“Overcast creates the most beautiful kind of light a cinematographer could ask for,” says McLachlan on the phone, just 15 minutes from the Millennium studios.

For three seasons, McLachlan has been projecting Vancouver’s grey shadows into the personal nightmare of Frank Black (Lance Hendrikson), a weathered telepathic former FBI agent who gets into the heads of killers, unearthing millennial prophecies.

Millennium is creator Chris Carter’s follow-up to The X-Files, but while the two programs both explore the paranormal, they’re visually miles apart this season. Since The X-Files moved shooting from Vancouver to Los Angeles, the show’s “look” has grown progressively darker, as if to compensate for the sunnier climes. Mulder and Scully often appear mud-coloured, even unfocused. On a bad day, the show looks like a fuzzy photocopy of its little sibbling, the aways dark — but never muddy — Millennium.

“In the first season, the scripts were similar to great film noir of the ‘50s. The attitude was that things were pretty grim and they were going to get worse, so I tended to light in very black and white style,” says McLachlan in his calm, measured voice. “In post-production, we were pulling a lot of colour out.”

This season, Black’s wife is dead, he has a fetching, Scully-esque new partner (Klea Scott), and he and his daughter have moved from Seattle to Washington. Aesthetically, while The X-Files wallows in darkness, Millennium is lightening up. Of course, the shift is from dark black to dark grey; Millennium is never going to look Melrose Place-shiny. McLachlan still shoots Black’s flashbacks in 16mm for a grainy, alienating effect, and Hendricksen’s craggy face remains a battleground of shadows. But the Washington setting has lifted some cloud. In the Christmas episode, viewers saw actual yellow light, a.k.a. sun.

“Rob has always respected the script. He doesn’t impose a certain look unless it’s called for,” says Eric Till, a Toronto director who worked with McLachlan on two TV movies. “He’s a sensitive soul.”

Born in San Francisco, McLachlan moved to Vancouver as a child. While a film student at Simon Fraser University in the ‘70s, he made a 7-1/2 minute film about the closing of the peanut butter machine at the downtown Woodward’s department store. The film told the story of the man who had been churning out the peanut butter since the store opened, absent only when called to fight in the Second World War.

The little documentary cost McLachlan $1,200 and won first prize at the B.C. Student Film Festival. McLachlan took the money from his follow-up industrial films (on eggs and asparagus) and started his own production company, Omni Productions, with partner Michael Chetchik. The two shot Yukon tourism ads and travelled around the world filming for Greenpeace.

In 1987, McLachlan photographed a “pretty tacky” series called Sea Hunt, a remake of the Lloyd Bridges show. Sea Hunt  landed him in the union just as the West Coast film and TV iindustry started to heat up. McLachlan shot The Beachcombers, The Commish, and Strange Luck, another creepy-goings-on series from Fox.  Though Strange Luck flopped, Chris Carter noticed McLachlan’s imprint.

“Strange Luck was art directed and lit with a firm reference Edward Hopper. I’ve also been inspired by Andrew Wyeth for the kinds of moods he could create,” says McLachlan. The home he shares with his wife and daughters (his oldest daughter studies film at SFU) holds a collection of Emily Carr paintings and contemporary Canadian art.

“Rob brings an almost painterly quality to his work,” says David Hauka,  director of Impolite, an independent film that earned McLachlan the 1993 Canadian Society of Cinematographers (CSA) award for feature film photography. “If you see a Turner you like, he’s probably shot it.”

For Millennium, McLachlan received an American Society of Cinematographers award nomination last year, and won the CSA’s award for best TV series two seasons in a row.

But nowhere is the show’s visual success more obvious than in the number of imitators Millennium has wrought. Brimstone, Profiler, Nikita — all have back alley texture that’s very McLachlan.

“I’ve noticed some (imitation),” says McLachlan, diplomatically. “Some of them have adopted that look for the sake of having a look. If dark is cool, they want to be dark, but if their stories aren’t dark, it doesn’t work.”

McLachlan claims there’s been no talk of Millennium pulling an X-Files and relocating to L.A. “Chris Carter is pretty committed to Vancouver” he says,“And I love the rain.”