Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC, HSC and Guillermo Navarro, ASC, AMC sat down to share memories about their respective Oscar-winning endeavors, which came nearly three decades apart, for International Cinematographer Guild magazine last year. Zsigmond took top honors for Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1978. Navarro won for El Laberinto del Fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth) in 2007, just the second time in Academy history that a cinematographer won an Oscar for a foreign language film.
Both men followed career paths that could be plucked straight from a Hollywood script. Zsigmond was born and raised in Szeged, Hungary, during the Nazi occupation and subsequent imposition of a communist regime by Russia. He made a perilous journey across the Austrian border in the wake of an uprising that was brutally suppressed by the Soviet Army. With no knowledge of English and zero connections in the film industry, Zsigmond migrated to the United States in 1956 as a political refugee. He worked at odd jobs, and shot free films for students and industrial movies for $2.50 an hour until he launched his narrative film career in 1963 with an ultra-low budget film titled The Sadist. Navarro was born in Mexico City, where he started taking still pictures when he was 13 years old. His sister got him a job as a photographer on a film when he was 14. Navarro eventually purchased a 16 mm camera, and began shooting documentaries.
