1. Vilmos Zsigmond is best known for his work on the films Close Encounters of the Third Kind and The Deer Hunter.
21 Facts About Vilmos Zsigmond
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Vilmos Zsigmond won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography for his work on Close Encounters of the Third Kind as well as the BAFTA Award for Best Cinematography for The Deer Hunter.
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Vilmos Zsigmond won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Cinematography for a Miniseries or a Special for the HBO miniseries Stalin.
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In 2003, Zsigmond was voted as one of the ten most influential cinematographers in history by the members of the International Cinematographers Guild.
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Vilmos Zsigmond became interested in photography at age 17 after an uncle had given him The Art of Light, a book of black-and-white photographs taken by Hungarian photographer Eugene Dulovits, but under the Soviet-imposed government of the Hungarian People's Republic he was not allowed to study the subject because his family was considered bourgeois.
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Vilmos Zsigmond worked for five years in a Budapest feature film studio becoming director of photography.
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In 1962, Vilmos Zsigmond became a naturalized citizen of the United States.
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Vilmos Zsigmond settled in Los Angeles and worked in photo labs as a technician and photographer.
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Some films that he worked on during this period credited him as "William Vilmos Zsigmond", including The Sadist, the classic horror B movie The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, and the Second City satirical science fiction movie The Monitors.
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In 1978, Vilmos Zsigmond worked on Michael Cimino's drama The Deer Hunter, starring Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep and Christopher Walken.
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Vilmos Zsigmond again worked with Cimino on his 1980 epic Western Heaven's Gate.
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Vilmos Zsigmond continued to be in demand in the years that followed, working multiple times with several directors.
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Vilmos Zsigmond again worked with De Palma on his films Blow Out, The Bonfire of the Vanities, and The Black Dahlia.
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Vilmos Zsigmond worked with Mark Rydell on Cinderella Liberty, The Rose, The River, and Intersection.
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Vilmos Zsigmond worked with George Miller on The Witches of Eastwick and with Kevin Smith on Jersey Girl.
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Vilmos Zsigmond worked with Woody Allen on Melinda and Melinda, Cassandra's Dream, and You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger.
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Vilmos Zsigmond was nominated for an Emmy for his work on 2001 miniseries The Mists of Avalon.
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Vilmos Zsigmond shot 24 episodes of The Mindy Project between 2012 and 2014.
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In 2011 Vilmos Zsigmond co-founded the Global Cinematography Institute in Los Angeles, along with fellow cinematographer Yuri Neyman.
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Vilmos Zsigmond was a longtime user and endorser of Tiffen filters, and is associated with the technique known as flashing or pre-fogging, which involves carefully exposing the film negative to a small, controlled amount of light in order to create a muted color palette.
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On January 1,2016, Vilmos Zsigmond died at his home in Big Sur, California, at the age of 85.