Dick Pope, who has died aged 77, was the cinematographer of choice for the director Mike Leigh. Their collaborations include Secrets and Lies (1996), which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival; Mr Turner (2014), a ravishing study of the last years of the life of the painter JMW Turner, played by Timothy Spall, for which Pope received one of his two Oscar nominations; and the forthcoming Hard Truths (2024), starring Marianne Jean-Baptiste as a lonely, fearful middle-aged woman raging against the world.
Leigh builds his films through six months of improvisations with actors before a camera ever enters the equation. “On a Mike Leigh film, there is no script,” Pope explained. “I don’t get to see what I’m going to be doing until I arrive on the first day.” When the actors finally unveil their long-gestating work on set, it is, he said, “the moment the film unfurls before our eyes”.
