Phedon Papamichael

Phedon Papamichael was born in Athens in 1962, to a Greek father and a German mother. His father, also named Phedon Papamichael, was an artist and set designer who worked on films by the American director John Cassavetes. Because father and son share the same name, film databases often call the son Phedon Papamichael II or Jr. In a 2014 interview with Athens Voice he recalled that the family left Greece in 1966 and moved to Munich. There he later studied art and photography, finishing his degree in 1982.

In 1983 he moved to New York and worked as a photojournalist. He then settled in Los Angeles and, at the end of the 1980s, began working as director of photography on low-budget feature films. Over the following decades he photographed more than forty feature films. He also worked with the German director Wim Wenders on The Million Dollar Hotel (2000).

In 2014 he said that he had lived in California for about thirty years, but Greece has remained close to him. He keeps a home in Leonidio, a small town on the east coast of the Peloponnese, where his parents also lived, and he has said that he will one day settle there for good. He is a member of both the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) and the Greek Society of Cinematographers (GSC).

A cinematographer decides how a film looks: where the camera stands, how it moves, and how light falls on faces and places. Papamichael's name is linked above all with two American directors. With Alexander Payne he filmed Sideways (2004), The Descendants (2011), Nebraska (2013) and Downsizing (2017); with James Mangold, Walk the Line (2005), 3:10 to Yuma (2007), Ford v Ferrari (2019), Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) and A Complete Unknown (2024). He also worked with George Clooney on The Ides of March and The Monuments Men, and with Aaron Sorkin on The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020).

Nebraska, the story of an old man and his son on a road trip across the American Midwest, is filmed in black and white. It brought him his first Oscar nomination; The Trial of the Chicago 7 brought the second. He has said that Payne cares more about characters than about visual spectacle.

As a director he has turned to Greece. Arcadia Lost, an English-language film with Nick Nolte about two American teenagers lost in the Greek countryside, was shot around Leonidio and premiered in 2010. Light Falls (2023), which he directed, co-produced and photographed with Akis Konstantakopoulos, is a Georgian, Albanian and Greek coproduction. It follows a couple from Los Angeles and three young Albanian workers at an abandoned hotel; its dialogue mixes Greek, Georgian, English and Albanian.

Greek media follow his career closely: his Oscar nominations in 2014 and 2021 were reported as Greek news, and in 2014 he showed Instagram photographs in the group exhibition Ινσταντανέ (Instantané) at the Zoumboulakis gallery in Athens. For a learner, his work is a lesson in seeing rather than listening, because most of his films are in English. Try this: pause on one image from Nebraska or from Light Falls and describe it in simple Greek. Η εικόνα είναι ασπρόμαυρη (the image is black and white). Το φως είναι ζεστό (the light is warm). Είναι νύχτα (it is night). Βλέπω ένα σπίτι (I see a house). These are our own practice sentences, not lines from the films.

• In a 2021 interview he said he was proud to be the first Greek nominated for the Oscar for cinematography.
• Light Falls is set on a Greek island, but it was filmed in 2020, during the lockdown, in Anavyssos near Athens.
• Before cinema he worked as a photojournalist, and he still takes photographs as a hobby.
• He told Athens Voice «Δεν είμαι φαν των social media» (I am not a fan of social media), yet nine of his Instagram photographs were chosen for an Athens exhibition.