He has captured Hollywood's and pop music's biggest stars on film, and was a nominee at this year's Oscars for Atonement, but cinematographer Seamus McGarvey recently enjoyed the finest accolade of his career when he was given a civic reception in his home town of Armagh, he tells Michael Dwyer

EARLY one morning last January, Seamus McGarvey was asleep in Los Angeles when he got the wake-up call most people in the film industry dream of. His wife, Phoebe, was on the phone from their home in Edinburgh with the news that he had just been nominated for an Academy Award.

His outstanding achievement with Atonementhad earned him a place on the shortlist for the best cinematography Oscar. "I was really surprised to be nominated," he says. "It was a very strong year for cinematography. I knew I hadn't a ghost of a chance of winning, so we just went along and enjoyed the night. It was slightly nerve-wracking, but it was great."

A few weeks earlier, he had been honoured by his peers in the American Society of Cinematographers with a nomination in their annual awards. His work on Atonementbrought McGarvey a succession of accolades, but none meant more to him, he says, than when he returned home to Armagh recently to be given a civic reception, surrounded by his family and friends.

It was while still in his teens in Armagh that he became interested in photography. It started with stills when he got a present of a camera, and set up a darkroom in his house. Encouraged by teacher Paul McAvinchey, McGarvey shot a series of black-and-white photographs of Armagh, where they were shown at his first exhibition. Turning to moving pictures was a logical progression, and he later enrolled at film school in London.

"It was a great course," says McGarvey, who will be 41 on Sunday. "It was practical. I got to experiment with cameras. It allowed me to get dirt under my fingernails and do something that was a hobby for me. I had a part-time job at the ICA in London, which was an education, too. I was seeing experimental films and meeting filmmakers. There was a sense that filmmaking was an exciting pursuit, and more importantly, that it was an art and not just a job people do."

After graduating in 1988, he shot a number of short films, forming a creative relationship with artist Sam Taylor-Wood on her shorts, from the Turner Prize-winning Atlantic to Love You More, shown at Cannes last month.

"I get on really well with artists," he says. "They make you do things that are different and that challenge your views. I'm always trying not to do things that are formulaic, and artists don't have that kind of headset."

McGarvey moved on to feature films with Butterfly Kiss(1995), which also marked director Michael Winterbottom's cinema debut, and worked on the first features directed by actors Alan Rickman ( The Winter Guest) and Tim Roth ( The War Zone).

"We shot The War Zonein Devon, and were blessed with these great storms sweeping over us. That was very helpful photographically in expressing the danger running through that film. It's one of my two favourites from the films I've worked on, along with Enda Hughes's Flying Saucer Rock'n'Roll, which was great fun to make.

"I had just done Butterfly Kiss, so I thought I was a bit of a big shot. I walked on to Enda's set in Keady and it was just a shed. There was a stink of slurry that made my eyes water. Then I opened the door of the shed and it was like Hollywood.

"There was this forest inside. The set was amazing. We didn't hold back. We shot it in anamorphic, which is normally this format reserved for something like Lawrence of Arabia."

A chance encounter during the Edinburgh Film Festival led to McGarvey making his US debut with High Fidelity(2000), the Stephen Frears film of Nick Hornby's novel. "That was an incredible break," he says. "I was in a pub in Edinburgh and I met this man. I didn't know it was Stephen Frears. He was desperate to get a cameraman for his next feature because someone had let him down. Three weeks later I was in Chicago, shooting High Fidelity. I have very happy memories of that."

How does he feel when shooting finishes, after having worked closely with a cast and crew for several months? "It's a release because everyone is exhausted," McGarvey says, "and a kind of delayed release because you've all worked so intensively in a very intense, collegiate environment. You've lived those months in an entirely fictional world, but you've had to keep your feet on the ground. And then it's 'Okay, torch the village.' The sets you've photographed lovingly for weeks are destroyed."

It must be very different when production gets under way and the cast and crew tentatively get to know each other. "Yes, you have to be able to make those shifts and be elastic in order to deal with new crews every time because you will be working together for three or four months. It tunes your diplomacy."

When he worked on The Hours(2002), McGarvey found himself on a team with a cast led by Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore. How did he get the job? "I got a call out of the blue from the director, Stephen Daldry," he says. "We're just hired hands, really. You get a call, usually amongst a lot of other people. If you're lucky, you'll get the job. There are lots I don't get. It's great when you do get it and the project is as illustrious as The Hours. I was desperate to get it, but of course, I didn't want to show that."

As a memento, Kidman gave McGarvey the prosthetic rubber nose she wore for the movie. "It's on our mantelpiece at home," he laughs. "Every time she had an emotional moment in the film, her face flushed beautifully red, but the nose was like a candle at the end of it. At the end of filming, we all went to the pub and she gave me this nose because it was such a nightmare shooting it."

An even more demanding shoot was Sahara(2005), Brett Eisner's action movie starring Matthew McConaughey and Penélope Cruz. "We were shooting in Morocco, so we thought the weather would be great, but there were storms and flash floods, which presented several problems. One action scene took about three weeks to shoot. We had about six camera crews on the ground, on the sea and in helicopters."

Yet it must have been even more daunting to work with Oliver Stone, who has a reputation for being abrasive, on the 9/11 drama World Trade Center(2006).

"I know that's his reputation, but he wasn't like that at all in my experience," McGarvey says. "Except for the first moment I met him. As soon as he heard my accent, he said nobody would understand me - and he persisted in calling me Sean McManus. When I watched the DVD extras, I was absolutely mortified. Oliver Stone sub-titled me!"

Would he work with Stone again? "Oh, I would," he says. "He's actually a really affectionate man. He backed me all the way on World Trade Center. We couldn't over-light it because it would have looked like a Hollywood movie, and that would have cheapened it. We had to make it feel real, and that involved expressing darkness in a way that would allow audiences to experience the obscurity, as well as seeing the actors' faces and their emotions.

"I would send the footage to the laboratory and beg them to expose it just enough and to print it as darkly as possible. Oliver would be happy, but the studio would scream at me."

McGarvey followed that with Charlotte's Web, a bright, sunny, beautifully lit fable. "With each film, you're trying to learn something," he says. "We shot it in Australia, and the whole family went. My daughter Stella is an extra in it. It was entirely different to anything I ever shot before. I loved the story, but technically, it was a nightmare because of all the animals in it. Pigs do not love horses, you know, and sheep do not love spiders. It was an education for me to work on that film."

Never one to shirk a challenge, McGarvey devised a virtuoso extended tracking shot for the wartime evacuation of Dunkirk in his next movie, Atonement. "That was tremendously difficult to set up technically because it was all going to be in one shot and we had over 1,000 extras," he says.

"It happened out of expediency because we had to shoot a lot of scenes over two days. We were on Redcar beach and the tide was coming in and the light was really terrible, except in the evening. Joe Wright, the director, and I looked at the tide times and the light trajectory, and we decided to do the scene in one shot."

Seamus McGarvey's video days: that's him just behind Natalie Imbruglia

SEAMUS McGarvey has photographed and directed dozens of music videos for, among many others, , Paul McCartney, Coldplay and Robbie Williams. "When people are making a video - and I've encountered this with stars as well on feature films - they're not egos," he says. "They're too busy doing their jobs.

"Filming live gigs can be a bit hairy. I went on tour with The Rolling Stones and I was a cameraman on the stage. It was exhilarating, but you're definitely part of the flotsam and jetsam of a live gig, and sometimes it seems that you're getting in the way.

"I love music, and music videos are a great way of experimenting, whereas working on feature films can be more conservative. There is so much freedom. Visually, you can go full throttle, pedal-to-the- metal. There's a lot of energy that can go to waste on a feature film.

"I still do music videos because they refresh me. It's like defragmentation every time I do it. I've sat in an editing suite sometimes and watched footage that just doesn't work. If it was a feature film, you'd be fired. Music videos allow you to fail beautifully, and in private."

And his favourite of his own music videos are . . .

Ebeneezer Goode
The Shamen
"That was a bit mental. A whole generation of conservatives frothed at the mouth when they saw the video. It was made for just £500. I shot it with this little Bolex camera on two three-minute rolls of film. It turned out really well."

Roll Away
Dusty Springfield
"I photographed it and co-directed it with Sean O'Hagan. It was Dusty's last video, but we didn't know that at the time. She was very ill with cancer. We shot it on the Burren, which was important to her. She was very close to Ireland and very proud of her Irish heritage. Her real name was Mary O'Brien.

"It was very cold and the shoot was very trying for her, but afterwards we had a few restorative tinctures and Dusty sang unaccompanied. I still get goose pimples thinking about it."

Torn
Natalie Imbruglia
"That's a narcissistic choice because I appear in it for a few seconds with my light meter. I was wearing a T-shirt with what I thought was an image of an abstract flame. I discovered it was actually a vagina. Somebody in MTV picked up on that, which is why my T-shirt is pixelated in the video."