Jessica chastain

Wilde salomé
I start an international career as a cinematographer.
Benoît Delhomme is a French film cinematographer who has also worked in American and British films.

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Is there a painter or a pictorial style that has influenced your work throughout your career?

I am a cinematographer so I have to be able to let myself be influenced by a large number of styles and art work. This is a big part of the pleasure I still have to make films. I have some easiness to immerse myself in a new style and experiment to find new textures of lighting for a film. I have no recipe. I hate to have to redo things I have done in the past. I treat every film as a prototype. I always start a film saying that I don’t know how to do it and the film is there to prove that I finally found a solution. Obviously, I own a lot of art books, they are my safest friends. I prefer to look at a book of paintings of Rembrandt than looking at a film that tries to light like Rembrandt.

Which film of the past has impressed you most in terms of cinematography in your artistic training?

Years before film school, the first time I tried to remember the name of a cinematographer was after watching Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven. Nestor Almendros. Then during film school, I remem

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Benoit was born in Nanterre in the west suburb of Paris in 1961 and spent his childhood in Cherbourg, in Normandy. He started to study cinema in 1980 at the Paris Sorbonne University and at the Ecole Louis Lumiere where he specialized in cinematography mentored by Robert Bresson's favorite camera operator.

Benoit's early breakthrough as a director of photography came with the movie he shot for the Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung « The Scent of Green Papaya », a poetic recreation of the 1950's Saigon entirely shot on stage in Paris. The film won the Camera d'Or Award in Cannes Film Festival and an Academy Award nomination for best foreign film. Following that success, Benoit re-teamed with the same director for «Cyclo »,a violent tale of contemporary Vietnam all shot in the busy streets of Ho Chi Minh City and was awarded a Golden Lion in Venice Film Festival by president of the jury Abbas Kiorastami.

Since then Benoit established himself as a very international cinematographer. He loves nothing more than jumping from one universe to another.

« The Loss o

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Benoit Delhomme cinematographer and painter

The 1960’s. I spend the first ten years of my life in Sarcelles, a northern suburb of Paris built in emergency to give dwellings to thousands of French expatriates fleeing Algeria at the end of the Algerian war and to populations from West and Equatorial Africa as France finally declared the real end of its main colonies in 1960. Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Ivory Coast, Dahomey, Sudan, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, Togo, Chad, Congo, Gabon, Cameroon: the mix of north African and black African worlds living in Sarcelles makes the strongest impression on the child I am. I visit my first exhibition: Alexander Calder at the Maeght Foundation in St Paul de Vence with my parents.

The 1970’s. My father who has finished his surgeon’s studies moves our family to Cherbourg, Normandy where our life seems to go back to the middle of the 1950’s era. A world of doctors and naval officers. I am discouraged by the way art is taught in French education and feel completely inhibited to draw or paint both at school