It’s not often we ever get to watch documentaries that profile cinematographers. They are an important part of cinema, obviously enough, and they are monumental artists in their own right. Masters of light and shadow. But when it comes to cinema profiles and filmmaking docs, they’re usually about directors, writers, actors, sometimes even producers, and other craftspeople. Finally we have a doc about a cinematographer and it’s a good one. Robert Richardson: The White Devil is a documentary made by Czech filmmaker / cinematographer Jana Hojdova and it premiered at the 2026 Karlovy Vary Film Festival. Jana explained in the intro that she has been coming to the fest since she was a teenager it’s a dream come true to premiere this film at KVIFF. The entire reason this doc exists is because one day Jana sent an email trying to get in touch with American cinematographer Robert Richardson for a masters thesis she was working on while studying at the University of Prague. The only other reason this doc exists is because when she went out to meet him, they both ended up stuck together inside his house on Cape Cod in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. She spent the next 3 months digging through his archives and interviewing him while they both had nothing else to do in 2020. The result is this fascinating film that any & every cinema geek must watch.
Directed by fellow cinematographer Jana Hojdova, Robert Richardson: The White Devil is a doc about Bob Richardson – not only his life as a cinematographer, but also his family life at home (he has 5 children from 4 different women). It’s a surprisingly rough & tumble, brutally honest, no BS portrait of this artist’s life and all the good and bad of the industry and everything that goes into cinema and making amazing movies. It’s also a bit rough around the edges, with a disjointed narrative bouncing around to various parts of his world, overstuffed with photos & archival footage & home videos galore. Whenever he brings up some part of his life during work on a project, the film jumps back in time to exam his childhood, his parents, his troubled brother, his time as a dad, to connect it with he cinematography work on screen. Ultimately it seems to be another case of the tortured artist theory. Richardson is a brilliant DP, but he’s also had one helluva tough life. There’s an especially dark & intriguing dichotomy in this doc showing how much his personal life is a disaster yet his cinematography work is extraordinary. He admits that he’s not a great dad and never spent enough time with his kids. He also admit he gets really depressed if he’s not working on another movie right away. Jana is only lucky that she had time to catch him and dig into his personality when he wasn’t working.
Some of the questions I want answered in a doc about any distinct artist is: why are they so amazing? What is it that makes them so special? How did they get so good at what they do? Too many biopics ignore this or can’t even answer it. The White Devil sort of gives us an answer for Richardson: LSD and tinnitus. And a driven focus on doing the work. During his youth he had a few mind-expanding experiences on acid, which accentuated his appreciation of light and shadow. In addition, he had tinnitus since he was born and that overwhelmed his hearing so vision became his priority. Later on he honed his skills working in perfect sync with Oliver Stone during their early years, each expressing their creativity and artistry on each new project. Richardson has won 3 Oscars so far: for Best Cinematography in JFK, The Aviator, and Hugo. Though he’s had plenty of other nominations over the years as well. He’s best know for working with Oliver Stone, from Salvador & Platoon all the way to Natural Born Killers, Nixon, U-Turn, before they broke up (which he does explain in this doc). Then he started working with Martin Scorsese & Quentin Tarantino and others, and the rest is history. He’s still out there making new movies all the time and, like many masterful filmmakers, cannot stop working. His entire life is making movies and that’s both a burden & a joy. I’m glad this film covers so much of the nitty-gritty of his life, it’s just sad how tumultuous so much of it has been…
One aspect of this film that I appreciate is how it depicts the evolution of his career and his personality. He was ambitious and wild and crazy at the start. By the end, where he’s at now, he admits that he just wants to do his best to capture the vision of whatever the director wants. It’s no longer his vision, he’s just doing the work to make it look good. Early on he was in perfect sync with Oliver Stone, because he was as creative and ingenious with his ideas of how to shoot & what to shoot as Stone was. He even storyboarded his own shots to help him plan and develop his ideas. That changed when he began working with Scorsese, who didn’t care about his notes or his storyboards, and pushed him to shoot everything exactly the way he envisioned in his mind. By the time he was working with Tarantino, he’d kind of resigned to just letting the director make the creative choices. But this also mirrored the struggles he went through in his own life, not only with his first wife Monona and their kids. But also with other emotions like his mother’s death (which he literally filmed) and brother’s death, which really took the wind out of him. At this point he was an entirely different person. He never admits this and never says it directly in any interview, but it’s evident in all this footage and in the way Jana edits it together and captures his progression & changes over time and throughout his film career.
It’s refreshing to see a biopic doc that isn’t a polished, cleaned up, PR-approved streaming presentation to make the subject look good and gracious and wholesome. Richardson is a masterful cinematographer but his personal life is chaotic and he won’t deny it. This is a profoundly intimate, especially unique, captivating doc that allows us to see him for who he really is. It’s amusing that so much of his home footage is so unpolished as well, but that’s because it isn’t his work, it’s as chaotic as his home life. Thank you to Bob & Jana both for allowing us, the audience, to join along in this experience and to spend time with “The White Devil” himself.
Alex’s KVIFF 2026 Rating: 8 out of 10
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