The Principle
Donald Peterman built a career on a deceptively simple proposition: that mainstream commercial cinema deserves the same visual rigor and emotional intelligence as any art film, and that accessibility is not the enemy of craft. Working across wildly different genres — the aquatic romance of Splash, the working-class grit of Flashdance, the alien bureaucracy of Men in Black, the grotesque fairy-tale excess of How the Grinch Stole Christmas — Peterman consistently demonstrated that a cinematographer's first obligation is to the story's emotional register, not to the showcasing of technique for its own sake.
What distinguishes Peterman is his ability to calibrate scale. He understood that spectacle and intimacy are not opposites; they are tools that must be balanced moment by moment. In Men in Black, the grandly absurd vision of New York as an alien transit hub required wide, confident compositions that made the impossible feel matter-of-fact, while the chemistry between Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones demanded something warmer and more grounded. Peterman moved fluidly between these registers without calling attention to the seams, which is perhaps the most underrated skill in Hollywood cinematography.
His work also carries a consistent interest in physical reality and texture. Even when shooting green-screen-heavy productions or sets of extreme artificiality — the elaborate Jim Carrey Whoville of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, the underwater sequences of Splash — Peterman anchored each frame in something tactile: the grain of a surface, the particular quality of a light source, the way a body moves through a specific environment. This commitment to the physical world as an emotional carrier is what keeps his most fantastical work from floating away into abstraction.
There is also a notable generosity in Peterman's approach to actors. He lit for faces with care and consistency, ensuring that performers had room to work without fighting for legibility against their surroundings. His frames tend to be built around human presence rather than despite it. This quality made him a trusted collaborator across decades and genres, working with directors as different as Kathryn Bigelow on Point Break, Barry Sonnenfeld on Men in Black, Ron Howard on How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and John Hughes on Planes, Trains and Automobiles.
Camera and Movement
Peterman favored a stable, purposeful camera that earned its movement rather than deploying restlessness as a default style. His base position was a classical one — lenses that respected natural human perspective, compositions that placed characters within their environments rather than flattening them against backgrounds. In Planes, Trains and Automobiles, the visual approach is almost deliberately unshowy, with Steve Martin and John Candy occupying frames that feel like snapshots of real American geography: highway rest stops, cheap motels, Midwestern skies. The camera serves the comedy and the emerging tenderness between the two men without ever announcing itself.
When movement was called for, Peterman brought it with commitment. Point Break showcases his most kinetically expressive work, where the camera becomes an active participant in the surfing sequences and foot chases, using handheld work and dynamic following shots that communicate the physical exhilaration Bigelow was after. The beach scenes have a sun-bleached, vertiginous energy quite different from his work on quieter comedies, demonstrating his range and his willingness to subordinate personal style to directorial vision. Crane work and wider establishing shots in films like Men in Black and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home gave those productions their sense of scope and world-building, but always transitioned back to the human scale without jolt.
His lens choices tended toward the moderate — the 35mm and 50mm range that keeps environments readable and faces natural, avoiding the distortions of extreme wide angles except when the material specifically demanded a heightened or expressionistic effect. The Grinch's deliberately warped Whoville sets called for a more aggressive optical approach, with wider lenses amplifying the production design's intentional unreality, but this was a conscious response to the material rather than a default habit.
Light
Peterman's lighting philosophy was fundamentally motivated — meaning that he worked hard to make every light source feel as though it originated from somewhere logical within the world of the scene, even when the actual mechanics of achieving that effect were complex. His interiors tend to feel inhabited and specific rather than generically illuminated, with the quality of light shifting meaningfully between locations. The difference in light between the corporate sterility of the MiB headquarters and the humid, neon-stained streets of New York City in Men in Black is doing genuine narrative and tonal work, telling the audience something about each environment before a word is spoken.
For Flashdance, Peterman worked closely with the film's distinctive visual identity, developing a high-contrast approach to the performance sequences that isolated bodies in darkness and brought sweat and motion into sharp, almost sculptural relief. The dance sequences have a quality somewhere between concert photography and theatrical lighting design, using hard sources to carve the dancers' physicality from shadow. This approach was influential well beyond the film itself and demonstrated Peterman's understanding that certain genres — the musical, the dance film — have their own visual grammar that rewards stylization over naturalism.
His work with natural light shows particular skill in exterior sequences. Point Break's California beach culture required a look that captured the particular bleached, high-key quality of Pacific light without losing contrast and definition. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, with its time-travel conceit dropping the Enterprise crew into 1986 San Francisco, benefited from Peterman's ability to shoot real urban locations with a freshness and specificity that grounded the film's considerable comedy and gave the city a personality beyond mere backdrop. He shot the available light of Fisherman's Wharf and the streets of the Bay Area with the same attention he gave to controlled studio environments.
Color and Texture
Peterman's color sensibility across his career favored saturation and warmth over the desaturated, cooled-down palette that became fashionable in American cinema during parts of his working life. His films tend to feel rich and inviting, with color used as an expressive tool rather than stripped away in the name of gritty realism. Addams Family Values leaned into deep, jewel-toned shadows and the contrast between the gothic darkness of the Addams household and the aggressively pastel horror of Camp Chippewa — the color contrast itself becomes a form of visual comedy, reinforcing the film's satirical targets.
In Splash, the challenge was creating an underwater visual world that felt genuinely otherworldly while maintaining enough warmth to support the romantic fantasy at the film's center. Peterman used filtered light and the natural optical behavior of water to create sequences with a blue-green luminosity that reads as magical rather than cold, ensuring that even in the film's most aquatic environments there was an emotional warmth keeping the audience invested in the relationship. The transition between the film's above-water New York sequences and its underwater material represents a controlled use of color temperature shift to mark the crossing of a threshold.
Ron Howard's How the Grinch Stole Christmas required an entirely different approach — production designer Michael Corenblith's vast Whoville sets demanded a color vocabulary of exaggerated candy-colored excess offset against the Grinch's cave, which called for something colder and more isolating. Peterman used the contrast between these two palettes to reinforce the film's emotional architecture, ensuring that Whoville's warmth reads as genuinely desirable rather than merely garish.
Signature Techniques
- Motivated source lighting with precise practical integration: Peterman consistently built his lighting setups around identifiable in-frame sources — windows, lamps, neon signs — ensuring that even complex multi-light setups maintained the logic of a single coherent world with believable illumination.
- High-contrast isolation for performance sequences: Developed most explicitly in Flashdance, this approach uses hard, narrow sources to pull performing bodies from deep shadow, creating images of physical movement that feel sculptural and theatrical simultaneously.
- Calibrated color temperature contrast between environments: Used deliberately in Men in Black, Addams Family Values, and Splash to mark emotional and narrative thresholds, with warm-to-cool or cool-to-warm shifts doing structural storytelling work.
- Kinetic handheld work in service of physical action: In Point Break, Peterman deployed handheld camera specifically for sequences of athletic or dangerous physical action, reserving the technique for moments where instability itself communicated something true about the experience being depicted.
- Wide establishing frames that honor production design without drowning human scale: A consistent technique in his larger-scale productions, Peterman's establishing shots in films like Men in Black and How the Grinch Stole Christmas give environments their due without losing the human figures who ultimately anchor each scene.
- Faces-first approach to coverage: Regardless of genre or production scale, Peterman prioritized legible, warmly lit faces in his coverage, ensuring that performers could carry emotional information without fighting against their photographic treatment.
- Location photography as character: In Star Trek IV and Planes, Trains and Automobiles, real American locations were shot with a specificity and attention that gave them genuine personality, treating geography as a form of characterization rather than neutral background.