Robert McLachlan (cinematographer)

Early life and education

In his youth, McLachlan was an avid cyclist, accrediting this to the fact that his home town Vancouver was not cold enough for ponds to freeze over to play ice hockey on. During his teenage years, he trained upwards of six hours a day, and won several national championships in the sport. He qualified to represent Canada in the 1976 Summer Olympics, but the lack of funding for cycling in North America at the time would have necessitated him funding his own journey and leaving school to do so; McLachlan opted instead to remain in education and focus on his interest in photography.^[1]

McLachlan first became interested in cinematography after viewing the 1969 film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; Nicolas Roeg's work on the 1971 film Walkabout further cemented his interest in the field. McLachlan was also motivated by his father, who was an avid photographer.^[2] An early school assignment to create a Super 8 film project, for which he received an A grade, also proved a formative influence.^[3]

McLachlan studied fine art at the University of British Columbia for a year, before changing courses to attend classes at Simon Fraser University's film department. McLachlan's education focussed on the documentary style of John Grierson; however, when he began work in 1987, he was mentored by Richard Leiterman.^[2] McLachlan also cites influences outside the field of cinematography, drawing influence from the chiaroscuro, Dutch art and pre-Raphaelite movements of visual art, and the works of Andrew Wyeth and Georges de La Tour in particular.^[4]

Career

Having graduated, McLachlan and

Having worked on Millennium with director David Nutter, McLachlan was able to parley this connection into a role on the HBO fantasy series Game of Thrones. McLachlan has called working on the show's ten-person cinematography team "a major logistical challenge", noting the complexity of its out-of-sequence filming schedules as something unseen on a television series before.^[8] McLachlan has also worked on the programme Ray Donovan, and has based that series' cinematography on both film noir aesthetics and those of 1970s cinema, specifically citing The Long Goodbye, The Parallax View and All the President's Men, as well as the work of Gordon Willis.^[9]

Accolades

McLachlan has been nominated for, and won, several awards over the course of his career. He has been nominated four times for the

References

• McLean, James; Henriksen, Lance; Spotnitz, Frank; Carter, Chris (2012). Chamberlain, Adam; Dixon, Brian A. (eds.). Back to Frank Black. Fourth Horseman Press.
  ISBN 978-0988392298
  .

• Official website
• Robert McLachlan at
  IMDb