Andrew Lesnie: Cinema loses its ‘master of light’

Two words are repeated in recollections of cinematographer ­Andrew Lesnie’s extraordinary life: laughter and gentlemanly.

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Two words are repeated in recollections of cinematographer ­Andrew Lesnie’s extraordinary life: laughter and gentlemanly.

The Academy Award-winning cinematographer of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, BAFTA and AFI Award winner and inductee to the Australian Cinematographers Society died on Monday after a heart attack.

His sudden death shocked the Australian film and television industry, and reverberated globally. Our acclaimed cinematographers have a reputation for being tough as ­mallee bulls, with many still working into their 70s. Lesnie was a loved and respected peer, and one would have expected him to have a long career.

He is one of six Australian cinematographers to win an Academy Award yet he was very much a singular lensman.

“He was rare in that you could look at a film and say, yes, that’s one of Andrew’s,” says Bill Bennett, the director who worked with Lesnie on Spider and Rose and Two If by Sea.

The Sydneysider became known as a singular talent early in his career. His first brief job after graduating from the Australian Film, Television and Radio School was as an ABC camera assistant before an 18-month stint as a cameraman on the hit children’s afternoon show Simon Townsend’s Wonder World .

There, he was able to push boundaries for broadcast TV while picking up freelance jobs on short films, music videos ­(including for INXS, the Angels, UB40 and Mental as Anything) and, most important, TV commercials.

He learned fast in advertising, with its many formats, styles and imperatives, developing an extraordinary range of technical skills that he would not have attained so quickly in TV or film drama alone.

After finding favour shooting behind-the-scenes footage on ­George Miller’s Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, Lesnie worked through the 1980s on miniseries (The Rainbow Warrior Conspiracy, Melba and Cyclone Tracy), documentaries (Inside Pine Gap and The Comeback, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger) and short films.

After Lesnie displayed his skill on Clara Law’s 1993 feature Temptation of a Monk, for which he was named Australian cinematographer of the year, production company Kennedy Miller, which saw him work alongside fellow cinematographer Dean Semler on the 1984 miniseries Bodyline, hired him to shoot Babe for director Chris Noonan.

The charming film earned a best picture Academy Award nomination, in part for Lesnie’s lush cinematography that painted the southern highlands of NSW as a rustic fantasy filled with ­talking animals.

Hollywood called and he went with Bennett to film the romantic comedy Two If by Sea starring ­Sandra Bullock. He asked his Aussie peer John Seale for advice. Seale told him to ask the studio for three times more equipment than he needed. When he asked why, Seale said: “They’ll cut whatever you ask for by two-thirds, so then you’ll still get what you want.”

Lesnie learned the lesson. While his on-set affability and ability to get what he wanted from even the prickliest talent would become one of his professional ­advantages, he was also known for his ability to play the Hollywood studios.

He certainly proved his mettle. New Zealander Peter Jackson recruited him for what would become an eight-film partnership across 17 years that earned $US6.49 billion in cinemas alone. The technical and budgetary requirements were immense.

The money didn’t seem to matter to Lesnie; for him, it was all about telling stories with images.

He proudly told colleagues after his first Oscar nomination that he’d found a lovely jacket to wear to the ceremony — “from Vinnies”.

Lesnie matched Jackson’s cinephile knowledge and technical ability. Throughout the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies, Lesnie brought the fantasy alive beautifully and believably. He mastered complex in-camera perspectives early in the series to capture hob­bits set against giants; and melded grand landscape vistas with digital magic. In The Hobbit, Lesnie continued to push ahead technically, using the revolutionary 48 frames per second format.

Jackson says Lesnie became like a brother to him, “someone I could intrinsically love and trust” and “an irreplaceable part of my family”.

Jackson and Lesnie shared a low-budget, can-do sensibility that was always about the storytelling. Directors recall Lesnie’s unique talent for getting quality images quickly.

“I’ve never seen a cinematographer work so fast with a team to capture such great images,” says John Winter, producer of Doing Time for Patsy Cline. Many can work fast to get “coverage”, or enough shots, but Lesnie was unique in the quality of what he produced.

Simon Harding, camera operator on King Kong and The Hobbit series, says Lesnie “wouldn’t waste anybody’s time going any further”.

He “didn’t have any pretence about him” by demanding the ­latest, most expensive equipment or bigger budgets. He would ­embrace anything that fulfilled his requirements, such as the off-the-shelf handicam he used to film the Coldplay music video Sky Full of Stars on the streets of Newtown in Sydney.

“You wouldn’t have found a technical gap in his knowledge,” says Harding.

It helped that people wanted to work for and with him. Jackson recalls his “infectious laugh”, “quiet wisdom” and “generous praise”.

Ian McKellen recalls: “He always had time for a laugh and a hug of encouragement.”

A young cinematographer who benefited from his encouragement was Meg White, 27, who assisted Lesnie on what would be his last film, The Water Diviner.

Like many, she recalls his gentlemanly demeanour and says he was “giving of all his knowledge”.

“As a young cinematographer it was great knowing there was someone of his stature you could go to,” she says, recounting one recent phone call about one quick question “and 30 minutes later he was talking about the retention of shadow details on a grade”.

Ron Johanson, president of the Australian Cinematographers Society, says Lesnie will leave “a huge void” in such mentoring. “He was such an infectious character who delivered the goods.”

The goods were always distinct. Russell Crowe described him as the “master of light” and his Australian films displayed that, capturing the verdant beauty of the east in Babe, Australia’s stark interior in Doing Time for Patsy Cline and Spider and Rose and the intense reds and blues of northwest Western Australia in Bran Nue Dae.

And no matter the circumstance, Lesnie brought lightness to the screen and to the set. “The thing you remember about Andrew was the laugh,” Bennett says.

“He had this chuckle that went on and on. He was just the most delightful person to work with.”

Lesnie suffered a heart condition late last year from which most thought he had recovered. He is survived by his wife and three sons, who have requested their names not be published.

Andrew Lesnie. Cinematographer. Born Sydney, January 1, 1956. Died Sydney, April 27, aged 59.