The esteemed Australian cinematographer, who died from a sudden heart attack on Monday at the age of 59, will be remembered as one of the artists who rendered the miraculous and otherworldly an integral part of popular culture, whether the subject was a talking piglet who had ambitions to serve as a sheepdog, a continent-shaking battle in the realm of Middle Earth, or a triumphant musical number on a Broome beach.
There was very little that Lesnie didn’t give drama and structure, depth and intent to in a career that started in children’s television 35 years ago after graduating from the Australian Film Television and Radio School and would end up including two Middle Earth trilogies with New Zealand filmmaker Peter Jackson, The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, both Babe hits, and numerous other prominent titles at home and abroad.
A rumpled, greying man, whose capacity for joy as he worked in often demanding circumstances was a universal element of the memories shared by those who knew him in the hours and days after his unexpected loss, Lesnie was the eye that framed and filtered the modern blockbuster. His shots, composed with his directors, helped ensure that even as the movies got bigger and the role of digital effects grew ever more central, the human element was never entirely forsaken. It was Lesnie who helped offset the anonymous hard drives.
Lesnie’s final feature was Russell Crowe’s directorial debut, Boxing Day’s The Water Diviner, and the actor rightly called the cinematographer “the master of the light” in a grieving tweet. The sun literally shone in Lesnie’s work and the world depicted on screen often felt familiar and often welcoming even though the extraordinary was unfolding. When the furious primates break free from the testing facility in 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes, they rampage across San Francisco busting out their brethren from a zoo, and the everyday and the amazing are one and the same.
There was a time – a matter of entire decades – when the notion of making J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings into a movie was considered a folly, a task that could only lead to failure. It took Peter Jackson, his New Zealand production house WETA and Lesnie three films to master the adaptation, but the result is a landmark blockbuster series that was often defined by the latter’s touch.
Lesnie won an Academy Award in 2002 for Best Cinematography for the first instalment, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, and he helped to make seamless a vast and varied production that readily intermingled live action footage, traditional miniatures, digital effects, and the groundbreaking motion capture performance of Andy Serkis as the bedeviled Gollum. All three films have a grounding physicality that’s of immeasurable benefit.
What punctuates the sometimes grand scale of all of Lesnie’s collaborations with Jackson (there were eight in total, including The Lovely Bones and King Kong) was the intimacy of character moments and close-ups. The Lord of the Rings is as much about the grim acceptance of Elijah Wood’s Frodo and the pensive unease of Ian McKellen’s Gandalf, or the glistening malevolence of the Ring itself, as it is spectacle of massed battles such as Helm’s Deep.
“He was a master of the new technologies that climaxed with the 3D Hobbit movies but his artistry was as personal and inspired as a painter in oils, magically capturing light and spreading it over landscapes wild and domestic and across the actors’ faces too,” McKellen said in a statement released after Lesnie’s passing. “If you liked the look of Middle-earth know that it couldn’t have been as it was without Andrew’s special expertise.
There is a scene in Francis Lawrence’s science-fiction adventure I Am Legend, where Will Smith, as a lone survivor in a New York emptied by disease and filled with nightmarish creatures, must euthanise his sole companion, his dog Sam, after the animal becomes infected. It’s lit by the glow of laboratory lights but begins down low, beneath the virologist’s equipment, drawing closer to Smith’s Robert Neville as he cradles the bloodied canine. It’s the most powerful acting Smith has ever delivered, and Lesnie isn’t simply tight on Smith’s face, he captures the strain in his neck muscles and the mortal despair in the character’s bloodshot eyes.
Lesnie’s body of work is full of such defining moments, and if he’s gone too soon then his work will endure for a long, long time. On Sunday, the day before Lesnie died, I happened to watch The Fellowship of the Ring with my nine-year-old son, who was as wide-eyed and rapt as he’d been at the age of five, when we first watched Babe. My son had no idea who Andrew Lesnie was, or the director of photography’s unique task, but he loved what he was seeing. A cinematographer can rest happily with that.
