Harris Savides, one of America’s most respected cinematographers, who helped directors like Woody Allen, Ridley Scott, Noah Baumbach, Sofia Coppola, David Fincher and especially Gus Van Sant achieve the visual expressivity they sought, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 55.
Franco Biciocchi/Focus Features
The cinematographer Harris Savides with Sofia Coppola on the set of the film “Somewhere,” directed by Ms. Coppola.
The cause was brain cancer, said his wife, Medine.
A onetime fashion photographer who later shot music videos for the likes of Madonna and Michael Jackson, Mr. Savides began working in feature films in the mid-1990s. He soon took a turn toward the subtle, sublimating the visual flash of runway shows and rock ’n’ roll to serve the sensibility of auteur directors. Known as a lighting expert and someone with a gift for talking and listening to directors, he became one of Hollywood’s most sought-after collaborators.
“He was a complete rule-breaker,” said Scott Rudin, who produced two of Mr. Savides’s films with Mr. Baumbach: the discomforting relationship dramas “Margot at the Wedding,” with Nicole Kidman and Jack Black, and “Greenberg,” which starred Ben Stiller and Greta Gerwig. “He’d light anything to make a scene work, never paid attention to conventional wisdom and did not know from self-doubt.”
From the shadowy, noirish affects of Mr. Fincher’s 1997 thriller “The Game” to the languid naturalism of Mr. Van Sant’s “Elephant,” a 2003 treatment of a Columbine-like tragedy; from the bleached-out Los Angeles of Ms. Coppola’s alienated movie-star study“Somewhere” (2010), to the same city’s suffocating, smoggy greenery in “Greenberg” (2010); from the muted colors of Harlem in Mr. Scott’s violent “American Gangster”(2007) to the burnished Greenwich Village in Mr. Allen’s “Whatever Works” (2009), Mr. Savides helped directors achieve their imaginings — and underscore their essential character.
“He made the films totally what they should have been,” Mr. Baumbach said in an interview Thursday. “We would sit together and I’d talk about how I imagined the movie looking and feeling In ‘Margot,’ I said I wanted a feeling of being indoors in a house with a lot of windows when you’ve been inside for a while and the sun has gone down and you realize you’re sitting in a dark room. It wasn’t necessarily a scene in the movie, just a feeling for the movie. And he’d go off and do tests, and when I looked at the tests, it was as though the feeling had been translated into pictures.”
The only child of immigrants from Cyrpus, Mr. Savides (pronounced suh-VEE-dis) was born on Sept. 28, 1957, in Manhattan and grew up in the Bronx. His father, Savas, was a short-order cook; his mother, Eleni, did clerical work for a publisher. Young Harris attended public and private schools in New York and a military academy in Virginia — his high school career was “checkered,” his wife said — and studied at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan.
Mr. Savides met Mr. Van Sant in the mid-1990s, when they made a Levi’s commercial together. Mr. Van Sant said in an interview on Thursday that he had been struck by Mr. Savides’s willingness “to think along with me” and to help him confound the expectations of moviegoers.
Their collaboration was especially effective in three narratively experimental films —“Gerry” (2002), about two friends on a desert hike, with Matt Damon and Casey Affleck; “Elephant”; and “Last Days,” inspired by the death of the rocker Kurt Cobain — as well as in “Milk” (2008), which starred Sean Penn as Harvey Milk, the gay activist who was assassinated in San Francisco in 1978.
Mr. Van Sant said that Mr. Savides had eschewed a strong visual style of his own, though he had preferences: “He liked the blacks to be not fully black, to have a milky, filmy quality, and he liked the light part of an image not to be fully blown out, not just gone complete white, so if someone was wearing a white dress in a window, there would still be details in the dress. He would say the word ‘creamy.’ He liked a creamy image. Otherwise there was no way to tell whether it was Harris.”
In addition to his wife, the former Medine Chenet, whom he met at a Manhattan dance club in 1979 and married in 1983, Mr. Savides is survived by their daughter, Sophie.
His other credits include James Gray’s “The Yards,” a 1999 crime drama set in the rail yards of Queens; “Birth” (2004), Jonathan Glazer’s eerie reincarnation mystery; “Zodiac,”Mr. Fincher’s 2007 crime drama; and “The Bling Ring,” Ms. Coppola’s latest film, which has not yet been released.
Mr. Savides often said that as he got older he grew less interested in effects that drew attention to the photography in a film and away from the narrative.
“I’m always wary of the fact of making things too beautiful and too photographic,” he said to the online magazine Cine-Fils in 2009, adding, “Some of the most beautiful movies I’ve seen haven’t been very good.”
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