Teodoro Maniaci - Career As A Cinematographer

Career As A Cinematographer

Maniaci has filmed an extensive body of work as a cinematographer, including most notably, Clean, Shaven and The Tao of Steve. He has also contributed to a large number of films that have not made a lot of notice outside Hollywood. These include Party Monster, Outsourced, and Inside Deep Throat. Another of his recent films, The Business of Strangers, has had good reviews.

Furthermore, he was the director of photography for at least five major television specials: Saturday Night Live in the '90s: Pop Culture Nation, Saturday Night Live in the '80s: Lost & Found, Bette Midler Sings the Peggy Lee Songbook, Live from New York: The First 5 Years of Saturday Night Live, and Sex and the City: A Farewell.

He was director of photography for Shaolin Ulysses, which was shown on PBS.

Maniaci was a founding member of the Board of Directors of the Black Bear Film Festival in Milford, Pennsylvania, and has won several awards for his work. He has filmed several music videos and short films. One such short film was Reality in 2003, which was featured in the Woodstock Film Festival.

When interviewed, Manianci found it difficult to describe his personal style of film-making:

"If you look at the films I’ve shot," Maniaci says, "you’d be hard-pressed to say there’s a single person behind them. They're all really different looking, different styles of filmmaking. Lodge Kerrigan’s Claire Dolan, for instance, is an incredibly formal art film with very precise, almost geometric sort of chrome-and-glass photography. It’s very voyeuristic. Whereas in The Opportunists the camera is invisible. The shots are carefully chosen, but the film is not about the camerawork. It doesn't call attention to itself."
Pressed to characterize his approach, Maniaci explains, "My style is highly adaptive. I try to create a look that’s appropriate for each film. It’s not about me attaching myself and it becoming about me. It’s about me becoming part of it – trying to figure out what that project wants to be. Lodge Kerrigan’s Clean, Shaven, for instance, was very intense and gritty" – the polar opposite of Claire Dolan. "Michael Benson’s Predictions of Fire, on the other hand, is a highly stylized propaganda film for a political art movement, and Bette Gordon’s Luminous Motion is a strange psychodrama with surreal overtones." —Filmmaker Magazine web site

For future work, he claims, "I’d love to do a sci-fi rocker film. We need a good sci-fi rocker movie!"