Stephen Goldblatt (Lethal Weapon 2) Lethal Weapon 2 (1989)
Stephen Goldblatt, BSC, ASC, was forty-three when Lethal Weapon 2 opened in July 1989. He had shot Lethal Weapon (1987) for Donner, The Cotton Club (1984) for Coppola, Young Sherlock Holmes (1985) for Barry Levinson, and was beginning a long collaboration with both Donner and the broader Joel Silver production circle. Returning for LW2 was a continuity decision Donner made as part of his "second hour of the same movie" approach to the sequel.
The blue-night Los Angeles look
LW2's most distinctive visual quality is its rendering of Los Angeles at night — a deep, almost monochromatic blue that reads as cool and slightly metallic, against which orange-warm interiors (Murtaugh's house, the consulate's library, Riggs's trailer) sit as small pools of domesticity. Goldblatt extended the LW1 look into something more saturated and graphic for the sequel, partly because the action set-pieces (helicopter, stilt house, cargo dock) were larger and required cleaner geographic legibility.
"We wanted Los Angeles to feel cold at night even though it's not. The blue is character — Riggs lives in a city that has been emptied out. The warm interiors are the only places anyone can be safe, and the case keeps bombing them." — Stephen Goldblatt, American Cinematographer (1989)
The trailer-chair midpoint scene is shot in a single dominant orange-warm key (a single practical bulb in the wrecked trailer's ceiling) against blue ambient through the broken trailer windows — the warm-cold contrast keyed to maximum, the trailer interior reading as the only lit space in a dark world. The lighting is part of why the scene feels structurally sealed off from the rest of the film: it is composed in a different palette.
The cargo-bay sequence as Goldblatt's set-piece
The Alba Varden cargo bay — the climax's primary battleground — was shot at the Port of Los Angeles inside an actual containerized cargo ship Donner's location team rented for the week. Goldblatt used available practical lighting (cargo crane sodium lights, ship deck floods) supplemented by minimal HMI augmentation, which is why the sequence reads as so geographically real compared to most action-film hold sets.
"Goldblatt shot the cargo bay like a noir. The shadows are deep, the spotlights are practical, and you can see exactly where Riggs is and where Vorstedt is at every moment. That's not luck. That's a hundred decisions about where the lamps were placed before they rolled." — Roger Deakins, ASC interview, American Cinematographer retrospective (2010)
The diplomatic-immunity climax shot — Rudd standing over the wounded Riggs, Murtaugh emerging from cover with the gun — is composed in three distinct lighting zones, with Rudd lit from below (sodium dock light), Riggs from above (overhead crane floodlight), and Murtaugh in shadow until the moment of the shot. The shadow-emergence of Murtaugh is the visual punctuation of the line.
What followed
Goldblatt continued with Donner on Lethal Weapon 3 (1992), Lethal Weapon 4 (1998), and Conspiracy Theory (1997). His career outside the Donner/Silver orbit included The Prince of Tides (1991, for Barbra Streisand), Batman Forever (1995), Striptease (1996), Closer (2004, for Mike Nichols, his first Oscar nomination), Charlie Wilson's War (2007, his second nomination), and ongoing work into the 2020s. He served as president of the British Society of Cinematographers in 2007–2009.
The Lethal Weapon four-film visual continuity is largely Goldblatt's. He shot all four. The blue-night LA look, the orange-warm interior key, the cargo-dock sodium spill, the freeway-chase telephoto compression — all are consistent across eleven years and four directors of photography would have been a more typical run.