 feature credits include Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Dead Calm, City Slickers, XXX, Waterworld and The Bone Collector.
