Ask Roger Deakins to explain what a cinematographer is, and the man behind some of the most iconic images in modern cinema will stop you right there. “I still can’t answer that,” he admits — a striking confession from the two-time Oscar winner whose lens shaped “No Country for Old Men,” “Blade Runner 2049,” and “1917.” In a new interview at Turin’s View Conference, Deakins opened up about instinct, experience, and why he believes the best images can’t be taught.
Roger Deakins (Credits: Variety)
Deakins was in Turin with his wife and essential creative partner, James Ellis Deakins, when the pair found themselves walking the city’s vast squares and long arcades. The surroundings put him in mind of Giorgio de Chirico, one of his favorite painters, who drew inspiration from the same play of light and shadow. It’s typical of Deakins: decades into a career spent looking at the world, he still can’t quite explain how he sees it — but he knows exactly how it feels.
“It’s Your Emotional Reaction That Matters”
For Deakins, cinematography begins not with a technique but with a feeling. Technical considerations can always be discussed, but the decisions that shape an image ultimately come from somewhere inexplicable — an emotional reaction to what’s in front of the lens. He described how, even in his own still photography, he tends to see the whole image rather than its individual parts. Ellis Deakins once told him that without realizing it, he is “interconnecting shapes” — something she recognized as pure instinct.
That instinct was on full display in “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.” The film trades heavily in contrasts of light and dark, yet the murder of Jesse James unfolds in a tent-bar amid snow, shot in flat, even light that leaves the killer jarringly exposed. Deakins says the look grew partly out of the set’s circumstances, but the team made a conscious choice to hold back stronger shadows — a deliberately documentary feel set against the rest of the film’s lyricism. He considers the scene stronger for it.
Experience Is the Real Film School
If instinct is the engine, experience is the fuel. Deakins is blunt about it: if you haven’t experienced things, what do you have to contribute? He shares that conviction with Ellis Deakins, his collaborator on every project since they met on Michael Apted’s “Thunderheart,” and she put it her own way — that a life full of varied experiences gives a storyteller more points of view to draw on.
He worries that modern cinema has become too inward-looking, with filmmakers drawing inspiration primarily from other films. He rarely, if ever, works that way. For him, everything you bring to a project comes from a life actually lived — which is why his own biography matters: a boy born in the resort town of Torquay who found, as a young man, that a camera offered confidence, something he could hide behind and see the world through.
A Craftsman Who Adapts to Every Director
Deakins’ filmography reads like a masterclass in adaptation. With Sam Mendes on “Jarhead,” he worked largely handheld, responding to the actors as they performed. With Joel and Ethan Coen, the process was often meticulously planned. Different methods, he says — different ways of reaching the same place. The through-line is always the same question: what matters in the scene, and where should the audience be?
Harrison Ford once observed, while discussing “Blade Runner 2049” with Ryan Gosling, that Deakins’ lighting proceeds from the story itself — leaving actors feeling supported rather than merely lit. Deakins himself misses the intimacy of older sets, of operating with the director standing beside him rather than watching a monitor from another room, and remembers the trust in a director asking after a take, “How was that for you?”
He embraces new technology when it serves the story — he has a long history of shooting digitally — but he still carries the discipline of low-budget film shoots, when every take had to count and you had to figure out the essence of a scene before rolling. He admires Andrei Tarkovsky’s long takes, the way a held shot can transform into something else entirely, and he compares filmmaking to his lifetime of fishing off the Devon coast: you never know what will happen, so you adapt constantly to the tide, the weather, and the way the fish are running.
Asked about the novel he chose on “Desert Island Discs” — “Moby-Dick” — he admitted he identifies less with Ishmael and more with Ahab: a captain going down with a whale, searching for something he doesn’t fully understand. “I’ve always felt an affinity with Ahab,” he said. Coming from a man who still can’t define his own job, that might be the most honest answer of all.
Source: Variety — read the full story there.