Watch: 70-Minute Masterclass With Legendary Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond

The soft-spoken and humble Oscar-winning cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond (“Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” also nominated for “The Deer Hunter,” “The River,” and “The Black Dahlia”) sat down this past summer to answer questions about his impressive career as part of Toronto International Film Festival’s Higher Learning program. (As a quick aside to our Canadian readers, we encourage you to check out TIFF’s Post-Secondary Programmes: “Higher Learning is a free ongoing programme that provides Canadian college and university students and faculty a forum in which to examine film, television, video, new media and gaming from a wide range of cultural, social, historical, political and technological approaches and disciplines.”) TIFF just published the talk and we think it’s worth a watch.

Over the course of the discussion, Zsigmond talks about the importance of film, modern versus historical cinema, and even how he made his transition from the athletically ambitious son of a...