American Cinematographer - February 2009 - (Page 61)

Portrait by Douglas Kirkland. Moulin Rouge photos by Sue Adler, courtesy of 20th Century Fox. Breaker Morant photo courtesy of McAlpine. South Wales, Australia, with helping him develop “an early sense of open space and country.” When his father contracted tuberculosis and was sent to a sanatorium, young Donald began earning money at the age of 12, doing farm work during the harvest. The experience could have led to an occupation as a sharecropper, a common path at the time, but a life of farming did not appeal to him. Instead, he used some of the money he made to take a four-week boat tour of Europe after he finished high school. That turned into a full year of working odd jobs in England, France and Belgium. “I found the way to meet people and really learn about a country is through work,” he recalls. After returning home, McAlpine enrolled in college as a physical-education and science major. Several of his teachers were coaches for Australian teams that were preparing to compete in the 1956 Olympics, and McAlpine helped them by shooting 16mm and 8mm film loops of the athletes’ performances; such films were a popular teaching tool at the time. Upon graduating, McAlpine began teaching phys-ed in a high school in rural Parkes, and he had been teaching for several years when a field trip to Sydney sent his life on another course. McAlpine took a group of students to visit the headquarters of the Australian Broadcasting Channel, the country’s relatively new network. Fascinated by what he saw, he inquired about a job. He recalls, “I had the 16mm camera I’d used to create the film loops, and I said, ‘If I capture the end of the world on film, would you guys buy it?’ They gave me four 100-foot rolls of black-and-white and a sheet explaining what [images] they need- ed to put together a news story. I shot one about Parkes, a rail town that was in the process of transferring from steam to diesel, and I got a lot of visually graphic material of locomotives on turntables.” ABC used his footage and asked for more, so McAlpine created a visual essay about the wheat harvest, chartering a plane to make it as impressive as possible. “The station loved it because they were trying to be a national network, but they were always short of ruralbased material,” he recalls. “I made Opposite: ASC International Award recipient Donald McAlpine, ASC, ACS. This page, above: Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman share a duet in Moulin Rouge (2001), which brought McAlpine his first ASC and Academy Award nominations. Bottom left: On the set of Moulin Rouge, McAlpine (right) watches playback with director Baz Luhrmann and Kidman. Bottom right: McAlpine at work on Bruce Beresford’s Breaker Morant (1980). American Cinematographer 61

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - February 2009

American Cinematographer - February 2009 Contents Editor's Note Short Takes: Circus Production Slate: The International Reverte 2 Worlds in 3 Dimensions Dead Reckoning Embracing Anamorphic Citizen of the World Post Focus: Restoring Manhatta New Products & Services International Marketplace Classified Ads Ad Index Clubhouse News ASC Close-Up: Peter Suschitzky

American Cinematographer - February 2009

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