Documentary Profiles Cinematographer Robert Richardson
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- Jana Hojdová directed "Robert Richardson: The White Devil" after launching the project as a recent Prague FAMU graduate who wrote a fan letter to the American Society of Cinematographers asking to meet her idol.
- Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, and Oliver Stone appear as the documentary's marquee talking heads, with Tarantino turning solemn when describing a rift with Richardson over the cinematographer's abusive treatment of crew on "Kill Bill."
- Oliver Stone discusses the end of his 11-year, 11-film partnership with Richardson, which spanned from "Platoon" through "U-Turn."
- Robert Richardson speaks candidly about his unhappy Cape Cod childhood, his mother's alcoholism, his late brother's mental illness and substance abuse, and his own failings as a husband and father as his mid-1980s Hollywood career took off.
- The bulk of the documentary was captured during the 2020 COVID lockdown, when Hojdová and Richardson isolated together for months at his modernist Cape Cod mansion, producing the push-pull mentor dynamic that structures the film.
- Richardson provides a raw personal archive, including wrenching home-movie footage of his elderly mother in her final moments and afterward, which he kept without apology for "viewing all of life through a lens."
- The review flags that the film largely skips Richardson's work with Robert Redford ("The Horse Whisperer"), Robert De Niro, and Ben Affleck, concentrating instead on the three directorial partnerships with Scorsese, Tarantino, and Stone that define his career.
Why it matters: The documentary breaks from the standard reverential filmmaker profile by capturing Richardson during an extended 2020 lockdown, yielding personal disclosures — including footage of his mother's final moments — and frank collaborator testimony that reframes his most celebrated working relationships. Tarantino's on-record account of the Kill Bill crew-abuse rift and Stone's explanation for ending an 11-film partnership are the kind of career-shaping tensions rarely surfaced in profiles of living cinematographers.
