‘Robert Richardson: The White Devil’ Review: Candid Documentary Turns the Camera on a Cinematography Legend

Among the various talking heads in “Robert Richardson: The White Devil” — a simultaneously awestruck and cheerfully confrontational documentary about the celebrated American cinematographer — are the three big dogs essential to any discussion of his work: Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and Oliver Stone, who all speak affectionately and perceptively about his artistry, and their respective individual experiences of working with him. Yet perhaps the most quotable observation in Czech director Jana Hojdová’s film comes from Kate Hudson, star of Shekhar Kapur’s swashbuckler “The Four Feathers,” one of Richardson’s more forgotten assignments. “I’m sure you have to do a lot of psychedelics to see light the way he does,” she says — a joke that we learn is funny because it’s true.

Though great directors of photography tend to be regarded in the industry with due reverence, they’re rarely profiled with the depth or detail afforded equivalently accomplished directors; behind the camera is where they tend to stay. But with his gruff machismo, vaguely mystic demeanor and a mane of snowy hair that lends him the nickname referred to in the doc’s title, Richardson is more closeup-ready than many of his professional peers: “Bob always had a fantasy of being a rock star, being a cinematographer was secondary,” says his ex-wife Monona Wali, a statement backed up by his general swaggering presence (and, yes, acid-trip memories). He’s an imposing documentary subject, then, and one admires both the initiative and the ambition of Hojdová, who began this project as a recent cinematography graduate of Prague’s FAMU film school, in taking him on.

What makes “Robert Richardson: The White Devil” compelling, however, is that it’s not a purely hat-in-hand work, breathlessly dedicated from student to master. Hojdová’s admiration for her subject is never in doubt, and the film sometimes makes a virtue of her naïveté, in life and in cinema, relative to his decades of experience. It endearingly begins, after all, with her fan letter, addressed to the American Society of Cinematographers, pleading for their help in connecting her with her professional idol; she’s astonished when Richardson writes directly back to her, cuing an exchange of questions, answers and archival materials.

But with Hojdová’s greenness comes a kind of boldness: She’s a direct and insistent interviewer, and he frequently chafes against her enquiries, particularly when the two wind up isolating together for months in his tranquil, modernist Cape Cod mansion during the 2020 COVID lockdown. Her documentary is partly a great-man portrait and partly a study of push-pull mentorship dynamics: It’s generally flattering on the former front, but we also leave the film with some sense of the challenges he presents as a personality and as an artistic collaborator. He can be ornery, irritably bristling at the filmmaker’s broader questions (“What is life for you?” she asks at one juncture), but he’s never glib or unforthcoming: If he doesn’t like a subject, he’ll talk plainly and illuminatingly about why.

He doesn’t shy, for example, from difficult personal matters, whether discussing his unhappy childhood in Cape Cod, his mother’s negligence and alcoholism, his late brother’s mental illness and substance abuse problems, and his own failings as a husband and father — to partners and children he saw increasingly infrequently when his Hollywood career took off in the mid-1980s. When he says, early on in proceedings, that he views his career as “a study in how to escape,” it initially sounds a romantic encapsulation of cinema’s transporting power. Yet the more we learn about him, the more literal the sentiment appears: He approaches filmmaking, an art that first caught his interest via an Ingmar Bergman festival at college in Rhode Island, as a parallel and more perfect existence.

Scorsese, Tarantino and Stone all testify fondly to that perfectionism and the elaborate, idiocyncratic technical lengths he’ll go to in pursuit of it — he loves crane shots, says Tarantino, “because he can’t share a crane with anybody” — but their reflections aren’t blandly adulatory. Stone speaks with some wistfulness about how their 11-year, 11-film partnership, spanning the director’s prime period from “Platoon” through to “U-Turn,” came to an end. Even Tarantino, unsurprisingly the most chatty and animated talking head here, turns a bit solemn when discussing his rift with Richardson between the “Kill Bill” films and “Inglourious Basterds” — the result of what the director describes as the DP’s abusive treatment of his crew on the former project.

Occasionally one wishes Hojdová and Richardson would geek out a little more over formal specifics — thoroughly accessible, “The White Devil” largely discusses the work at hand in layman’s terms — and that the film engaged more with his oeuvre outside the three directorial collaborations that form the spine of his career. (There’s nothing, for example, on working with Robert Redford on “The Horse Whisperer,” or indeed fellow actors-turned-directors Robert De Niro and Ben Affleck, though Andy Serkis, director of the Richardson-lensed “Breathe” and “Venom: Let There Be Carnage,” is an enthusiastic interviewee.)

But if the film is sometimes scrappy as docmaking, with too many unrelated film clips somewhat gauchely applied to personal recollections, it’s unusually rewarding as personal portraiture — particularly as Richardson entrusts Hojdová with a remarkably raw archive of home movies, shot by the man himself with as much focus and intensity as his Hollywood assignments. In one wrenching passage, he keeps the camera on his elderly mother in her final moments and for some time after, not apologizing for viewing all of life through a lens. Colored by a palpable sense of filmmaker and subject building a friendship and a professional understanding in real time, this documentary’s intimacy feels hard-won, and entirely genuine.