Robby Müller

Biography

Robby Müller was a Dutch cameraman. He was born on Curaçao, where his father worked for an oil company. In 1953, Müller moved to Amsterdam. After finishing high school and fulfilling his compulsory military service, Müller started studying at the Film Academy in 1962. There he got to know Frans Weisz, Wim Verstappen, Pim de la Parra and Nikolai van der Heyde. In 1964 he shot Frans Weisz's film Een zondag op het eiland van de Grande Jatte, together with Gerard Vandenberg, who would later become his most important teacher. Vandenberg and Müller left for Germany in the second half of the 1960s, where Müller quickly started filming for television for George Moorse and Hans W. Geissendörfer. It was then that he got to know Wim Wenders, who would graduate from the film and television academy in Munich with the project Summer in the City (1970), filmed by Müller. Until 1977, Müller worked on all of Wenders' feature films, including Alice in den Städten (1974) and Der Amerikanische Freund (1977). Later the duo would still work together, although sporadically, for example, on Paris, Texas (1984). In this film in particular, Müller's sharp eye for extraordinary light is obvious.

Up until this time, Müller regularly worked on Dutch productions for Frans Weisz and Frans van der Staak, among others, but at the beginning of the 1980s he left for the United States, where his international career took off. He worked with Peter Bogdanovich, Jim Jarmusch and John Schlesinger. In the 1990s he worked with Michelangelo Antonioni (Al di là delle nuvole, 1995) Lars von Trier (Breaking the Waves,1996 and Dancer in the Dark, 2000) and Michael Winterbottom (24 Hour Party People, 2002). During the span of his career, Müller received a series of awards for his work. The Netherlands honoured him in 2009 with the Bert Haanstra Oeuvre Award.