Paul Wilson

With a photographer for a grandfather, Paul developed a fascination with cameras from an early age. His father, a film and theatre critic for The Star newspaper, encouraged this interest and in 1939 took him to visit Ealing Studios. That visit ignited a lifelong passion for filmmaking.

He began his career at Gainsborough Pictures in Shepherd’s Bush, London, where he worked as a clapper boy on The Man in Grey (1943), directed by Leslie Arliss and shot by Arthur Crabtree. When he turned eighteen, Paul was drafted into the Royal Navy and became a photographer aboard the aircraft carrier HMS Glory, capturing scenes including part of Japan’s surrender at the end of the war. Returning to Shepherd’s Bush, he resumed his film career, rising from assistant cameraman to camera operator and eventually working on more than 120 films.

One of his early credits as an operator was The Boy and the Bridge (1959). He gained wider recognition as one of the operators on the Beatles’ films A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help! (1965), both directed by Richard Lester. Recalling A Hard Day’s Night, he described shooting many handheld sequences with Arriflex IIC cameras inside real train carriages, often under challenging conditions.

Over the following decades, Paul collaborated with many of Britain’s finest cinematographers, including Arthur Ibbetson, Gil Taylor, David Watkin, and Chris Challis. His filmography as operator includes classics such as Never Let Go (1960), I Could Go On Singing (1963), A Countess from Hong Kong (1967), Where Eagles Dare (1968), Anne of the Thousand Days (1969), Frenzy (1972), The Three Musketeers (1973), and Joseph Andrews (1977).

By the late 1970s, Paul transitioned into special effects, a move inspired by his earlier work on Moby Dick (1956), where he saw the challenges of model photography firsthand. While filming a commercial with director Richard Lester in Switzerland, he was introduced to special effects supervisor Derek Meddings, beginning a long and successful collaboration. Paul contributed to the Superman and Supergirl films, several James Bond adventures including Moonraker (1979), GoldenEye (1995), Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), The World Is Not Enough (1999), and Die Another Day (2002), as well as Labyrinth (1986), The Princess Bride (1987), Batman (1989), and Cape Fear (1991). After an extraordinary career spanning six decades, he retired at the age of seventy-seven.