Deakins Wins Cinematography Award for Barton Fink

Roger Deakins, BSC, won the Eastman Award for outstanding achievement in cinematography at the Eighth Annual Chicago Film Critics Awards for his work on Barton Fink.

Other nominees were Allen Daviau, ASC, for Bugsy; Lauro Escorel for At Play in the Fields of the Lord, Adam Greenberg, ASC, for Terminator II: Judgment Day, and Peter James, ACS, CSC for The Black Robe.

Deakins was a still photographer before attending the National Film School in London. His other movie credits include Mountains of the Moon, Sid and Nancy, and Homicide. His most recent projects are Thunder Heart, which is due for an April release, and a new John Sayles film, with the working title The Louisiana Project.

His work on Homicide also earned a nomination for an Independent Spirit Award for cinematography. The latter is kind of an Oscar competition for independent filmmakers working on low budgets. The winner will be named March 28th at the 7th Annual Independent Spirit Awards Banquet in Los Angeles. Deakins has already won New York, Los Angeles and National Film Critics honors this year for Homicide and Barton Fink.

Almost all of Deakins' feature work has been on independently produced, low budget films.

"It's the smaller films that lead you to improvise, and quite often improvisation leads you to an idea that you wouldn't have gotten if you'd had every option in the world," says Deakins.

"The independents now and again come up with a film that's successful and makes the majors sit up and take notice, and say 'That was successful, and that was a fringe movie! Then they try their own version of it."

The Chicago Film Critics Cinematography Award is sponsored by Eastman Kodak Company.

"Cinematographers rarely get the recognition they deserve," says Robert E. Rowe, Chicago-based manager for Kodak's Motion Picture and Television Imaging business unit. "That's because their best work is usually transparent to the audience. Great cinematography should be judged on the basis of how it makes the audiences feel.

"The Chicago Film Critics nominated an extremely talented group of cinematographers for this award," he continues. "Roger Deakins can take great pride in being singled out of this group of talented filmmakers. The Chicago critics recognized his unique vision and creativity.

The fact that he won for his work on a low-budget film proves that great cinematography can be accomplished on a shoestring budget."