{"id":784263,"date":"2026-07-06T17:07:15","date_gmt":"2026-07-06T17:07:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/784263\/"},"modified":"2026-07-06T17:07:15","modified_gmt":"2026-07-06T17:07:15","slug":"robert-richardson-the-white-devil-review-a-candid-dp-portrait","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/784263\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Robert Richardson: The White Devil’ Review: A Candid DP Portrait"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tAmong the various talking heads in \u201cRobert Richardson<\/a>: The White Devil\u201d \u2014 a simultaneously awestruck and cheerfully confrontational documentary about the celebrated American cinematographer \u2014 are the three big dogs essential to any discussion of his work: Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and Oliver Stone, who all speak affectionately and perceptively about his artistry, and their respective individual experiences of working with him. Yet perhaps the most quotable observation in Czech director Jana Hojdov\u00e1\u2019s film comes from Kate Hudson, star of Shekhar Kapur\u2019s swashbuckler \u201cThe Four Feathers,\u201d one of Richardson\u2019s more forgotten assignments. \u201cI\u2019m sure you have to do a lot of psychedelics to see light the way he does,\u201d she says \u2014 a joke that we learn is funny because it\u2019s true.<\/p>\n

\n\tThough great directors of photography tend to be regarded in the industry with due reverence, they\u2019re rarely profiled with the depth or detail afforded equivalently accomplished directors; behind the camera is where they tend to stay. But with his gruff machismo, vaguely mystic demeanor and a mane of snowy hair that lends him the nickname referred to in the doc\u2019s title, Richardson is more closeup-ready than many of his professional peers: \u201cBob always had a fantasy of being a rock star, being a cinematographer was secondary,\u201d says his ex-wife Monona Wali, a statement backed up by his general swaggering presence (and, yes, acid-trip memories). He\u2019s an imposing documentary subject, then, and one admires both the initiative and the ambition of Hojdov\u00e1, who began this project as a recent cinematography graduate of Prague\u2019s FAMU film school, in taking him on.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat makes \u201cRobert Richardson: The White Devil<\/a>\u201d compelling, however, is that it\u2019s not a purely hat-in-hand work, breathlessly dedicated from student to master. Hojdov\u00e1\u2019s admiration for her subject is never in doubt, and the film sometimes makes a virtue of her na\u00efvet\u00e9, in life and in cinema, relative to his decades of experience. It endearingly begins, after all, with her fan letter, addressed to the American Society of Cinematographers, pleading for their help in connecting her with her professional idol; she\u2019s astonished when Richardson writes directly back to her, cuing an exchange of questions, answers and archival materials. <\/p>\n

\n\tBut with Hojdov\u00e1\u2019s greenness comes a kind of boldness: She\u2019s a direct and insistent interviewer, and he frequently chafes against her enquiries, particularly when the two wind up isolating together for months in his tranquil, modernist Cape Cod mansion during the 2020 COVID lockdown. Her documentary is partly a great-man portrait and partly a study of push-pull mentorship dynamics: It\u2019s generally flattering on the former front, but we also leave the film with some sense of the challenges he presents as a personality and as an artistic collaborator. He can be ornery, irritably bristling at the filmmaker\u2019s broader questions (\u201cWhat is life for you?\u201d she asks at one juncture), but he\u2019s never glib or unforthcoming: If he doesn\u2019t like a subject, he\u2019ll talk plainly and illuminatingly about why.<\/p>\n

\n\tHe doesn\u2019t shy, for example, from difficult personal matters, whether discussing his unhappy childhood in Cape Cod, his mother\u2019s negligence and alcoholism, his late brother\u2019s mental illness and substance abuse problems, and his own failings as a husband and father \u2014 to partners and children he saw increasingly infrequently when his Hollywood career took off in the mid-1980s. When he says, early on in proceedings, that he views his career as \u201ca study in how to escape,\u201d it initially sounds a romantic encapsulation of cinema\u2019s transporting power. Yet the more we learn about him, the more literal the sentiment appears: He approaches filmmaking, an art that first caught his interest via an Ingmar Bergman festival at college in Rhode Island, as a parallel and more perfect existence.<\/p>\n

\n\tScorsese, Tarantino and Stone all testify fondly to that perfectionism and the elaborate, idiocyncratic technical lengths he\u2019ll go to in pursuit of it \u2014 he loves crane shots, says Tarantino, \u201cbecause he can\u2019t share a crane with anybody\u201d \u2014 but their reflections aren\u2019t blandly adulatory. Stone speaks with some wistfulness about how their 11-year, 11-film partnership, spanning the director\u2019s prime period from \u201cPlatoon\u201d through to \u201cU-Turn,\u201d came to an end. Even Tarantino, unsurprisingly the most chatty and animated talking head here, turns a bit solemn when discussing his rift with Richardson between the \u201cKill Bill\u201d films and \u201cInglourious Basterds\u201d \u2014 the result of what the director describes as the DP\u2019s abusive treatment of his crew on the former project. <\/p>\n

\n\tOccasionally one wishes Hojdov\u00e1 and Richardson would geek out a little more over formal specifics \u2014 thoroughly accessible, \u201cThe White Devil\u201d largely discusses the work at hand in layman\u2019s terms \u2014 and that the film engaged more with his oeuvre outside the three directorial collaborations that form the spine of his career. (There\u2019s nothing, for example, on working with Robert Redford on \u201cThe Horse Whisperer,\u201d or indeed fellow actors-turned-directors Robert De Niro and Ben Affleck, though Andy Serkis, director of the Richardson-lensed \u201cBreathe\u201d and \u201cVenom: Let There Be Carnage,\u201d is an enthusiastic interviewee.) <\/p>\n

\n\tBut if the film is sometimes scrappy as docmaking, with too many unrelated film clips somewhat gauchely applied to personal recollections, it\u2019s unusually rewarding as personal portraiture \u2014 particularly as Richardson entrusts Hojdov\u00e1 with a remarkably raw archive of home movies, shot by the man himself with as much focus and intensity as his Hollywood assignments. In one wrenching passage, he keeps the camera on his elderly mother in her final moments and for some time after, not apologizing for viewing all of life through a lens. Colored by a palpable sense of filmmaker and subject building a friendship and a professional understanding in real time, this documentary\u2019s intimacy feels hard-won, and entirely genuine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Among the various talking heads in \u201cRobert Richardson: The White Devil\u201d \u2014 a simultaneously awestruck and cheerfully confrontational…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":784264,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,75,277448,259562,337,187753,271043],"class_list":["post-784263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-jana-hojdova","tag-karlovy-vary-film-festival","tag-movies","tag-robert-richardson","tag-robert-richardson-the-white-devil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/784263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=784263"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/784263\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/784264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=784263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=784263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=784263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}