One of the best cinematographers of modern film and cinema got his start with a groundbreaking Canon DSLR – and ultimately "blagged" his way into a BAFTA-nominated career shooting series like HBO's The Last of Us and Apple TV's Cape Fear.
After getting addicted to movies like Blade Runner and RoboCop when he was ten, Eben Bolter always wanted to get involved in film. And it was as an amateur photographer, when he discovered his camera could shoot video, that everything started to fall into place.
"I grew up on the south coast of England a million miles away from the film and TV industry, but like a lot of people I fell in love with cinema because of VHS," he explained on The Making Of podcast.
"I used to beg my parents to go to the cinema, and I think the real kind of inciting moment was Jurassic Park in 1993. I was 10 years old, saw it at the cinema, and it really did what it did to me. I was the perfect age to see that film.
"And that really inspired this lifelong love of movies. And it took me, from the age of 10, it took me another like 15 years to figure out what a cinematographer was, and and that real people can make movies – you don't have to be born into the industry."
Moviemaking was "still magic that [he] knew nothing about", leaving Bolter with a love of film that he didn't know what to do with. His first idea to get involved with film was to study business at university, with a notion of working with distributors or movie theaters somehow. He just wanted to do something related to film, and that felt attainable way in.
"In a way, luckily, that didn't work out. And at the same time I was getting into amateur photography, just picking up a DSLR and shooting photographs. I traveled a little bit, learned how to take better pictures as I went – but completely separate to any kind of career. That was just for the love of images.
"And then there was a crucial moment in time with the Canon 5D Mark II, the DSLR camera that I happen to own, enabled a video mode. And this had a large format sensor, and I'm already holding this thing and using this thing, and suddenly I could shoot video.
"So suddenly these photographs I was going out and taking in the street could become animations, could become movies. And it just opened up this idea of like, huh – well maybe that is a thing I could kind of do."
Bolter was working for a marketing company at the time, which needed some corporate videos shot. He volunteered, just for the opportunity to go out and shoot something. "I was basically shooting these sort of corporate interview rubbish videos, but I was kind of learning about editing and dealing with Final Cut Pro."
This led him down "a rabbit hole of short films", after connecting with a group of filmmakers via an evening film school.
"We started shooting short films, and I was the guy who had a camera, so I was de facto cinematographer. And a couple of those short films got into festivals, and it felt like the train had left the station and I was just suddenly a DP [director of photography] without really knowing what a DP was."
What he did have, however, was a knowledge of film that had been building for years, ever since watching his cousin's stack of VHS tapes as a kid.
"So if directors talk to me about, 'Hey you know that shot in ET, and how Spielberg covered this scene and blah blah blah,' I was like, 'Oh, I know exactly what you mean,' and I can visualize that, and I can attempt to do that. And the way that I fail in attempting to do that is going to make it my photography."
With an abundance of passion and no formal training (save the Final Cut course he was sent on by his old marketing firm), Bolter forged an enviable career that saw him work with Pedro Pascal on The Last of Us and Javier Bardem in Cape Fear.
Despite being recognized as a Breakthrough Brit by BAFTA in 2016, and receiving a nomination for a BAFTA Award for his work on The Last of Us, Bolter still experiences imposter syndrome.
"It's sort of like, here I am, I found myself in this absurd position, and I started by just picking up a camera and not knowing what I was doing. And I'm still in a way the same person. I've sort of blagged it this far, and now I guess I've legitimized myself finally, but at the beginning it was very much a sort of, 'Huh, they're letting me do this!'"
I highly recommend checking out the full 43-minute episode, where Bolter shares more about working on an Apple production, the camera gear he uses on set and more. Pour yourself a tasty beverage and over to The Making Of podcast.
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