Cinematographer Peter James ACS ASC: Bringing Vision to Light

“You have to allow yourself to have that big creative dream,” says Peter James ACS ASC. The cinematographer has long balanced the discipline of craft with a conviction that images must serve character and story. In this conversation, James outlines a prep approach grounded in quiet focus and visual exploration; revisits his collaboration with director Bruce Beresford on Driving Miss Daisy, where car interiors demanded dynamic yet unobtrusive technique; and shares a lens philosophy that grounded in consistency and emotional intent. Framed by decades of experience across documentaries, commercials and features, his insights reaffirm cinematography as both art and science. 

Premiers pas

As James shares, he started on his path toward becoming a cinematographer "when I was really young. I was only 15. I'm dyslexic. A cousin of ours, he's an author, Jon Cleary, he came for dinner. He said, 'What's Peter going to do?' And they all said, 'Oh, no, he can't read, spell, write, add up, do anything. He's hopeless.' But he said, 'Well, what's he do?'"

James remembers his family sharing with Cleary that "'He's always taking photographs, and stacking the furniture up, and getting high angles, and things like this.' So [Cleary] said, 'Oh, it might be good to be a cinematographer.' And from day one, I thought, this is what I've got to do." 

Visualizing the Screenplay

Over the years, James has developed a habitual way of approaching the script for a new feature. "When I get a project or a film script," he shares, "I sit down quietly in the early morning with a light on, a cup of tea, hard chair, and sit there, and read the script, and make notes, and allow myself to visualize what the story's going to look like. Give it the time and allow yourself to dream and think about how it's going to be.

"It might take me two mornings to read a script because I'm such a slow reader," he continues. "But I'm also a terrible daydreamer. So I'm actually making the film while I'm going along. I'm casting it, I'm doing the wardrobe, I'm lighting it, I'm doing the camera moves, and I'm finding the locations in my head."

After spending this time alone with the screenplay, he adds, "You've got something fairly positive to come back to the director with. And usually, by that stage, I've picked up some images, some art or some photographs, or film clips, or something that is really trying to illustrate what I'm thinking about in the film." 

Meeting Director Bruce Beresford

Over the course of his career, James has worked with a wide range of directors, including Donald Crombie, Anne Fletcher, Frank Marshall, Jay Roach, Adam Shankman, Peter Bogdanovich, Richard Linklater and Philllip Noyce. Certainly, though, his closest and longest-running collaboration has been with director Bruce Bereford. To date, their creative partnership has spanned 14 feature films, from 1989’s Driving Miss Daisy through 2025’s The Travellers.

"Bruce is prepared," James shares. "He does his storyboards, which are crazy little drawings - I can even tell what lens it's on. I'll say, 'Well, that's on a 25mm, Bruce, or that's on a 75mm.'"

Their first opportunity to work together came when Beresford hired James “on a Bank of New South Wales commercial, which was in a chicken shed in Kellyville,” the cinematographer recalls. Shortly after, he says, Beresford “asked me to do Tender Mercies. And I had another film, The Dunera Boys, which we were going to do with [production company] Adams Packer. That fell over, and I rang [Beresford] up and I said, ‘Is that job still available?’ He said, ‘Oh, no, I just got Russell Boyd [ACS ASC] to photograph it.’ The only time in my life I've ever been depressed was then, thinking, ‘Oh, I'm never going to work with Bruce again.’ I was really upset. And then he rang me to do Driving Miss Daisy.”

Making Driving Miss Daisy

“I just loved the story,” James recalls of first reading the screenplay for Driving Miss Daisy, written by Alfred Uhry, who also wrote the play upon which the movie was based. "I came up with all these different looks for it. We're in the South, and it's a film called Driving Miss Daisy, so it's in a car — a lot of the dialogue is set inside the car. And it came from a play. But we had to give it scope.

"I said, 'We need to get a process trainer, Bruce, to do these shots,'" James remembers. Specifically, he adds, "I'd heard about the Shot Maker that was around at that stage. It just started to come in. So I said, 'We've got to get something decent,' and we shot the rest of the film on that."

In addition to the Shot Maker process trailer, the movie called for a variety of other car mounts and rigging solutions. "The thing is not to over-light it," James shares. "And if you're shooting through the windscreen, don't necessarily polarize everything to death. Just put half a pola screen in it. Plus, I found streets that had trees over the top, so you got the flicking of the light.

"You don't want shallow depth in the car scenes," the cinematographer continues. "You really want both people in focus. We didn't want to pull focus from one actor to the other. In some cases, it was done in cuts. In some cases, they looked like they're sitting side by side with one another. I shot on longer lenses, and it's like she's sitting in the front seat - that's when they were amicable and getting along. But when they were not getting along, I did it on wider-angle lenses, and she looks like she's in the back and he looks like he's very much in the front.

"That's really a credit to Bruce, because he was using the camera angles to tell the emotional distance between the characters and the story, so it wasn't just the same front-on shot or side shot," James adds. "The heart of the idea is that simplicity, that honesty, that storytelling. That is so important, and it comes across on the screen." 

Storytelling With Lenses

When it comes to choosing the optics he'll use for a given project, James explains, "I'm trying to find a lens that is sympathetic to the story and enhances the story. It may be a very sharp lens. You may need a very sharp lens for certain films. But most of the films I do, I don't need to have really sharp lenses. I like to have lenses that are sort of f***ed-up a bit, depending on the story I'm telling."

Throughout his storied career, the cinematographer has regularly turned to Panavision for his projects' lens and camera packages. "I've always liked Panavision lenses because of the consistency," he says. "Even before the Primos came out, there were sets of lenses that were all perfectly matched. The color was exactly the same."

Balancing the Creative and the Technical

Reflecting again on his earliest steps in the motion-picture business, James notes that it was a considerable but invaluable journey from when he decided at 15 that he would become a cinematographer to when he was working on features as a director of photography. "Coming up through the ranks as a focus puller, then a camera operator, and then doing documentaries to learn about cutting in the camera, and commercials where it was all about composition and light - that took years. That's years and years of work. But all the way along, I've always been interested in the creative side of it, not just the technical side. I think it's an art and a science.

"You've got to have that dream," James concludes. "Think about what you want to visualize, because it's all dark until you turn on the light."