Early Life and Career
Watkin was born in Margate, Kent, England, the fourth and youngest son of a Roman Catholic solicitor father and homemaker mother, and grew up within a well-to-do upper-middle class household. He gained an early enthusiasm for European classical music, which was left to be satisfied only as a passive listener when his father rejected his request for a piano and lessons; Watkin always contended that he would rather have been a professional musician than a cinematographer.
After a brief period in the Army during World War II, Watkin started work at the Southern Railway Film Unit in 1948 as a camera assistant. After the unit was absorbed into British Transport Films in 1950, he eventually climbed the ranks up to director of photography at BTF before going off to work freelance in commercials around 1960.
Before working in feature films "as a fully fledged cinematographer", he shot the title sequence of the James Bond film, Goldfinger (1964).
Read more about this topic: David Watkin (cinematographer)
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“...he came towards them early in the morning, walking on the sea.”
—Bible: New Testament, Mark 6:48.
“What a vast fraternity it is,—that of ‘Hearts that Ache.’ For the last three months it has seemed to me as though all society were coming to me, to drop its mask for a moment and initiate me into the mystery. How we do suffer! And we go on laughing; for, as a practical joke at our expense, life is a success.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“John Brown’s career for the last six weeks of his life was meteor-like, flashing through the darkness in which we live. I know of nothing so miraculous in our history.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)