Tutorials Video

Vittorio Storaro: From Rome Film School to Three Academy Awards

Profile · ~17 min

Overview

Vittorio Storaro (born 1940) trained at Rome's Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, Italy's national film school, after an apprenticeship in still photography, going on to shoot Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist and Last Tango in Paris, Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, and winning three Academy Awards for Best Cinematography.

What You Need

Where to Start: The Conformist (1970), Last Tango in Paris (1972), Apocalypse Now (1979), Reds (1981)

Steps

Formal training at Italy's national film school

Storaro apprenticed in still photography as a teenager before enrolling at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, Italy's leading state film school, where he began developing the systematic, theory-driven approach to color and light that would define his entire career. A formal education grounded as much in painting and color theory as in camera technique.

Early studio apprenticeship as camera operator and assistant

Before becoming a director of photography in his own right, Storaro worked his way up through the Italian film industry's camera department as an operator and assistant cinematographer, gaining hands-on technical experience on numerous productions before earning his first solo cinematography credits.

The Bertolucci partnership: The Conformist and Last Tango in Paris

Storaro's collaboration with director Bernardo Bertolucci on The Conformist (1970) and Last Tango in Paris (1972) established him as a major international cinematographer, known for architecturally composed frames and a highly symbolic, theorized use of color tied closely to each film's psychological and political themes.

Hollywood breakthrough: Apocalypse Now and three Oscars

Storaro's work on Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), shot under famously difficult production conditions in the Philippines, won him his first Academy Award for Best Cinematography, followed by wins for Reds (1981) and The Last Emperor (1987), making him one of a small number of cinematographers to win the Oscar three times.

Pro Tips

A published, systematic personal theory of color. Storaro has written extensively about associating specific colors with specific psychological and narrative meanings, applying the theory consistently across entire films rather than scene by scene.
Painting-influenced, highly composed framing that treats each shot as a deliberately constructed image, drawing on his formal training in art history and color theory alongside camera technique.
Collaborating closely with directors during pre-production to develop an overall visual and color strategy for an entire film before shooting begins, rather than solving lighting problems shot by shot on set.
Adapting his controlled, theory-driven visual approach to the famously chaotic production conditions of Apocalypse Now, demonstrating that a rigorous personal method can survive extreme production disruption.

Knowledge Base

What You'll Learn

Storaro's formal training at Italy's national film school, combined with a lifelong, published theory of color psychology, produced one of the most intellectually systematic bodies of work in cinematography history, recognized with three Academy Awards.

Awards & Recognition

Storaro won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography three times, for Apocalypse Now (1979), Reds (1981), and The Last Emperor (1987), placing him among the most-awarded cinematographers in Oscar history.

Why Storaro Still Matters

His insistence on treating color as a systematic, theorized storytelling language rather than an intuitive or purely technical choice gave subsequent cinematographers a rigorous intellectual framework for planning a film's visual strategy at the whole-project level.

Where This Fits

This guide covers one specific part of cinematography. The wider picture, what focal length, exposure, lighting ratio, and camera movement actually communicate, rather than only what the controls do, is in Cinematography Fundamentals: Lens, Light, and Movement, which frames the discipline as a whole and links out to the detailed guides underneath it, including this one. If you are starting from scratch rather than solving a specific problem, read that first and come back here.

FAQ

Q: What film school did Vittorio Storaro attend?
A: He trained at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, Italy's national film school, after an earlier apprenticeship in still photography, and has often credited that formal training in art and color theory as foundational to his later work.

Q: How many Academy Awards has Vittorio Storaro won?
A: He has won three Academy Awards for Best Cinematography, for Apocalypse Now (1979), Reds (1981), and The Last Emperor (1987), making him one of the most-honored cinematographers in the award's history.