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Hiro Narita (成田広, Narita Hiro; né Hiro Morikawa; born June 26, 1941) is a Japanese-American retired cinematographer.[1][2]
Narita was born to Japanese parents in 1941, in what is now Seoul, South Korea, then part of the Empire of Japan.[3] In 1945, he and his family moved to Nara, Japan, and later to Tokyo.[3] Following his father's early death and his mother's remarriage to a Japanese American,[3] he immigrated in 1957 to Honolulu, Hawaii where he graduated from Kaimuki High School.
He went on to the San Francisco Art Institute where he received a BFA in Graphic Design in 1964. He quickly landed a position at a prominent local design firm, but the job lasted barely six months before he was drafted into the U.S. Army. For two years, he served as a designer and photographer at the Pentagon.[1]
An avid movie fan since childhood, Narita decided to go into filmmaking rather than go back into graphic design upon his return to San Francisco in the mid-sixties. He was a still photographer on Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point (1970).[1] After an internship with John Korty and Victor J. Kemper on the Michael Ritchie movie The Candidate in 1971, he photographed the television movieFarewell to Manzanar in 1975, for which he received an Emmy Award nomination.
In 1976, he was one of the camera operators on Martin Scorsese's documentary The Last Waltz about the last concert of The Band. Later, he worked on projects like Apocalypse Now, More American Graffiti, and the Neil Young documentary Rust Never Sleeps. For his cinematography on the movie Never Cry Wolf he won the Boston Society of Film Critics Award and the National Society of Film Critics Award in 1983. In 1989, he photographed the Visual Effects in the Steven Spielberg film Always. In the following years, he was the Director of Photography on successful films like Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Dirty Pictures, The Rocketeer, and James and the Giant Peach.
Narita served as director of photography on the 1997 Live Action Short Film Academy Award winning Visas and Virtue. He also directed the 1997 hour-long documentary film, Isamu Noguchi: Stones and Paper, for PBS' American Masters series.
He has taught at San Francisco Art Institute, lectured, and given master classes at many institutions including Golden Eye in the Republic of Georgia.
He is a member of American Society of Cinematographers (ASC)[1] and Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Documentary film
Short film
Feature film
TV movies
TV series