The cinematographer Harris Savides, who has died of brain cancer aged 55, brought an evocative aesthetic to films made by some of the world's most adventurous directors. His goal was to capture what he called a "heightened reality" through a visual style that was understated to the point of being subliminal: "I don't think you can ever make a movie that looks amazing when you're trying to make it look amazing," he said.
Savides shot six features for Gus van Sant and collaborated with David Fincher, Sofia Coppola and Noah Baumbach. While directors frequently turned to him for a visual style redolent of 1970s American and European auteur cinema, Savides was at the forefront of digital experimentation. He shot Fincher's Zodiac (2007), the fastidiously detailed story of the real-life hunt for a serial killer in San Francisco in the 1960s, entirely on the HD Viper camera. going to great lengths to give the movie an authentic period texture.
Born in New York and raised there in the Bronx, Savides studied film and still photography at the city's School of Visual Arts. He became a fashion photographer before moving into commercials and music videos for REM (Everybody Hurts), Madonna (Rain and Bedtime Story) and Nine Inch Nails (Closer). His first break in film-making came from the softcore producer Zalman King, who hired him to photograph Lake Consequence (1993) only three months after Savides's first commercials. He went on to shoot Heaven's Prisoners (1996), starring Alec Baldwin, after doing some second unit work on Fincher's influential Seven (1995). Fincher then appointed him as director of photography on the playful thriller The Game (1997).
Savides became known for his trademark technique of lighting the space in which he was working, rather than individual actors: "That's a mantra for me. When I approach a scene, I light the space, and in doing that, I hopefully light the people enough to make it work and also keep it real."
If this style posed problems amid the multi-camera frenzy of a big-budget project such as Ridley Scott's American Gangster (2007), it could be seen to ravishing effect in the more intimate, painterly settings of James Gray's The Yards (1999) or Jonathan Glazer's Birth (2004), starring Nicole Kidman as a woman confronted with a child claiming to be the reincarnation of her late husband. In Birth, the muted colours of the opulent Upper West Side setting in New York conveyed a cloistered world that was polite but bloodless – a perfect backdrop for the story's messy, unruly emotions.
By that time, Savides had begun his most fruitful partnership with Van Sant, who hired him to shoot the sentimental drama Finding Forrester (2000) and retained his services for a trilogy of films that embraced the avant garde, most obviously in their use of long takes. The trilogy began with the minimalist Gerry (2002), which followed two friends (Matt Damon and Casey Affleck), both named Gerry, as they become lost on a desert hike. "After working through Gerry," said Savides, "I felt like I understood film-making for the first time. In working so simply, I gained a confidence that I never had before."
In Van Sant's Palme d'Or-winning Elephant (2003), which drew on the Columbine shootings of four years earlier, Savides used a gliding Steadicam to follow the students through school corridors in extended, dreamlike sequences. The apparently floating camera was inhibited by shooting in the classical 4:3 aspect ratio, which restricts the image to a screen squarer than has become usual. The most experimental film in the trilogy, Last Days (2005), imagined the life of a rock star (based on Kurt Cobain) through scenes as meandering and inscrutable as they were luminously photographed.
Savides shot two more movies for Van Sant: Milk (2008), a biopic of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to public office in America, and Restless (2011). He also photographed Woody Allen's Whatever Works (2009) and Coppola's Somewhere (2010), as well as two films for Baumbach: Margot at the Wedding (2007) and Greenberg (2010). He was consulted by the director Andrew Stanton, who wanted to bring live-action photographic techniques to his Pixar animated feature WALL-E (2008).
It was announced in 2010 that Savides would shoot the adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer's 9/11-themed novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, but illness forced him to pull out. At the time of his death, he had recently finished work on Coppola's The Bling Ring, starring Emma Watson as one of a group of teenagers who break into the homes of celebrities.
Savides is survived by his wife, Medine, whom he married in 1983, and their daughter, Sophie.