‘We were the magicians’: cinematographer Phedon Papamichael on 40 years of film-making

He has collaborated with an array of star directors, and is currently at work on James Mangold’s Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown. He explains why US film-making is like the army, and British cinema is more like a factory job

Phedon Papamichael is sitting in a sparse hotel room in New York, huddled in a puffer jacket and glancing at the window as his fingers play with an unlit cigarette. He’s in town shooting A Complete Unknown, the highly anticipated Bob Dylan biopic starring Timothée Chalamet – and today, at least, he seems to be channelling its subject.

The film, he says, at the moment largely involves “travelling to every corner of New Jersey on a bus”. For Papamichael, king of the road movie, this is a very good thing.