A Master of Subtle Function: Cinematographer Dick Pope (1947-2024)

The brilliance of Dick Pope, who died this week at 77, can be seen in nearly all of the movies he shot as a cinematographer. But the first examples that spring to this viewer’s mind are two shots from 1996’s “Secrets and Lies,” one of many collaborations with his greatest creative partner, Mike Leigh. 

The film is a bleakly funny domestic drama set in London, about a Black optometrist named Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) who was adopted as a baby and discovers that her birth mother Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn) is a white woman with a large, unruly, unhappy family. The first example of Pope’s brilliance is the scene where Hortense and Cynthia meet for the first time; the centerpiece is the mortifying silence as Cynthia runs through her memory to try to figure out which man fathered Hortense. The other is a scene from much later in the movie, when Hortense joins her birth mother’s family for a backyard barbecue, and things get more uncomfortable until finally, a succession of noisemakers pop off like a firing squad. 

The consensus on what constitutes good or great cinematography has been corrupted in the 21st century for reasons that are too complicated and slippery to get into here: suffice to say that when most people post images online of shots they personally think are amazing, it tends to be a landscape shot that’s pictorially very attractive in the manner of a postcard, or a shot full of digitally generated visual effects that have a screensaver vibe. Sometimes it’ll be a Stanley Kubrick-inspired (or just a Kubrick) image that’s rigidly symmetrical, with all the perspective lines converging dead-center in the frame. And before you ask: yes, of course, there are a lot of iconic images that fit these descriptions. 

But overall, this is a reductive cliche of the idea of what it means to say that a movie is “well shot.” Sometimes, the very best cinematography subordinates the visual—more specifically, the prettiness or showmanship—to the function of a scene. Pope was a master at that. 

I don’t know who was primarily responsible for the blocking of the scenes above – probably Leigh and his actors, as he works in close collaboration with them, to such an extent that he refers to his very long pre-production rehearsal periods as “growing a film.” But I think we can safely say that the framing and lighting and choice of how much of the frame to allow to be in focus (only the two main actors in the top image; everyone in the second image) fall under the purview of the cinematographer, who’s in charge of timing focus shifts, if there are any, doing quality control throughout, and modulating the tone of what we’re seeing (as opposed to directing the performers). There’s nothing pretty about these two scenes in “Secrets and Lies” because Leigh is not a filmmaker who wants things to be pretty (though his historical films, also shot by Pope, are gorgeous: see “Topsy-Turvy,” “Peterloo” and “Mr. Turner.”) 

But they are magnificent, in their relaxed, real-ish way. They give you information you need to understand the people in the story; notice, for instance, how Timothy Spall’s character, the long-suffering diplomat of the family who holds the squabbling clan together, roams from the deep background to the middle ground, tending to everyone like a waiter. And they let all of the actors, a total of seven in the second scene, have just enough room to do their thing and maneuver within the frame without stepping beyond (or even crowding) the frame line, without taking you out of the scene and making you think, “Gosh, they really did a great job of arranging those actors.” 

Pope did some of his best work without announcing his presence. That might explain why we don’t know as much about his life as we know about the lives of other veteran cinematographers of his generation, like Roger Deakins or Robert Richardson or Christopher Doyle. Having seen most (though not all) of the features he shot after 1990, when he did his first collaboration with Leigh, “Life is Sweet”—as well as his work with Richard Linklater (“Bernie,” “Me and Orson Welles”), Christopher McQuarrie (“Way of the Gun”), Beeban Kidron (“Swept from the Sea”), Edward Norton (“Motherless Brooklyn”), and Chiwetel Ejiofor (“The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind”). I don’t think Pope had a signature like the “white hot cones of light” that defined Richardson for about twenty years. Pope seemed like the cinematography version of a character actor, giving the performance that particular film needed.

Pope’s Wikipedia page says it all by not saying much. There’s barely anything on it, except for his filmography. It might as well be marked “still under construction.” (If you’re reading this several years from its publication date, hopefully there will be more information.) The only biographical facts in his Variety obituary are, “Pope was born in Bromley, Kent in 1947. His earliest work as a cinematographer came in documentaries with the series “World in Action.” He shifted to narrative television in the ’80s, leading to a BAFTA nomination for his work on ‘Porterhouse Blue.’”

Which leaves the work. 

The aesthetic through-line, I believe, was Pope’s evidently unassuming intelligence about how best to serve material. He seemed to have an instinct for doing as much as he could to help a movie, a scene, or a moment without seeming as if he was trying to inappropriately spice things up or wow the audience or dazzle in some superficial or obvious way. 

Look at his historical movies for Leigh, as well as his work on “Nicolas Nickleby” (helmed by Douglas McGrath) and his Oscar-nominated work on Neil Burger’s “The Illusionist.” They avoid empty pictorialism or Hollywood slickness. Beauty emerges from frames in a seemingly organic way. You could say they have some relationship to pre-photography oil paintings, but they’re not the kinds of gigantic paintings hanging on a massive wall in a museum–more like the smaller kind that show bowls of fruit, or people sitting in chairs staring straight ahead. The eye is directed to important details in the image without our feeling as if we’re being grabbed by the scruff of our necks and pointed in a certain direction. 

“Mr. Turner,” Leigh’s film about painter J.M.W. Turner, got him multiple awards nominations and wins (including best cinematography at Cannes), but here, too, what jumps out is how he avoids empty replication or imitation of Turner’s style. “It was less reproducing the work, more evoking the spirit of what he was looking at, of what he was seeing, of what inspired him,” Pope said during a New York Film Festival discussion of “Mr. Turner.” “There’s a lot of it where we’re looking through his eyes, over his shoulder.”

Leigh said in an interview about his final collaboration with Pope – “Hard Truths,” which reunited them both with Jean-Baptiste – that the cinematographer had undergone heart surgery prior to the production. His death is a tremendous blow to Leigh personally and artistically, and to audiences who maybe didn’t realize they were seeing something special whenever Dick Pope worked his magic because he was so subtle about it.