Richard Leiterman, one of Canada’s most definitive and respected cinematographers, died on July 14 of complications from the rare disease amyloidosis. He was 70.

Born in 1935 in the Timmins, ON, suburb of South Porcupine, Leiterman’s family moved to Vancouver when he was still a boy. There he worked odd jobs and had a brief stint at the University of B.C. before journeying through Europe.

He later enrolled in UBC’s six-week film program. When directing didn’t pan out, Leiterman joined documentary filmmaker Allan King in London, ON, to be his cinematographer.

Leiterman was one of the pioneers in cinéma vérité filmmaking and his work with King created some unique and memorable documentaries in the late 1960s, including the reality-television ancestor A Married Couple, following a Toronto couple’s disintegrating relationship. Other notable films from the team include the dramatic features Who Has Seen the Wind (1977) and Silence of the North (1981), starring Ellen Burstyn.

Director Peter Rowe, who collaborated on many occasions with Leiterman, remembers the cinematographer’s boundless energy on a particular shoot at a 1969 rock concert.

‘We filmed the Toronto Rock & Roll Revival, and I remember he was just shooting handheld with this big camera non-stop for 14 hours,’ he says. ‘He wasn’t about any of the frivolous side issues of filmmaking. He was about being involved and making the best film that could be made.’

In 1970, Leiterman merged his vérité-style with fiction in Don Shebib’s Goin’ Down the Road, the iconic story of two Maritimers trying to make it in Toronto. Two years later, he was DOP on another Canadian breakthrough, William Fruet’s Wedding in White.

He continued to lend his gifted eye to more than 75 features and television projects, including Shebib’s Rip-Off (1971), Ticket to Heaven (1981), My American Cousin (1985), Stephen King’s It (1990) and, most recently, Rowe’s doc Popcorn with Maple Syrup.

In 2000, Leiterman accepted a teaching position in Sheridan College’s post-graduate film and television program, where he again teamed with Rowe. Rowe noted that as a teacher, just like when he was on set, Leiterman would say when he thought someone wasn’t producing to his or her full potential.

‘He had high expectations of them,’ Rowe says. ‘I think he felt it was a privilege to be able to make films, and he expected people to respect that privilege by giving all they could to it.’