NEW YORK (AP) â 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: âKeep it to yourself.â
Deakins has taken countless images since that first snap. He's photographed âFargo,â âKundun" and âThe Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.â He's shot âNo Country for Old Men," âThe Man Who Wasn't Thereâ and âSkyfall.â He's been nominated for 15 Oscars and won two. He's .
But if given the chance, he'd take that first black-and-white shot exactly the same way.
âI would take the same photograph now with the same situation, the same frame, the same lens,â Deakins says, chuckling. âI donât think my eye has changed much at all.â
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. âI try to find a bit of humor,â he said in a recent interview from outside London.
Deakins' latest is Sam Mendes' starring Olivia Colman and Michael Ward as workers at a 1980s shoreline cinema in the south of England. The film, currently in theaters, 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
Deakins and his wife and collaborator, James Deakins, also maintain one of the most essential podcasts on moviemaking. In each episode of 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 âByways" and the podcast shouldn't be taken as a new backward-looking impulse.
âWhen 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 donât really think about it. You just go from project to project, year to year, and just see how things go. Thatâs how I live my life, really.â
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...
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. Itâs 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?
Deakins: It is, frankly. I find working on movies as a cinematographer really stressful. And it doesnât 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 donât have any great pressure but my own pressure, I suppose.
AP: When you go out shooting, do you take a lot of pictures?
Deakins. I went out the other day for about five hours wandering around the coastline and I took one shot. (Laughs) Which is OK. Itâs quite good if a get a shot. No, I donât 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 âBywaysâ not so distant from some of the coastal scenes of âEmpire of Light.â
Deakins: Well, yeah. I grew up in Torquay and we have a place in Devon. Iâve lived by the coast all my life. We mainly live in L.A., but in Santa Monica so weâre only a few blocks from the beach. I donât think I could live far from the ocean. I find it hard shooting in New Mexico or something for four months. Whereâs the sea? I like that sense of the beyond, I suppose.
AP: Is it true you once studied meteorology?
Deakins: 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 thatâs very weather-dependent. Itâs 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?
Deakins: Yeah, I do pretty well. Especially down here in Dedham because Iâve lived here most of my life. Nowadays, you can just log on to the . If you can read them, you know whatâs coming. Itâs 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: Directors must often turn to you to ask when the sun is coming out.
Deakins: Yeah, thatâs one of the big pressures on a set, especially when youâre shooting a lot of exteriors. Like on â1917,â that was a huge pressure because we didnât want to shoot anything in the sun. Sam would say to me, âItâs not your responsibility, Rog. You canât control the weather.â I said, âBut, yeah, everyoneâs looking at me.â
AP: Youâve said you wished you could have made a film with John Huston (âThe Maltese Falcon,â âKey Largoâ). Is there a style of moviemaking that doesnât exist anymore that you wish you could have been a part of?
Deakins: I do see films moving in a direction of everythingâs got to be so naturalistic and softly lit. I used to love film noir and black-and-white cinematography, especially people like or , their use of light. I think thatâs kind of changed. Thereâs not that stylization and I think thereâs a place for that. Of course, thereâs a place for total naturalism. And I should talk because I do quite a lot of naturalism. But I think we are losing that whole range of ways of creating a world through cinema.
AP: âEmpire of Lightâ seems to be participating in a dialogue about moviesâ shifting place in culture. Do you ever fear for the future of the medium?
Deakins: I have for a while. My heroes when I was starting out, when I was a teenager and first turned on to movies, were and (Andrei) and . Theyâre people that were telling stories in different ways. They werenât linear narratives. It wasnât a series of talking heads. Especially with Tarkovsky, thereâs a structure to his movies that is a kind of visual poetry. But itâs more than poetry because itâs visuals and itâs sounds and itâs a whole bunch of things. I canât talk about it, but it leaves me emotionally drained watching You canât put your finger on it, and that, to me, is real film. (Michelangelo) Antonioni could do it and (Luchino) Visconti did it. I donât see much of that now. I see a lot of talking heads and linear narrative storytelling and, frankly, it bores the hell out of me.
AP: Youâve been thinking this way for a while?
Deakins: Iâve been very lucky. Some of the films Iâve done like âThe Assassination of Jesse Jamesâ with Andrew Dominik or âKundunâ with Martin Scorsese. Thereâs something about those movie thatâs more than just a story. Theyâre attempting to do something thatâs pure cinema. I donât see so much of that. The films that are being made, some of them are great. But I donât see that range.
AP: Why do you think that shift happened?
Deakins: I donât know. Thereâs also the kind of action films as well. Itâs becoming a very narrow vision. I donât know. Maybe because itâs easy. It guaranteed theyâre going to make money on those kind of films. But I donât see producers and studios taking chances now so much. For me, the best year of cinema ever was 1969. You had You had âThe Wild Bunch.â You had âZ.â I mean, it was an amazing number of films that one year, and you think the equivalent hasnât happened since. And they were all so different. One of (Sergio) Leoneâs films came out that year, as well. The difference in stylistic approach in the same genre, you donât see that now. To Leone, film is like opera or something. It shouldnât work but it does. Itâs so over-the-top itâs just absolutely awesome. I watch âThe Good, the Bad and the Uglyâ or âOnce Upon a Time in the Westâ quite regularly because theyâre so moving.
AP: Your father had a construction business. What did he make of you pursuing filmmaking?
Deakins: For a long time, he thought I would be ending up going back to the company and taking it over from him. It wasnât until many, many years later that he came to L.A. for one time. It just happened to be the premiere of âKundun.â It was at that he said, âNow I really understand why you do it.â
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Jake Coyle, The Associated Press
