Coulter was born in Glasgow in 1952. He was introduced to the local film business by his director brother-in-law, the Charles Gormley.[1] He started as a gopher for local production companies making industrial films, before moving on to load the black and white film stock into camera magazines at football matches. He went freelance in 1975.
Career
Coulter became acquainted with writer/director Bill Forsyth, shooting in his 1972 documentary short Islands of the West. He subsequently filmed Forsyth's first feature, That Sinking Feeling (1979). Coulter operated for Chris Menges on Forsyth's next pictures, Local Hero (1983) and Comfort and Joy (1984), which Coulter describes as "unmissable opportunities to work with a man I admired tremendously".
During the early 1980s he also worked on many documentaries. "Documentaries made you resourceful, inventive. You had to make things work somehow. Also the life-experience of 'travel broadening the mind' was important for me". He enjoyed a brief stint in France during the early 1980s, as an assistant to cinematographer Pierre-William Glenn, but it was back in the UK that he passed a watershed.
He was just about to start work as the camera operator on No Surrender (1985), when the original director of photography had to pull out.
