A Conversation With
Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC

By Bob Fisher with Beverly Wood

Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC was born and raised in a small seaside town called Torquay in Devon, England. His mother had been an actress before the war and was an amateur artist. Deakins spent his school days painting and enrolled in art school as a graphics arts major. At art school he discovered still photography. He subsequently completed his education at the National Film School. After graduation, Deakins focused on documentaries for some seven years, on subjects ranging from the wars in Rhodesia and Eritrea to a trip of nine-months duration in one of the entrants on a round the world yacht race.

He earned his first feature credit shooting the low budget Another Time, Another Place for Channel 4 television. His later credits in the UK would include 1984, Sid and Nancy, Stormy Monday, White Mischief and Mountains of the Moon. Deakins began his collaboration with Joel and Ethan Coen in 1991 with Barton Fink. In 1995, Deakins earned an Oscar nomination and the American Society of Cinematographers Outstanding Achievement Award for his work on The Shawshank Redemption. There have been subsequent Oscar and ASC Award nominations for Fargo, Kundun and O Brother, Where Art Thou? Deakins has compiled some 38 narrative credits including such other memorable films as the recent HBO film Dinner With Friends, Imagine entertainment's A Beautiful Mind, and his sixth feature film with the Coen brothers, The Man Who Wasn't There, which is being released in black and white.

The following are excerpts of a conversation with Deakins, including some additional comments by Deluxe Labs technology guru Beverly Wood discussing the process used to release some 100 prints of The Man Who Wasn't There in black and white:

ICG: Tell us about where you were raised in England?

DEAKINS: I was brought up in a sort of fishing, sailing, boating community called Torquay in Devon, England. It was a great place for a kid to grow up and I love it there. I still keep a flat nearby.

ICG: Were you interested in photography or movies as a youth?

DEAKINS: I was mad about movies. My brother and I would walk three to four miles, sometimes in the rain, to see films. I joined a local film society, but I never thought movies could become my career. I still remember watching The War Game, a film by Peter Watkins about what would happen if a nuclear bomb went off in London. It sort of felt like a documentary, but it was a fictional film. It was made for the BBC, but it was banned until the '90s. For some reason our film society had a copy of the film. It was a terrifying film. Some of the ladies in the screening fainted and a couple ran out of the theatre. I remember being impressed by the power of filmmaking.

ICG: Is that when you started thinking about becoming a filmmaker?

DEAKINS: I didn't know what I was going to do. The headmaster told me I should plan to work in a bank or do something like that. I rebelled against that idea. Although I loved the sea I was desperate to get away from the restrictive small town environment I was in, so I applied to an art school. My mother was an actress, and she was really good at painting, so she had some influence on my thinking. She died when I was nine or 10 years old. I started painting when I was very young. I really wanted to be a painter. Everything I painted was very, very naturalistic.

ICG: Where did you go to school?

DEAKINS: I applied for entry in an art course at a university. I don't remember why that didn't work out. I think I applied too late. Basically I was a bit of a mess as a kid. I didn't know what to do. I knew I didn't want to work in a bank. My father was a builder, and, sadly for him at the time, that was the last thing in the world I wanted to do. I spent most of my time by myself, painting very dark morbid pictures. I was accepted as a graphic arts student at Bath Academy of Art in a little village called Corsham, Wiltshire. They also had a fine arts department where they taught painting and sculpturing.

ICG: How did you get from art to cinematography?

DEAKINS: I discovered photography at art college. There was a darkroom, and I kind of pinched the key one day and made a copy of it. I would work at night in the darkroom when everyone else was asleep. I would go off for weeks at a time just taking pictures. Then, I would spend all my time in the darkroom. I also did silkscreen printing, etching and other graphic arts, but photography really took over my life. At the end of the course, they said, well, 'you've got all these photographs, but you haven't really done anything else. How do you expect to make a living?' I didn't know the answer.

ICG: What did you do after graduation?

DEAKINS: When I was at art college, I heard that a National Film School was opening in London. I applied thinking that maybe I'd get into documentaries, because I had grown to love that form. I went for an interview, but didn't get in. The head of the film school looked at my photographs and said none of them were filmic. I remember thinking it was a stupid conversation about whether an image is filmic or not. There was a picture on his wall, and he said that it was filmic. It told him it was out of focus. He said, ‘no, it's filmic because the shutter is slow.’ It was a picture of a horse and cart in a yard, and the horse and cart was blurred because it was moving. When I left the interview, he said, ‘we'll see you next year.’ I thought, well I've got a good chance. They obviously like me, but I need some experience so I can show I'm filmic. I was quite lucky because I got a job as a photographer making a record of country life in Devon. The idea was to document this kind of world before it died out. It was a great opportunity. I loved it. When I left, somebody else took over the photo project and it continued for many more years. A year later, I gained a place at the National Film School, even though my photographs weren't blurred or filmic. (Actually one was of a dog corralling sheep and the dog was blurred, as it was moving so fast, so perhaps that is why I was accepted)

ICG: Who were your early influencers?

DEAKINS: We had cinematographers like Dick Bush and Ozzie Morris teaching classes. Film school was great. It was very unfocused at the time, because it had just started. They didn't really have an infrastructure, and (head of the school) Colin Young didn't want to impose anything. It was anarchy in a way, and I think he was right. Everybody had a set amount of money every year, and they could either chose to pool it with other people, or make their own films the way they wanted to make them. I made documentaries, and also put money towards other people's projects, so I could shoot their movies. Mainly, they were dramatic films and occasional documentaries. I think I shot 15 films in three years. They ran from 30 to 90 minutes each. I was shooting constantly.

ICG: Did you have an idea what you wanted to do when you graduated?

DEAKINS: I wanted to make documentaries like Frederick Wiseman or Ricky Leacock. A number of documentary filmmakers came to the school and were sort of tutors. When I got out of film school nothing happened. I looked around for work as an assistant. David Putnam advised me to get a job at the BBC as a clapper-loader and work my way up. I was already 25, so I didn't want any of that. Maybe I was a bit cocky, but I wasn't getting any work as an assistant, so I decided I might as well be unemployed as a cameraman. I was going around with the films I'd shot for other people at the film school looking for work as a cameraman. One of my first jobs was at ATV, an independent channel. They were looking for someone to shoot an around-the-world yacht race and also be part of the crew. I said I'm your man for this because I'm from South Devon, where all the sailors come from. Actually, I had only been on a yacht once, but I managed to convince them I knew everything about sailing. It ended up being a two-hour film that wasn't just about sailing. It was really about how the crew got along in a confined living space and under extreme conditions over a relatively long period of time.

ICG: It sounds like it tested you in a lot of different ways?

DEAKINS: Yes. Early on I had to prove to the skipper and crew that I was going to be able to do it. There was a sea trial before the race from where the boat was based in Scotland. We went off on this trial sail a couple hundred miles off the north coast of Ireland. This incredible storm hit us. We had to take all the sails down and batten the hatches. Everybody sat down below deck. I had the camera, and I was filming the skipper as he was being sick, puking into a bucket, but it was so cold all my batteries had lost power. The camera wasn't running at speed, but it didn't really matter. Then he handed me the bucket below frame. He reckoned that if I could hold a camera in that situation, I was the guy to do the job. It was nine months sailing around the world, and I was very seasick for about the first six weeks; but I still managed to film.

ICG: Did you just carry the film with you for nine months?

DEAKINS: We stopped at three different ports, Capetown, Auckland in New Zealand and Rio; so it was like four trips with each being six to nine weeks of sailing.

ICG: Did you put it together at the end?

DEAKINS: No. It got taken out of my hands because of union rules. The producer decided that the editor was going to be the director. I thought, how can that happen? He wasn't even on the boat. He wasn't going to know anything about sailing. He had nothing to do with it except he got credit as director, which I was a bit annoyed at, but there was another project they wanted me to do, following the guerrilla war in Eritrea, then the most northern province of Ethiopia. I was a so-called director/cameraman working with a journalist. I was there for three months. It was one of the most amazing experiences of my life.

ICG: Why was that?

DEAKINS: The people were so amazingly resilient. We started filming in a lot of different places, but in the end we focused on one little village called Zager on the front line. The EPLF(Eritrean Peoples Liberation Front) were basically a Marxist leaning liberation movement. They had started to politicize the peasantry, trying to teach them socialism and the benefits of having a communal society. It was really interesting. At that point, the people had been fighting this war for 20 years. They were absolutely amazing.

ICG: Were you getting an idea of what film could do, not technically, but as a form of communication that affects society?

DEAKINS: Absolutely. That was why I wanted to do documentaries. That was really the thrust of my interest. I worked on documentaries for about seven years. I photographed some anthropological documentaries in India and the Sudan, always as a freelancer, and I did a film about the war in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). A sound recordist and myself flew in under the guise that we were making a tourist film. We were to meet up with one particular journalist but this original contact was arrested and thrown out of the country so at the last minute we had to team up with someone else. Often on documentaries it was a sound recordist and myself.

ICG: Was there a point where your focus shifted to dramas?

DEAKINS: Yes, John Saunders and I were making a film about schizophrenia. We managed to get some money from independent television to make a film about mental health and the treatment of outpatients in one particular hospital in South London, which dated back to Victorian times. We spent three months at this hospital following different outpatients. We'd sit in on the doctor's meetings when the people were taken into the hospital, and then we'd basically judge whether they were suitable subjects. We talked to the doctors about who they thought we should or could follow. We followed eight patients through their treatment and back into society when the hospital and the doctor said they were well enough to leave the hospital. We discovered some details about these people's lives that the doctors never knew. When you can put a camera on somebody it's like therapy at times and they become so free in the way they talk about their lives. We found out, for instance, that one of the patients had a kid who she hadn't seen for 30 years. Another one was this old Jewish lady who had escaped from Germany hidden in a barrel on a merchant ship. All of her family had been killed in Germany in the Holocaust. The doctors never knew these things. There was an Irish laborer who lived in Kilburn, whose wife had taken up with somebody else. They were living upstairs and had given him the basement. This poor guy had just kind of fallen apart. Anyway, we followed these people, and it was just so awful to realize that it meant nothing. They were soon back to where they were before they went into the hospital. It was just as they say, like a revolving door. I started to feel like it was so voyeuristic that I didn't want to be there anymore. These people had become so attached to us, because we seemed to be the only people listening to them. There was this one dear lady who lived in a tower block in Notting Hill. She was on the 14th floor. We went to visit one day to film her, and she was absolutely out of her head, puking everywhere, screaming and shouting. My friend John said, ‘well, we've got to film this’, and I said, there's no way I can film this. It takes away her dignity. We ended up making her a meal and trying to get her somewhat right, and then we did film her. I still felt bad about it. It was too voyeuristic. That was really the time when I drew away from documentaries.

ICG: How did you get an opportunity to work on dramas?

DEAKINS: I began working with directors I had met on documentaries and at film school. In 1983, I did Another Time, Another Place for Channel 4, with Michael Radford, a director I had met in film school, and the following year I shot 1984, based on George Orwell's book, also with Mike directing. It had a great cast, John Hurt and Richard Burton. It was my first studio film with a lot of effects, which I mainly did in camera. It was the first time I worked with a big crew and I enjoyed it.

ICG: I noticed you've worked with Michael Apted? Did you meet him shooting documentaries?

DEAKINS: No. I did Thunderheart with Michael after I had moved to the States. I never met him in England. I didn't really know many people in the industry in England.

ICG: You also did some early films with Mike Figgis?

DEAKINS: Yes, I did two films with Mike, including his first dramatic film, which was for Channel 4, and then I worked with him on Stormy Monday.

ICG: What brought you to the United States?

DEAKINS: The first time I came here was when I was working on Sid and Nancy.

A part of that film was shot in New York. I had never been here before, so I took kind of a holiday and drove around the country. I met Ethan and Joel Coen later by luck, really. I think they had seen 1984, Sid and Nancy and Stormy Monday or some other film. They called me because Barry Sonnenfeld, who was shooting for them, was going to direct. At that point, I was kind of backing away from films. I had just done a big picture, Air America, which I thought was kind of a travesty. I don't mind being honest about it. I was really upset with the way the film went. It was a fantastic subject. It could have been a hard-edged kind of black comedy about Laos and the American involvement there in the drug trade during the Vietnam War. Instead it became an insipid buddy movie. I just thought it was a wasted opportunity. You could have said and done so much with that movie. I felt it was kind of obscene.

ICG: What was your first impression of the Coen brothers?

DEAKINS: I was a little nervous about the idea of two brothers directing the same movie, but after meeting them and hearing their take on life and film, I found they were low-key and very natural. There was nothing pretentious about them, and I loved their work. Raising Arizona and Blood Simple are absolute classics. I hadn't seen Miller's Crossing at that point, but I jumped at the chance to work with them. They really are one of a kind in the film industry. There aren't many directors who have their ability to work with the medium. They're really complete filmmakers.

ICG: Was your first movie with them Barton Fink?

DEAKINS: Yes. I remember being incredibly nervous, and hating dailies every day. I so wanted to do it well, and I was thinking, it's not good enough. One day I left dailies and I was quite honestly almost in tears. I thought they were awful, but a lot of it was the printing. I'd never worked with the lab before and they didn't seem to care about my stuff. I guess I didn't have “a name". It was funny because Joel said afterwards that the dailies looked sort of up and down, but that in the end it was a great looking movie. I still really hate watching dailies, but I don't get quite so strung out these days.

ICG: Why did you decide to move to Los Angeles?

DEAKINS: I don't really know why I moved to Los Angeles. I'm sort of a rural, country person, and this is probably the last place in the world where somebody like me should come to live. I did Barton Fink and then Homicide with David Mamet, and I was just about to start Thunderheart with Michael Apted. I thought, I'd give it a shot and get an apartment here, but I ended up falling in love with this little beach house.

ICG: What was it like working with David Mamet, a playwright?

DEAKINS: It was a great script and a great cast. It was a hard film because there wasn't a lot of money, and we were shooting on small natural locations in Baltimore with a lot of nights. I thought it was a good movie. I was quite proud of it.

ICG: What about Passion Fish?

DEAKINS: I did Passion Fish with John Sayles. It was a great experience. I think it was 31 days, and we actually finished a day under schedule. I remember the heat and mosquitoes. John drew thumbnail sketches of the things he wanted. He was really very prepared. He had to be because we had so much to do in such a short time. The thing I remember most is doing the scene where the two main characters are on this boat going through the bayou at night, and they see animals, like an alligator, and also an owl. I said to John, I don't know how we're going to do this at night. I had to figure out some way of lighting the scene although the area where he wanted to shoot had no roads—no access for a moonlight or something for the backgrounds. So we put a spotlight on the boat - actually a car headlight. By itself it was just enough to light the animals and the environment as the boat passed by. Otherwise they were surrounded by a very spooky blackness. There was no other way that I could think of for us to do it. On the night of the shoot we had a big, double-pontoon barge with a little jib arm on it boomed out over the picture boat that was tied alongside. We had a dolly on the pontoon, so we could move from character to character. The animal people had staked out a crocodile and other animals along the banks of this stretch of water. Of course, the day we were going to shoot, it poured absolute torrents of rain. The grip, Tim Pershing, was pushing the boat out and I was asking him, are you sure about this? Everybody wanted to be on the pontoon underneath the awning out of the rain. They pushed the thing out and, of course, it started to sink because there were too many people. It was chaos. Luckily, about an hour later it stopped raining and we managed to organize and shoot the scene.

ICG: How about The Shawshank Redemption? How did you prepare for that?

DEAKINS: I don't know how you prepare to do a movie. You are really prepared by your life's experience if that's not a too pretentious a way of putting it. Other than that, you read the script and talk with the director. I got the script while we were in the middle of shooting The Hudsucker Proxy, and we started shooting six weeks later.

ICG: Do you think the fact that you started out doing documentaries helps in a movie like The Shawshank Redemption?

DEAKINS: I don't know whether that helps or not. Would the film have been better if someone else had photographed it, someone who came from a different background, I don't know. My personal style, the way I like to light and move the camera, really does come from documentaries.

ICG: When you're reading a script for the first time, are you seeing the images in your mind at that point?

DEAKINS: No. The first time I read the script I'm seeing if I can relate to the characters, and if has something to say. Does that sound pretentious? I don't read it thinking this is going to be visually interesting. I think if I can relate to the people or the situation, or if it moves me-and that's a personal thing—then I'll read the script again and think about it visually. It's the story first and foremost that draws me to a film, though obviously I love working with Joel and Ethan. I'd shoot the phone directory for them.

ICG: Have you ever been surprised, where something turns out to be better or worse than you thought it was going to be?

DEAKINS: Yes. I'll be honest about it. I've been fired and I've left movies too, because it obviously wasn't working. I can't do films where you just go in and make it up as you go along, maybe with an operator who wanders around with a Steadicam and grabs stuff. That's not my style. I really think you have to consider why you're making a film. What's your point of view and how are you going to break down scenes? I don't enjoy just shooting coverage. There's nothing in that for me apart from a paycheck and there are far less stressful ways of making a living. Somehow films are rarely better than I imagined them to be; certainly they seldom live up to my dreams or even expectations photographically.

ICG: What are your memories of Kundun?

DEAKINS: That was one of my life's great experiences. Marty (Scorsese) is a brilliant director, because he has such a clear concept of where he's going, and he relies on you to bring that concept to the screen. Apart from that, it was a wonderful experience because of the people and the subject. It was an incredibly moving experience, because the Tibetans were actually living their history on film. Outside of doing documentaries, it was probably the most moving film experience I've ever been involved in.

ICG: Have you ever gone back and done a documentary?

DEAKINS: Not since the one I did in the mental hospital. I've always thought that later I'll go back to doing documentaries. I don't know whether that's just a romantic sort of notion. There are times in your life when things fit…when it is the right time and the right place. Doing documentaries at the time was right for me. I'm not sure it would be the same today. Everything is much more newsy, faster and information driven. How many films like the ones Wiseman made are produced today? Not many. I suppose that watching the terrorist attacks and reports from Afghanistan on CNN it makes you realize how inadequate any fiction film is because you never get that depth of feeling that happens with reality. But for the most part documentaries today are the equivalent of the tabloid newspapers.

ICG: Is it harder or easier working with the same directors like the Coen brothers on a lot of movies?

DEAKINS: It gets easier in many ways, but it gets harder, as well, because they attempt to do more challenging and more complex things. Look at the last one, The Man Who Wasn't There. It's a very small and character driven film, but it was still quite complex to shoot. We were actually shooting a black and white and a color film at the same time.

ICG: I wanted to ask you about that, because you and the Coen brothers decided to create the black and white prints optically on the last film whereas on O Brother, Where Art Thou?, you desaturated greens in a digital intermediate process. How was that decision made?

DEAKINS: The digital route was something we'd talked about as a possibility on O Brother as Joel and Ethan had such a specific look in mind for the picture, but it wasn't seriously considered at the beginning mainly because of cost. We shot some film tests that didn't give us the look we wanted, and I think it was Joel who said, 'Why don't you look into it?' It just started as an idea, gradually became a possibility and then, with the backing of Kodak a reality. We used it (digital mastering) as an overall timing mechanism. There were things we could do, such as changing the green of the trees to browns and yellows, that you just couldn't do in a lab.

ICG: On some films, the director, and sometimes producers have taken over control of the digital intermediate process. Was that ever an issue on O Brother?

DEAKINS: No, not at all. Joel and Ethan never even thought about doing that. I was timing the movie in Los Angeles and they were in New York. They visited Los Angeles once, and I also sent them the first passes where we were establishing the look. They thought it was a bit extreme, so we pulled back a little bit. But, during the actual day-to-day digital timing, I was there (in the digital suite) alone with the timer. There are so many ways you can create a look in the lab, and obviously with digital timing there are many more ways you can do it. It's a good thing and a bad thing. I'm very picky about timing the final film, and making sure I'm getting the best look out of that negative I can get. If there's one thing I learned from digital timing is that in a way you've got too many variables to leave it to someone else.

ICG: Is this something film schools should be teaching now?

DEAKINS: They definitely should be teaching it now, because it's going to become more important during the next few years. I still think there are many problems that haven't been worked out, and not just technical problems. The big question is who's going to control this process? What is going to be the structure of timing a picture digitally? Obviously, I think it's the cinematographer's domain. One of the wonderful things about the chemical process is that it is kind of mysterious. Producers don't tend to go to labs very often, because they think it's something they can't understand. There is also something mysterious about it, because you can't see stuff that happens in the dark with chemicals. But when you get into a telecine bay, producers, directors, studio heads, anyone can watch and say, 'What if we make that more - or that's too yellow." It's not mysterious anymore. There's a danger that the whole process is going to be taken away from the cinematographer. You already see that in the digital world. I read an article where George Lucas was saying that if he had a two-shot and wanted a single, he could just manipulate it. It's a gray area where the role of the cinematographer is going to change. It depends on what kind of films you want to make. I wouldn't be very interested in making the kind of film where you lose that collaboration. It's kind of sad. I always thought one of the wonderful things about documentaries is you were showing something that was real to somebody that had never seen or never experienced it before. We had a chance to do something like that in films like Kundun or Mountains of the Moon, where we were recreating a real environment. I don't know how you do that in a computer. Somehow it's going to be artificial and sterile, even if technically you can't see where the computer images blend with film. It's also one of the differences between shooting film and digital. Joel and Ethan rarely do more than one or two takes on film. It's often only me asking for the second take. They know what they want and they've gone through it with the actors. Filmmakers like them or Marty are focused on creating a moment or a series of special moments on film. If you've just got the tape running in an endless stream, and you just do it over and over again, you might get better pieces and you can join the pieces together and manufacture something that's good; but there's no focus on that special moment that can really happen only once. What I've always loved about film, documentary or fiction, is that everybody is working towards that one goal. That's really special. I don't think you can create that feeling with a computer out of nothing. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but that's the way I feel. I'm not against computers, but it's a different kind of filmmaking.

ICG: What were your first reactions to The Man Who Wasn't There?

DEAKINS: When I read it, I thought it was a touching, dark, funny and absurd story. In many ways, it was like reading the script for Fargo. There's something about the character of Ed that's touching and sort of haunting…something that kind of moves you. You don't know what it is, but it's something very special.

ICG: At what point did they decide they wanted it black and white?

DEAKINS: They wrote it as a black and white film.

ICG: Was it because of the period or the content or both?

DEAKINS: I think they wrote it feeling it should be black and white for the period and for the noir-ish idea. I don't think there was any specific reason. It's how they write. They've been talking for years about this black-and-white movie they wanted to do. I hadn't read the script, though they thought I had. One day, I asked if they were going to give me the script sometime? Eventually we got to make it because White Sea, which we were going to do, fell through, so we did the black-and-white movie.

ICG: Did you actually shoot black-and-white tests?

DEAKINS: We shot side-by-side black and white, (Eastman) Double-X and (Eastman) Plus-X, and different color stocks. We found different ways of making black-and-white images from the color stock. We looked at them side by side to figure out which image quality we liked most. We actually liked the black-and-white images from the color original better than the original black-and-white. It was a number of things. It was the sharpness, the depth of blacks, and it had details in the highlights and shadows without losing this incredible sort of black and white feel to it. It was also a lot less grainy than the black and white stocks.

ICG: Is there a commitment to release videocassettes in color?

DEAKINS: Yes, USA Films (the distributor) has a standard deal which requires providing a color master for overseas cassette, so they felt obligated to have the ability to do that, even though we hope nobody's going to insist on a color version. It wasn't like they were trying to force it on us. They didn't have any options. You have to give a lot of credit to Beverly Wood (at Deluxe labs) who figured out exactly how it was going to work. We just did endless tests. I say ‘we,’ but poor Beverly did them really.

WOOD: It was truly a collaboration. It always is with Roger. He is very clear about what he wants, and we tried to figure out a way to get there. It was interesting, because, as everyone knows, not a lot has been done with black and white in recent years. Roger shot some tests in black and white, and had really fallen in love with that look, so we had to figure out how to get there starting with color negative. We got the idea of printing onto a black and white film Kodak (5369) makes for titling. Basically it's designed to reproduce the blackest blacks you can get. Most titles are white characters on black backgrounds, so you want the black as black as you can get it. The film has been around for a long time.

ICG: Do you know if anybody has ever done anything like this before?

DEAKINS: Wasn't The Girl on a Bridge printed on a black-and-white sound stock?

WOOD: Yes. A lot of people have used this technique for printing dailies over the years; but this was a step further. I don't think anyone has ever released on 5369 to this magnitude. We did a lot of testing. The objective was to make Roger happy. He didn't want it to look like a color image printed on black-and-white film.

DEAKINS: The first tests using this title stock looked very contrasty to my eye. Beverly lowered the contrast in development, and we got to an image that to my eye was far superior to the black-and-white film. It was crisper, sharper, less grainy, and the blacks were deeper with more details in the shadows; and the highlights never blew out. It was an amazing look. We also tested different negatives, and I decided to use (Kodak Vision 320T) 5277 film. It has a very tight grain structure, and it's quite low contrast—it was perfect in combination with the 69 title stock. I fell in love with that look, and then it was really up to Beverly to find a way to make it work. I believe they've done something like 100 prints on 69, and the rest has to go through an intermediate onto color release print stock.

ICG: How did you handle timing for the different release formats?

DEAKINS: The timing was kind of complicated but because we always saw dailies on 69 we always the reference for timing numbers. We never really went into this in that much detail, but if you've got a negative that you've exposed as a blue night scene say- I had to keep in mind that we may use this as a color version- that was going to translate onto the black and white stock slightly differently than a warm tungsten-lit night interior. But we never really discussed it in a lot of detail. I automatically adjusted my thinking and trusted the guys at Deluxe to do a great job. I wasn't seeing problems, so I wasn't concerned.

WOOD: I'll tell you my version. Thank you for that compliment, but it's really there on the film. Let's start at the beginning. Roger's rendition on the negative was full. Tonality was very important to him. Once he saw it on 69, the question for us, even for show prints, was, is the duplicate negative going to give us the same rendition as the 69? We took his original negative and made a 5369 print. Roger looked at it and liked it. Then we made a color IP and used it to make a color internegative, which we printed onto 5369, which we matched to the 5369 guide print. What we found was that if it looked good on 69, the interpostivies and internegatives on the Kodak stock saw it the same way. If we had to time it on differently for the color (meaning a B&W image on color print stock from a B&W intermediary) and black and white (69 stock release prints), it would have been more difficult. In fact, it would have been a nightmare.

ICG: Were Joel and Ethan Coen involved in this process, or did they leave it to you to get the look they wanted?

DEAKINS: No, they weren't involved in the tests. Not at all; but they kept asking me every day on the set, how's Beverly getting on? That continued after the shoot. They were asking, how's Beverly doing? How are we going to release this picture?

ICG: Were you totally confident that everything would work?

DEAKINS: I was actually very anxious, to be honest, though I always thought we had a fallback position, which was releasing everything on 69. As it happened the fallback position was the best position, anyway.

ICG: Did you think about using digital intermediate as an alternative?

DEAKINS: No, because at the moment there is a quality loss. It's not film resolution, yet. When we did O Brother, we were coming from a Super 35 negative, so I don't think we lost as much image quality in that case as we would have if we were shooting straight 1:8:5.

ICG: You know there are people out there who say that the cinematographer is the only one who cares what the images look like. The audience doesn't notice. How do you respond to that? Does the fact that they'll see it in black and white affect how the audience experiences the film?

DEAKINS: It definitely affects them just like the choice of lenses, or how you move the camera, or balance composition, or decide what is lit in frame and what's dark. The audience doesn't, necessarily say, 'oh, isn't that wonderful, look at how that's lit', or 'I like the balance in that shot,' but subconsciously it's all coming together and giving them a way of looking at the content. I don't think people understand how important these decisions are in telling a story. What lens you use? How close you are to the subject? How much the camera moves or doesn't move? If the angle is high or low, if the camera is moving in or pulling back, or if the print is black and white?

ICG: Are those decisions intuitive or are they something you can learn?

DEAKINS: I think they are intuitive for the most part and are refined through experience. For me my experience has grown through stills and documentaries, If there's a scene playing in front of you, you've got to decide how to capture it in a single frame or compress it into a series of shots of a reasonable length of time, getting the angles that tell the audience what is happening. It's not just about who's speaking, it's also about the reactions of the other people in the frame and how important they are to one another.

ICG: What are your reactions to the digital projection demonstrations?

DEAKINS: In a lot of places, digital projection would be better, because normal projection is so bad. I remember watching tests we shot for O Brother in a theater in Mississippi or maybe it was Carolina while we were scouting. It was appalling. It was out of focus. It must have been a light level about eight. It was just unbelievable. I complained to the manager, and he said it's always like that when they show movies, and that was a modern cinema. If you had digital projection that is good as when Texas Instruments wheels their machine out and you see it at the DGA that would be something. But is that really going to happen at all those little cinemas? I think they are going to have the same problems they have today. It's not about the technology. It's about the lack standards and caring.

ICG: I'm going to change the topic for a few moments. Early in your life, you were a painter. Are there things you learned then that apply today?

DEAKINS: You could never say I was myself a painter. I painted for my own satisfaction but you could hardly say I was a painter. In fact I think I learned a lot more from still photography in practical terms. In fact, I've just started doing stills photography again. I built a darkroom in the house about a year ago. Its something I've always wanted to do. If I'm not working, I just go off and wander around and take pictures, usually of people. I've spent a lot of time wandering around taking pictures of people at the seaside, amusement arcades and things like that.

ICG: Are students and young filmmakers asking you about the future?

DEAKINS: Yes, a few of them are. My answer is that everything has always been in a state of flux technically. However, you're basically still telling a story whether it's with a film or a digital camera. You are still using a lens and composing a frame that tells the story; and you tell stories with composition and light falling on objects in that frame.

ICG: What's the worst part of this job?

DEAKINS: The worst thing for me is calling the laboratory in the morning to see if there were any problems. I always get my assistant to do it, but I'm always standing near the phone so I can hear. As yet, I've never had a real problem, but I'm still nervous about it.

ICG: If you could go back in history and pick out a director, dead or alive, to work with, whom would you choose?

DEAKINS: John Huston. I thought he had such versatility. Most of his films had such a deep feeling for humanity. John Huston was a guy who brought all his experience and feelings for humanity into his work. Fat City, The Man Who Would Be King and Moby Dick are among my all-time favorite movies. They were films made by somebody who understood the world. I think that's something we're losing now. We see technically brilliantly made films that are emotionally dead. They seem to lack any feeling for humanity or any understanding.

ICG: Are you pessimistic about the future?

DEAKINS: I'm not pessimistic at all. I'm very optimistic, but I think we have to get back to realizing that we are all part of a much bigger world. I see that happening.

ICG: You said earlier the role of the cinematographer's going to change?

DEAKINS: I think everything about how we produce and access media is going to change. There is obviously going to be some interface between movies and the Internet and the streaming of information. There are questions about whether movies will exist as movies. I think they will, because it is a different experience. When photography came along, some people predicted that painting was dead. Now we have digital technology, and some people are saying, film is dead. I think film (the experience if not the celluloid) is going to be there for a long, long time, the same way painting is still appreciated.

ICG: Still, there are people who say digital cameras are so easy to use that you won't need a cinematographer. For example, Michael Cimino said that last year at the CamerImage festival of cinematography that he's going to shoot all of his own pictures?

DEAKINS: I think film is best as a collaborative medium. Some people are saying they everyone will be able to make their own movies and show them on the Internet, so we won't have cinemas. That may be true but how come there aren't more great novelists and more great stills photographers? Today, everybody has a camera and everybody has a pencil, typewriter or computer but not everyone is writing great novels. Very few people will ever make great movies and those that do will always need other people.

ICG: Do you think movies have a role in society besides entertainment?

DEAKINS: Yes, absolutely, otherwise I've been wasting my time. Movies surely have to be entertaining; hopefully they also communicate something about humanity that puts us in touch with the world. They have to stimulate us, and make us think and feel things. I think all entertainment must be meaningful in some way in order to really satisfy us.

ICG: If you were going to do a documentary now, what would it be?

DEAKINS: I would love to be making a documentary about the situation that is going on in the world now. I think it's fascinating how two incredibly cultured, important strains of civilization have got so little understanding about each other. I mean, they call us the great Satan, and you hear how a Sikh is killed because he looks like a terrorist. There's so little understanding here about the Muslim world, and so little understanding from their side about our world. It would be wonderful to deal with that in a documentary. We should be dealing with this issue in our fiction, as well. It's such a fascinating topic. When I was working on documentaries, the ones that really worked were stories about clashes of cultures or ideas. I shot a film in southern Sudan about a tribe called the Nuba. They were absolutely wonderful people. They were naked and into body painting. They had there own rich culture. The northern part of the Sudan is Muslim, and it is more like a Middle Eastern culture. The government of Sudan was taken over by a strict Islamic sect that resulted in this war between the north and south for some 20 to 30 years. We were filming this very African tribe in the south, and the government sent in trucks and trucks filled with clothes. These army guys stood there ordering these people to put clothes on, because they thought it was unbelievably primitive that there was a BBC crew filming a documentary about people in their country who weren't wearing clothes. It was funny, because we filmed all this. The people would take the clothes, and they would hand them to women behind them, who handed them to someone packing a donkey or a camel, and they went straight off to market. Nobody put the clothes on. They sold them to other people down the road. The government tried to build a mosque in the middle of the village. We asked if they were going to stand there with guns and make the locals go in and pray? It was such a fascinating story about how there's such a lack of understanding by people from different cultures.

ICG: If you had a son or a daughter who came to you and said, 'I'm going to go to film school' now, would you be horrified or glad?

DEAKINS: I don't have children, so it's a very hypothetical, but I think it's a great profession. I don't know any other endeavor like this one. I don't like to be negative, but there are only so many people that actually get to shoot movies. I consider myself very, very lucky. In the end, a lot of it isn't about talent. It's a lot of it is luck, where you are, who you happen to work with, who has seen or didn't see your films. Sometimes a film hits a particular nerve with an audience, and suddenly its successful and you're successful. But, that success doesn't make you more talented than somebody else. People do ask me how they can become successful cinematographers? I really have no idea. Everybody, Haskell Wexler (ASC), Connie Hall (ASC) and everyone else who has succeeded has taken a different route.

ICG: A cinematographer has to be a lot of different things to a lot of different people. How do you cope with that aspect of the job?

DEAKINS: That can be hard, because I'm not a very gregarious person, and you have to function as a leader of a large group, your crew. You are also dealing with production assistants, directors, producers, studio people, costumers, hairdressers and so on. That whole side of the business was alien to me. I can cope a little bit better now that I'm used to it, but it's still very hard. I'm in my element when I'm on the set, lighting and working with the actors and director, but all the other stuff I find really hard. There is a lot of politics, and a lot of different things you have to do.