The dazzling light show that served as interplanetary communication in 1977’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” helped win both cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond and the film their only Oscar. Zsigmond was nominated three other times as well and won a lifetime achievement award from the ASC for a legendary career that has spanned decades and included multiple collaborations with such directors as Steven Spielberg, Robert Altman, Michael Cimino and Woody Allen. He’s the subject, along with his late friend, colleague and fellow Hungarian émigré Laszlo Kovacs, of “No Subtitles Necessary: Laszlo and Vilmos,” a documentary airing nationwide Tuesday on PBS’ “Independent Lens” and Thursday on KCET in Los Angeles.
Zsigmond spoke with Eric Estrin about Communist Party bosses and Hollywood studio chiefs and how he managed to develop his own unique vision despite them all.
I lived under Communism, under repression, a dictatorship, and everybody is fearing for their life because in the middle of the night somebody can knock on your door and take you away.
I went to work in a factory, and at one point I was complaining to the party secretary that I want to go to the university but they will not take me.
She looked at my file and said, "Oh, you are in big trouble. Your father is in Morocco, in the West; he could be a spy ... the only way for you to succeed is to try to show something good for the working class, so that we are feeling that you are part of the working class and you want to help them."
So I was thinking for months and months, "What can I do?" I was a sort of an amateur photographer; I liked to take pictures, so I went over there and said, "How about if I start actually a photography class for the workers and their family members?" And she loved the idea: "That’s great!"
So they set me up with a camera and a developing machine in a little laboratory. So in a year or two I became a hero, and they forgot about my upbringing, you know, my bourgeois parents.
And then they gave me the idea that why don’t they send me up to the film school in Budapest. So I said I didn’t know anything about cinematography. I love movies but I didn’t know how it’s made, but I fell into it.
We had to go through some terrible, hard testing to see if we had talent for cinematography. But I was lucky. From Szeged, where I was born, they had really about 200 applicants, but I was the only one that they took up there.
And then I became a cinematographer after four years of hard study and all that, and then came the Hungarian revolution in 1956, and we were on the streets taking movies, recording all the events. Of course the revolution was beaten down by the Russians in two weeks, and I had to flee from that because of my involvement in shooting the movies.
