Éric Gautier

Gautier was born and raised in Paris; he grew up in eleventh, twelfth, nineteenth, and twentieth arrondissements with his construction engineer father, mother, and younger sister. During his youth, he excelled in music, and from the age of eleven played the piano and organ. He originally aspired to become a professional musician before becoming disillusioned with the field and deciding to pursue a career in cinema instead, which he felt combined many different creative pursuits. He attended the film school of the Louis Lumière College.

After graduating from the Louis Lumière film school in 1982, Gautier began work as an assistant camera operator director on Alain Resnais's film Life Is a Bed of Roses. He left the job soon after, however, and chose instead to work as the director of photography on short films. He shot 60 films before returning to feature film work. The first feature-length film he photographed was La Vie des morts, released in 1991 and directed by Arnaud Desplechin. He won a César Award for his cinematography on Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train (1998), and received nominations for his work on Sentimental Destinies (2000), Clean (2004), Gabrielle (2005), Private Fears in Public Places (2006), and A Christmas Tale (2008). He has worked on many other French films, collaborating most often with Resnais and the directors Olivier Assayas, Arnaud Desplechin, and Claude Berri.

Gautier began working in international film in the early 2000s, beginning with The Motorcycle Diaries, for which he won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Cinematography and the 2004 Cannes Film Festival Technical Grand Prize, and was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Cinematography. After seeing The Motorcycle Diaries, American actor/filmmaker Sean Penn approached Gautier to shoot the 2007 film Into the Wild, for which he won a Lumière Award. He subsequently served as director of photography on the American films Taking Woodstock (2009) and Grace of Monaco (2014).