Allen Daviau
American cinematographer (1942-2020)
John Allen Daviau (June 14, 1942 – April 15, 2020) was an American cinematographer known for his collaborations with Steven Spielberg on E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), The Color Purple (1985), and Empire of the Sun (1987). He received five Academy Award nominations and two British Academy Film Award nominations, with one win. In addition to his work in film, Daviau served as Cinematographer-in-Residence at UCLA.
Career
Daviau was born on June 14, 1942, in New Orleans, and raised in Los Angeles. He graduated from Loyola High School in 1960. He entered the profession shooting music videos in the years before MTV, among them films for the Animals and the Jimi Hendrix Experience.
He was introduced to Steven Spielberg in the late 1960s and the two went on to work together on two early short films. The first, Amblin' (1968), was Spielberg's first film shot on 35 mm, a 26-minute short carried by music and sound effects rather than dialogue; Spielberg later said the two had begun their careers side by side on it. They continued their professional working career by collaborating on E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982); "Kick the Can," a segment from Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), The Color Purple (1985), an episode of the NBC anthology series Amazing Stories titled "Ghost Train" (1985), and Empire of the Sun (1987).
Daviau's work also includes John Schlesinger's The Falcon and the Snowman (1985), the Spielberg-produced Harry and the Hendersons (1987), Albert Brooks' Defending Your Life (1991), Barry Levinson's Avalon (1990) and Bugsy (1991), Peter Weir's Fearless (1993), Frank Marshall's Congo (1995), Rand Ravich's The Astronaut's Wife (1999) and Stephen Sommers' Van Helsing (2004), his final feature. He also photographed the Gobi desert sequence for Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).
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