Dick Pope obituary

Dick Pope, who has died aged 77, was the cinematographer of choice for the director Mike Leigh. Their collaborations include Secrets and Lies (1996), which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival; Mr Turner (2014), a ravishing study of the last years of the life of the painter JMW Turner, played by Timothy Spall, for which Pope received one of his two Oscar nominations; and the forthcoming Hard Truths (2024), starring Marianne Jean-Baptiste as a lonely, fearful middle-aged woman raging against the world.

Leigh builds his films through six months of improvisations with actors before a camera ever enters the equation. “On a Mike Leigh film, there is no script,” Pope explained. “I don’t get to see what I’m going to be doing until I arrive on the first day.” When the actors finally unveil their long-gestating work on set, it is, he said, “the moment the film unfurls before our eyes”.

Their long and harmonious partnership, however, did not get off to the most auspicious start. Pope, who had previously shot documentaries, concert films, music videos (Kylie Minogue, Queen, Erasure) and highly stylised features such as Philip Saville’s The Fruit Machine (1988) and Philip Ridley’s The Reflecting Skin, was crestfallen when he arrived at the nondescript terrace house in Enfield, north London, where much of Life Is Sweet (also 1990), his first film with Leigh, was to take place.

“I died a death when I saw it,” he said. “A living room and a stairs, a bit of a kitchen, bedroom at the top and a patio, and that was the film.”

While Leigh was busy with the cast, Pope made the mistake of overcomplicating an introductory shot. “I set something up, feeling pleased with myself, and Mike joined me and tore it to pieces, questioning why the camera was cutting to certain shots, and from whose point of view,” he recalled.

The two men strolled around, discussed the shot at length and arrived eventually at a simpler solution that was, said Pope, “almost proscenium arch. I felt I had been on a therapy session, but he was testing me out.”

Their next film, Naked (1993), was a picaresque odyssey with an apocalyptic tone. Pope shot the film using the bleach bypass process, which produces a grainy, steely look. In doing so, he harked back deliberately to the mood of the video he had shot in 1981 for the Specials’ menacing No 1 single Ghost Town, directed by Barney Bubbles.

Naked was an audacious departure both visually and thematically from Leigh’s previous work. This was evident from the opening scene – a rushing, handheld, dimly lit rendering of a sexual assault in an alleyway – to the astonishing final Steadicam shot more than two hours later, the camera backing away along an east London residential street and gradually outpacing the scowling, shuffling antihero Johnny (David Thewlis) as he lopes down the middle of the road in a manner redolent of Richard III.

Career Girls (1997) was unusual among Leigh’s films for featuring flashbacks, with Pope bringing distinctive hues to the story’s interlocking timelines showing two university friends then and now. For Leigh’s first period feature, Topsy-Turvy (1999), which reconstructed the circumstances surrounding the making of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, Pope consulted the Savoy theatre’s original lighting plots from 1885.

The look that he brought to the theatre interiors was sumptuous yet also crisp, and made him especially sought after for other films in theatrical settings, such as Neil Burger’s The Illusionist (2006), a visually luminous yarn about a magician in turn-of-the-century Vienna, for which Pope received his first Oscar nomination, and Me and Orson Welles (2008), one of two pictures he shot for Richard Linklater. (The other was Bernie, starring Matthew McConaughey and Jack Black, in 2011.)

After Topsy-Turvy, it was back to modern-day London for Leigh’s All Or Nothing (2002), shooting on a housing estate earmarked for imminent demolition, then the same city in the postwar period for Vera Drake (2004), starring Imelda Staunton as an unassuming domestic who secretly performs abortions. The mood was brighter on Happy-Go-Lucky (2008), for which Pope at last convinced Leigh to embrace the widescreen format. Without the broader canvas, the film’s ebullient protagonist, a teacher played by Sally Hawkins, might well have burst out of the frame.

Leigh and Pope stuck to widescreen for the contemplative Another Year (2010), which cycles through four seasons in the life of a married couple (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen) and their demanding friend, played by Lesley Manville.

Mr Turner was a visual tour de force. “We tried to apply Turner’s own colours to the film, paying homage to his work and subtly evoking the period he lived in without self-consciously trying to copy the paintings themselves,” said Pope. It was the first of Leigh’s pictures to be shot digitally, and CGI was even used here and there. “Turner was progressive,” Pope reasoned. “Mike and I felt that he would choose digital.”

For Leigh’s Peterloo (2018), about the 1819 Manchester massacre, Pope employed drones during one scene, though not for the harrowing climax, where the perspective stayed at eye-level. Multiple cameras were used for that sequence, which was influenced equally by Akira Kurosawa, the illustrator George Cruikshank and news footage from the mid-1980s of police on horseback on the attack during the miners’ strike.

Born in Bromley, Kent, he was the son of Bernard Pope, also known as Dick, a shipping agent, and Nancy (Agnes, nee Campbell), and was educated at Charterhouse Road secondary school in Orpington.

Noticing his interest in photography, an uncle with a background at the BBC nudged Pope in the direction of becoming a documentary cameraman. His own hopes of working at the BBC, however, were scotched when it became apparent the corporation was hiring only graduates. He followed the one path available to him, undertaking a traineeship at the Pathé film lab in Soho, from which he emerged in 1968 with a union card and an understanding of a wide range of disciplines including negative printing and cutting.

He assisted on documentaries, worked as an animation camera operator and was a clapper loader on the comedy What’s Good for the Goose (1969), with Norman Wisdom.

Pope forged an important relationship with the cameraman Mike Whittaker, who hired him as his assistant in places as far afield as Australian and South Africa. When Whittaker declined a job working on Granada Television’s Disappearing World series in 1973, he recommended Pope, who happily set off to an island in the middle of the Pacific. Working on World in Action in the second half of the 70s, he covered subjects as diverse as child labour in Hong Kong and dangerous conditions at King’s College hospital, London.

He was also a camera operator on A Bigger Splash (1973), Jack Hazan’s innovative pseudo-documentary about the artist David Hockney, and later on Hazan’s Rude Boy (1980), which applied the same hybrid technique to the subject of the rock band the Clash. Pope’s first cinematography credit was on the romantic comedy The Girl in the Picture (1985). He was nominated for a Bafta for the television series Porterhouse Blue (1987), based on Tom Sharpe’s comic novel about a fictional Cambridge college.

Away from Leigh, his films included The Way of the Gun (2000), directed by Christopher McQuarrie, who nicknamed Pope “the Pontiff”; John Sayles’s Honeydripper (2007), set in 50s Alabama; Gurinder Chadha’s 2008 comedy Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging; Legend (2015), starring Tom Hardy as both Kray twins; and an adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s noir novel Motherless Brooklyn (2019), directed by its star, Edward Norton.

Crucial to Pope was the “motivated” light source – that is, light that has a logical, even natural origin, rather than a contrived one. “It’s my documentary background at work, where I learned the difference between quietly observing a situation and trying to re-stage [it] – which always separated the honest and believable from the hokey and fabricated.”

Though his 35-year collaboration with Leigh produced images that were eloquent and even on occasion magical, Pope was keen wherever possible to demystify their working process. “Basically, we make it up as we go along, and that’s how we do it,” he said.

He and his wife Pat met at a gig in Shepherd’s Bush in 1969 and married in 1972. She survives him, along with their son, Mark, daughter, Molly, and two grandsons, Liam and Felix.

• Dick (Richard Campbell) Pope, cinematographer, born 3 August 1947; died 21 October 2024