The first photograph Roger Deakins ever took, in 1969 Bournemouth, England, shows a man and a woman quietly eating lunch on a bench outside a ladies room. A sign reads: “Keep it to yourself.”
Deakins has taken countless images since that first snap. He’s photographed Fargo, Kundun and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. He’s shot No Country for Old Men, The Man Who Wasn’t There and Skyfall. He’s been nominated for 15 Oscars and won two. He’s been knighted.
But if given the chance, he’d take that first black-and-white shot exactly the same way.
Photo: AP
“I would take the same photograph now with the same situation, the same frame, the same lens,” Deakins says, chuckling. “I don’t think my eye has changed much at all.”
For decades, Deakins’ eye has been one of the keenest in movies. It’s not easy to pinpoint what makes a film’s cinematography identifiably Deakins’ work and yet it’s obvious. Something about how seamlessly the images connect. A sometimes wry perspective.
“I try to find a bit of humor,” he said in a recent interview from outside London.
Photo: AP
Deakins’ latest is Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light, starring Olivia Colman and Michael Ward as workers at a 1980s shoreline cinema in the south of England. The film returns Deakins to the coastal setting that he knew growing up in the English county of Devon and that deeply influenced him as a cinematographer and occasional still photographer. Deakins recently published some of his early photos in the stunning collection Byways.
Deakins and his wife and collaborator, James Deakins, also maintain one of the most essential podcasts on moviemaking. In each episode of Team Deakins, they interview craftspeople, offering a window into the behind-the-scenes arts of filmmaking.
Deakins, a widely revered master of the form, has built an empire of light of his own. On a recent fall day, the 73-year-old, reflected on his life in image-making, his concern for the future of filmmaking and why Byways and the podcast shouldn’t be taken as a new backward-looking impulse.
“When people come up to you and gush over your career and stuff, there are moments like that where you go, ‘I suppose I have done a lot,’” Deakins says. “But I don’t really think about it. You just go from project to project, year to year and just see how things go. That’s how I live my life, really.”
Remarks have been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
AP: Cinematography is a hard-to-define art sometimes compared to painting or described as a grammar. To you, cinematography is...
Roger Deakins A visual interpretation of a story. To aid the director in a visual interpretation of a story, really. Filmmaking is a collaborative process. Where does directing end and cinematography begin? Where does production design begin and end? Wardrobe, costume, acting. The lines change depending on the combination of characters involved. It’s what’s always been so interesting, really, about doing movies. It can even change project to project with the same people.
AP: Is the solitary nature of still-photography part of its appeal to you?
RD: It is, frankly. I find working on movies as a cinematographer really stressful. And it doesn’t get any less stressful the more experience I get, which is strange, really. I find more and more just wandering around with a still camera a great relaxation, really, because I don’t have any great pressure but my own pressure, I suppose.
AP: When you go out shooting, do you take a lot of pictures?
RD: I went out the other day for about five hours wandering around the coastline and I took one shot. (Laughs) Which is OK. It’s quite good if a get a shot. No, I don’t take very many. I enjoy the experience of just looking around and walking. The camera is kind of an excuse to do that, in a way.
AP: There are images in Byways not so distant from some of the coastal scenes of Empire of Light.
RD: Well, yeah. I grew up in Torquay and we have a place in Devon. I’ve lived by the coast all my life. We mainly live in LA., but in Santa Monica so we’re only a few blocks from the beach. I don’t think I could live far from the ocean. I find it hard shooting in New Mexico or something for four months. Where’s the sea? I like that sense of the beyond, I suppose.
AP: Is it true you once studied meteorology?
RD: I did, yeah, as a kid. When I went to art college, in the first year you had to do some other discipline as well as art. I took some meteorology courses. Mainly meteorology came because I spent a lot of my time as a kid fishing. In fact, I was fishing today out in my boat. Of course that’s very weather-dependent. It’s all connected.
AP: You’ve surely spent many hours on film productions waiting for the weather to change. Do you have a good sense for it?
RD: Yeah, I do pretty well. Especially down here in Dedham because I’ve lived here most of my life. Nowadays, you can just log on to the Met Office surface pressure charts. If you can read them, you know what’s coming. It’s kind of amazing. I never had those when I was a teenager going fishing. We had to use whether the seaweed was wet or dry. My granny used to hang seaweed in the back of the house. When it was wet, it was going to rain.
AP: Your father had a construction business. What did he make of you pursuing filmmaking?
RD: For a long time, he thought I would be ending up going back to the company and taking it over from him. It wasn’t until many, many years later that he came to LA for one time. It just happened to be the premiere of Kundun. It was at that he said, “Now I really understand why you do it.”
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