Born in Birmingham, Venville was the child of deaf parents. He was, in the words of his uncle, "caught in some no-man's land between the deaf world and the hearing world." Venville attended Solihull College and Polytechnic of Central London, graduating with honors with a BA in film, video, and photographic arts. Breaking out with a campaign for Wrangler in 1991, he became an acclaimed and sought-after advertising and fashion photographer. In 1992, he began directing commercials, starting with an advertisement for Audi. Venville has three books of photography. Layers is a collection of Venville's advertising, celebrity, fashion, and personal photography. Lucha Loco is a collection of over a hundred portraits of lucha libre wrestlers taken on a 2005 trip to Mexico. His third monograph The Women of Casa X, portraits of elderly prostitutes from Casa Xochiquetzal in the infamous Tepito district of Mexico City, was published by Schilt Publishing in 2013. His short film career began with Silent Film, an 11-minute film documenting the romance of his deaf parents. He also directed a pair of short documentaries about actresses in small memorable roles: Remembering Sister Ruth, about actress Kathleen Byron, who played the disturbed nun Sister Ruth in Black Narcissus, and the 15 minute Remembering Miss Torso, about actress Georgine Darcy, who played the voluptuous neighbor Miss Torso in Alfred Hitchcock'sRear Window. Venville initially turned down a number of offers to direct feature films, including Coyote Ugly, because he wished his feature film debut to be a planned movie called Deaf Road, about his uncle's attempts to lose his virginity in Tangiers. It would be entirely in sign language, which Orlando Bloom had pledged to learn to star in the film. Venville's feature film debut was 44 Inch Chest, a gangster film starring Ray Winstone, John Hurt, Tom Wilkinson and Ian McShane. It reunited the writers and some of the cast of an earlier British gangster film, Sexy Beast. He also directed Henry'sCrime, a romantic comedy starring Keanu Reeves, JamesCaan, and Vera Farmiga.
