Gordon Willis is an American cinematographer born in 1931 in New York. He is often credited as the most influential cinematographer in American cinema of the 1970s and 1980s, primarily for his unprecedented lighting style and his vision with the long shot in film. His most notable works include the Godfather trilogy, Annie Hall, Manhattan, All the President's Men, and Zelig, among many others. Throughout his career he has collaborated with famous directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, Alan Pakula, Woody Allen and Hal Ashby. Willis, began his career working with cameras for documentaries and commercials, a combination of self-learning and learning from experience and colleagues on projects. In the 1970s he received his first assignments with feature films. Willis himself says that his start with the main features was mostly luck, but he "took advantage of that luck." Willis outwardly supported the growing creative role of cinematographers in the collaborative art of filmmaking, an idea generally foreign to cinematography of the time. Willis says the entire process is a collaboration; Before even reading the script he prefers, if possible, to discuss the film with the director. Then, after re-reading the script two or three times, he is able to start visualizing the film in his head. However, the true structure of the film cannot happen without the contribution of the actors themselves and the relationship with the director. Willis believes in the "organic" feel of a film, focusing less on sitting behind monitors and more on interacting directly with other collaborators or relying too heavily on technology to control the direction of a film. Art is about visualization and then the ability to execute… middle of the paper… throughout his career and it has served him well. Surprisingly enough for the depth of his approach to filmmaking, Willis proclaims himself a minimalist. A film is simply made up of individual shots strung together, so take each shot one at a time, make each one as good as it can be, and then string the shots together; there's no reason to complicate the process, he says, and complexity is not conducive to simplicity in the filmmaking process. Beauty is defined by simplicity. The cinematographer's job is not just to visualize the film in his head shot by shot, but to visualize the effect of the shot on the story on the screen and convey that vision to the director. The overall color of the film to describe the mood of the scene, the length of the shot and even the format in which the film is shot are all aspects that Willis took into account with a skill perhaps unprecedented to date..