Karlovy Vary Festival To Honor Cinematographer Robert Richardson

​At this year’s 60th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, the Crystal Globe for Outstanding Artistic Contribution to World Cinema will go to world-renowned cinematographer Robert Richardson, winner of three Academy Awards and recipient of seven additional Oscar nominations. While at the festival, Richardson will join director Jana Hojdová in presenting the documentary portrait Robert Richardson: The White Devil. 

After gaining experience in documentary film and second-unit work, in the mid-1980s Robert Richardson began a long-term collaboration with director Oliver Stone. Salvador (1986) and Platoon (1986) – the latter of which brought him his first Oscar nomination for Best Cinematography – were followed by Wall Street (1987), the drama Born on the Fourth of July (1989, another Oscar nomination), the biographical musical film The Doors (1991), and the political thriller JFK (1991). This last film also earned Richardson his first Academy Award. He quickly established a reputation as a cinematographer capable of combining documentary authenticity with lavish cinematic visuals – a style he further developed in Oliver Stone’s Heaven & Earth (1993), Natural Born Killers (1994), Nixon (1995), and U-Turn (1997). 

In the second half of the 1990s, Richardson began to collaborate closely with director Martin Scorsese. Together, they created the visually distinctive films Casino (1995), Bringing Out the Dead (1999), The Aviator (2004), Shutter Island (2010), and Hugo (2011). The Aviator and Hugo earned Richardson two more Academy Awards for Best Cinematography.  

Since 2003, his name has also been indelibly associated with director Quentin Tarantino, with whom he shot Kill Bill 1 (2003), Kill Bill 2 (2004), Inglourious Basterds (2009), Django Unchained (2012), The Hateful Eight (2015), and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), the last three of which brought Richardson three more Oscar nominations.  

In 2021, he worked on Venom: Let There Be Carnage, the following year brought the action thriller Emancipation with Will Smith, and this was followed by an instalment in the popular franchise The Equalizer 3 (2023) and the comedy Air (2023), directed by Ben Affleck and starring Matt Damon. Most recently, he worked on Madden (2026), a biographical sports film starring Nicolas Cage. 

Richardson’s work has helped lend a distinctive atmosphere to films starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Uma Thurman, Samuel L. Jackson, Jamie Foxx, and Margot Robbie. Thanks to his bold use of light, contrast, and camera movement, Robert Richardson is one of the most respected cinematographers of the past four decades and one of the few people alive to have received a Best Cinematography Oscar three times. 

Robert Richardson has been a member of the American Society of Cinematographers since 1992, which honored him with its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019.