It is with deepest sadness that we learn of the passing of Roger Pratt BSC (1947-2024).
Roger Pratt BSC was an extraordinary cinematographer, who was awarded this society’s highest honour, our Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023. Roger was born in Leicester, the son of a parish vicar, and although the church didn’t capture his career aspirations, seeing 16mm “fact and faith” films did.
“I was mesmerised by the annual showing of religious films in the church, at times like Christmas and especially Lent. A box full of rolls of film, projectors, screens, loudspeakers. The lights go out, the whirring of mechanics…then real people talking, moving, laughing, and dying (I mention dying because they were about Christ and his crucifixion)”.
Pratt’s first job in film was working at Chippenham Films and it was here, as a clapper loader, he met Terry Gilliam for the first time. Gilliam recalls “We were filming the Bridge of Death sequence and needed a dramatic shot looking up at the bridge with the mountains in the distance. I stuck the camera on the edge of the cliff, but the lens wasn’t wide enough. We were a long way from the road, the light was going. It was terrible. This guy said, ‘Just give me a moment’ and in a few minutes, while we were still faffing around, he had run all the way down the mountain, forded the river, run up the other side, into the camera truck, grabbed the right lens and here it was. We stuck it on the camera and got the shot. That was the moment I fell in love with Roger.”
Roger would go on to shoot some of Gilliam’s cult classics, from Brazil (1985) to The Fisher King (1991) and 12 Monkeys (1995). In addition to working with Gilliam he also shot four films for Richard Attenborough, including Shadowlands (1993) which won the BAFTA for Best British Film.
For superhero fans he held a special place working alongside director Tim Burton to create the look of Batman (1989) that would launch many of the superhero franchises we have today.
Our thoughts go out to his family at this time.
You can read our visionary piece with Roger here.
