Russell Carpenter

The grandson of a film sound engineer, Carpenter was born in Van Nuys, California in 1950 to a family of six. After his parents divorced in 1960, he moved with his mother and three siblings to Orange County, where he took up Super 8 films as a hobby. After graduating from Van Nuys High School, he enrolled at San Diego State University to study television directing, but later changed his major to English. To pay for school, he worked at a local public broadcasting channel, where he learned the ropes of documentary filmmaking. After graduating, he moved back to Orange County, where he shot educational films and documentaries.

Carpenter started his career working as DP on numerous low-budget horror films throughout the 1980s. His first major project was Lady in White, followed by Critters 2: The Main Course. The Los Angeles Times criticized the film but praised Carpenter's cinematography. In 1983, he shot The Wizard of Speed and Time, a special effects-laden experimental film. After shooting several episodes of the television series The Wonder Years, he worked on The Lawnmower Man. Carpenter met James Cameron during the production of the John Woo-directed action film Hard Target, who hired him on the basis of his work on Lady in White to shoot his 1994 action comedy True Lies, and the 1996 Universal Studios attraction T2 3-D: Battle Across Time. Their next collaboration, Titanic, carried away 11 Oscars in 1997, including Best Picture and Best Cinematography. Carpenter is a member of the American Society of Cinematographers, and received the Society's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018.

Carpenter is married to Donna Ellen Conrad and has one son, Graham (from a previous marriage), a stepson Zak Selbert, a daughter-in-law Gaudia Correia, and two granddaughters.