Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC
Biography

Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC was born and raised in Szeged, Hungary. He was barely in his teens when World War II ended, and communist politician backed by the military might of the Soviet Union, grabbed control of the country and cut it off from the West. Zsigmond was denied an opportunity to enroll in a state university to pursue a career in engineering because his parents were bourgeois. Instead, he was required to work in a rope manufacturing factory in Szeged.

Inspired by a book written by Eugene Dulovits, Zsigmond became a self-taught still photographer. That led him to an opportunity to study cinematography at the state film university. The year after he graduated, Zsigmond was working as a camera operator on a feature film in Hungary, when the populace spontaneously revolved against the communist regime in October 1956. Zsigmond and Laszlo Kovacs, ASC - who was a student at the film school -documented the revolt on 35 mm film. When the Russian army crushed the revolution, Zsigmond and Kovacs carried their film across the border into Austria so "the world could see the truth."

They made their way to the United States as political refugees the following year, and subsequently followed their dreams to Hollywood. It was a long and often discouraging journey. Zsigmond worked in still film labs and other odd jobs, while he gradually learned to speak the English language. He began shooting 16 mm film for UCLA students and eventually that led him to an opportunity to work on industrial films and documentaries for $2.50 an hour.

One of his first breakthroughs was an opportunity to work as a staff cinematographer on low budget commercials at Film Fair, a Los Angeles production company. During the mid-to-late 1960s, Zsigmond compiled a series of credits on ultra-low budget films with titles like The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies and The Nasty Rabbit. In 1971, Zsigmond shot The Hired Hand for a new director named Peter Fonda, and later that year he collaborated with Robert Altman on McCabe and Mrs. Miller. John Boorman recruited Zsigmond to work with him on Deliverance the following year, and he encored with Cinderella Liberty, The Long Goodbye and The Sugarland Express.

Twenty years after arriving in the United States, Zsigmond earned an Oscar for his work on Close Encounters of the Third Kind. There were other nominations for The Deer Hunter and The River. Zsigmond also collected an Emmy for Stalin, a TV miniseries filmed in Moscow and Hungary. His incomparable body of work also includes such classics as The Rose, The Last Waltz, The Witches of Eastwick, Sliver and The Ghost and the Darkness.

Zsigmond received the Camerimage Career Achievement award in 1997, and the American Society of Cinematographers Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999. His recent projects include Life Is A House and an artful rendering of a film version of Bank Ban, a classic Hungarian opera.