In Memoriam — Eduardo Serra, ASC, AFC (1943-2025)
The cinematographer, whose acclaimed works included Girl with a Pearl Earring, Unbreakable and two Harry Potter films, prided himself on his versatility, and on challenging accepted rules.
Eduardo Serra, ASC, AFC, an Academy Award nominee for Girl with a Pearl Earring and The Wings of the Dove and the 2014 ASC International Award honoree, died Aug. 19 at the age of 81.
Always alert to the possibility of telling a resonant story regardless of its period, setting or source material, Serra embraced literary adaptations, historical and contemporary dramas and CGI-heavy fantasies. Along the way, he also sought creative partnerships that struck a particular chord: “In cinema you have different families; I always chose to work with people who saw the relationships that way.” Among his credits were Vincent Ward’s Map of the Human Heart and What Dreams May Come; Michael Winterbottom’s Jude; M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable, Edward Zwick’s Blood Diamond and Defiance; David Yates’ Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Parts 1 and 2); and multiple features with both Patrice Leconte and Claude Chabrol. Serra’s final film was Leconte’s A Promise.
Born in Lisbon, Portugal, on Oct. 2, 1943, Serra left for France in 1963, when his activism against the authoritarian regime of António de Oliveira Salazar began posing a danger to his safety. Already a film enthusiast, he immediately fell in love with the cineaste culture of Paris, and over the next two years, he spent hours at the Cinémathèque. “I’ve probably seen about 95 percent of everything important made between 1895 and 1955,” he told AC. He earned a degree at the Vaugirard (now the ENS Louis-Lumière), which trained cinematographers, and when job opportunities proved scarce following graduation, he enrolled at the Sorbonne and earned degrees in art history and archaeology. He gained a foothold in the industry as a loader for Pierre Lhomme, AFC, and subsequently worked on more than 30 productions as a first camera assistant. He started shooting French features in 1980, and Portuguese, Brazilian, German and English productions soon followed. He relished the peripatetic nature of his work: “Every change of country for a movie can be an enriching experience for any member of a cinema crew, even for technicians. I found I could adapt myself to different ways of working while maintaining the same direction in terms of my aesthetic choices.”
Ward, the New Zealand filmmaker who tapped Serra to shoot the equally ambitious but very different love stories Map of the Human Heart and What Dreams May Come, told AC, “Eduardo is very methodical and particular about light. He can create what I call ‘exotic experiences,’ particularly in smaller environments.”
Peter Webber’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, which imagined Vermeer’s creation of the famous work, was a career apex, offering Serra a singular opportunity to suffuse an entire picture in the soft yet contrasty light he once described as a decades-long “obsession.” Accepting the European Film Award for his work on the picture, he noted, “A film like this, where light is one of the main characters, is a gift for any cinematographer.”
Serra took up residence in England for two years to shoot both installments of the final Harry Potter film back-to-back for Yates. “I think Eduardo’s real gift is that he can light a scene incredibly naturalistically and believably, and yet it can still have this wonderful, painterly quality to it,” Yates told AC. Serra noted with some amusement that over the course of the shoot, “sometimes I would look around on set at all these thousands of people and wonder, ‘How did I come to be here?’” But he also rooted the experience in the familiar: “I was fortunate to have a wonderful gaffer in Chuck Finch. The first time I worked in England [on Funny Bones] he was on it, and he helped me a great deal, so it was very good to work with him again.”
Serra became an ASC member in 2002 after being proposed by Robert Primes, Darius Khondji and Steven B. Poster. In addition to active membership in the AFC, he was an honorary member of the Associacão de Imagem Portuguesa.
Speaking to Peter Ettedgui for the book Cinematography: Screencraft, Serra said, “Two principles inform everything I do. The first is, always question the rules which are presented to you. Some are good; others aren’t (although they may have been at some earlier stage in the evolution of film technology). Secondly, never accept to become involved in any project that you suspect you may be ashamed of. Whatever you choose to do, you must do your best; so if you don’t think a project deserves your best — all your commitment and talent and energy — then avoid it.”
