The cinematographer Roger Pratt, who has died aged 77, rendered some of cinema’s most spectacular fantasy worlds. His films included Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002) and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005) but his finest work involved bringing to the screen two vivid and nightmarish dystopias in the 1980s.
In Brazil (1985), which went by the working title of 1984½ and concerned an office drone (Jonathan Pryce) whose dreams of heroism plunge him into conflict with authority, Pratt helped to realise the retro-futuristic vision of a film that its director Terry Gilliam imagined taking place “everywhere in the 20th century, on the Los Angeles/Belfast border”.
Just as the picture’s production design combined dingy wartime living rooms and bulbous, intestinal heating pipes with late-20th century gadgets and grotesque plastic surgery, so the cinematography thrived on its own strange bedfellows.
“Roger used colours from expressionist paintings, mixing yellows and oranges with blues and greens in the lighting,” explained Gilliam. “You see a lot of mixing warm and cold colours today, but people weren’t doing that in the mid-80s; we took our cue from the way German expressionist painters put contrasting colours together so that they jarred.”
Four years later, Pratt was called on by Tim Burton for his ambitious reworking of Batman (1989) with Michael Keaton in the title role and Jack Nicholson as the Joker. The movie brought to the look of the superhero blockbuster an unprecedented air of menace and corrosion that persisted in the genre for decades.
As with Brazil, Pratt achieved a striking visual dissonance. He told the New York Times that he was “lighting it as if it were black and white but shooting in colour … in very low light while retaining bright effects. But the key is using sets of a single tone against which the Joker just pops out.”
It was a mark of his versatility that in between these projects he did eloquent work for Mike Leigh, whose visual style was the antithesis of Burton and Gilliam. While still at the London Film School, he had assisted on Leigh’s debut, Bleak Moments (1971), and it was to Pratt that the director turned when making High Hopes (1988), his second film for cinema, 17 years later. In between, they collaborated on the television film Meantime (1983), a scathing portrait of class conflict in Thatcher’s Britain featuring early performances from Gary Oldman and Tim Roth.
Pratt received his only Oscar nomination for Neil Jordan’s adaptation of The End of the Affair (2000), Graham Greene’s tormented, semi-autobiographical novel about love and faith in 1940s Britain. He had previously shot Jordan’s noir thriller Mona Lisa (1986), in which visual references to Taxi Driver (closeups of car headlamps on rain-slicked streets, faces floating in rear-view mirrors) were consistent with the narrative echoes of Scorsese’s film.
Asked why he thought The End of the Affair was singled out for Oscar recognition, Pratt said the subject “suits the way I like to photograph things … The mood of the piece was close to my own experience. I wasn’t born during the war, but I experienced a bit of its aftermath. Even in the 1950s, there was restraint in Britain in terms of luxury items … It manifested itself in silly things, like having only one lightbulb in the middle of each room, which is pretty depressing, and most houses being cold and badly painted.”
He recalled that “the most plentiful paint for home decoration was this terrible green hue … That’s really what governed the way we approached the film’s photography and production design.”
For exterior scenes, rain and smoke predominated. Pratt’s challenges included asking local councils to switch off their normal streetlights so that he could instead use illumination specific to the period.
The film’s star, Julianne Moore, told Pratt: “The lighting is so textured and emotional … I have never looked better in my life!”
He was born in Leicester, to Phyllis (nee Swift) and Francis, a vicar. Cinema first entered his life during screenings of religious films at his father’s parish church. Pratt described himself as “mesmerised” by the “box full of rolls of film, projectors, screens, loudspeakers”. His daughter May recalled that “he was fascinated by celluloid – seeing people come to life”.
He was educated at Loughborough grammar school, where he shot the silent Super 8 short Green and Dying, which he screened for a small fee to pupils and parents on open day, making a minor profit in the process. He spent his gap year with the VSO in Mali then attended Durham University.
After graduating from the London Film School, he worked at Humphries Film Laboratory, then at Chippenham Films, which produced corporate videos for members of the Monty Python comedy team. Working as clapper loader on the Arthurian spoof Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1974), he impressed Gilliam, who was co-directing the film with his fellow Python member Terry Jones.
Gilliam, who cast Pratt in a cameo part as Man Living in Barrel in his solo directing debut Jabberwocky (1977), hired him to shoot the short film The Crimson Permanent Assurance, about a group of rebellious elderly accountants who become Crimson Pirate-style buccaneers. Originally intended as a segment of the final Monty Python film, The Meaning of Life (1983), it outgrew its remit and was shown instead as an accompanying short on the picture’s theatrical run. (At one point, the characters from the short invade the main feature.)
Also for Gilliam, Pratt shot The Fisher King (1991) and was responsible for that movie’s most rhapsodic sequence, in which commuters dance together in Grand Central Station. Lighting that space was a challenge until Pratt decided to hang a mirror-ball above the concourse. “Suddenly the scene is lit like a disco, and I’ve got a thousand people waltzing and the lights are spinning everywhere,” said Gilliam. “It was utterly magical.”
They also teamed up on the fantasy thriller 12 Monkeys (1995), which starred Bruce Willis as a time traveller sent back to the present from a disease-ravaged future.
Among Pratt’s other work were four films with Richard Attenborough, including two about novelists: Shadowlands (1993), starring Anthony Hopkins as CS Lewis, and In Love and War (1996), with Chris O’Donnell as the young Ernest Hemingway.
He shot Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), starring Kenneth Branagh (who also directed) as the doctor and Robert De Niro as his creature; a plush adaptation of Joanne Harris’s novel Chocolat (2001), with Juliette Binoche; the Iris Murdoch biopic Iris (2002), with Judi Dench, Kate Winslet and Jim Broadbent; and the historical epic Troy (2004), starring Brad Pitt.
Pratt’s self-deprecating nature was noted by everyone who worked with him. “I don’t have anything original to say,” he insisted. His job, he explained, was simply “to make the impossible work”.
His last films included a 2010 remake of The Karate Kid. He retired after being diagnosed with young-onset familial Alzheimer’s, and expressed the wish that his brain be donated for research into the disease.
He is survived by his wife, Erica Phillips, a teacher, whom he married in 1979, and their children May, Tim and Lily, as well as by four grandchildren.
• Roger Pratt, cinematographer, born 27 February 1947; died 31 December 2024
