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Deakins Explores New Frontiers in the Art of Cinematography This article
originally appeared in the Winter 1995 issue of Flashback: It had to be a magical experience for Roger Deakins, BSC, ASC. Just a few months earlier, he was invited to join the American Society of Cinematographers. That was a dream come true. Now, he was at a dinner honoring nominees for the 1995 ASC Outstanding Achievement Awards. He was being feted for The Shawshank Redemption. The dinner was held in the intimate environs of the ASC clubhouse. Deakins was momentarily standing alone in a quiet corner of the room at the conclusion of the informal ceremony. You could see him glancing at Haskell Wexler, ASC, Conrad Hall, ASC, Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC, Owen Roizman, ASC and other cinematographers whose work he had admired. Now, he was one of them. It had to feel a little surrealistic. Deakins also earned his first Oscar nomination for The Shawshank Redemption. That was another extraordinary experience, but he says that there was something tactile about the ASC nomination that touched him on a visceral level. Maybe it was a sense of history. Who knows what ghosts of legendary cinematographers linger in the ASC clubhouse? Deakins went on to win the ASC award, but it was almost anticlimactic. By then, he was in Minnesota, where he was working with Ethan and Joel Coen again, this time on a film called Fargo. It was a happy reunion. In 1991, he shot Barton Fink with the Coen brothers. It earned him Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and National Film Critic Awards for cinematography. In 1994, they collaborated on The Hudsucker Proxy, a much bigger and more elaborate production. His other credits include Thunderheart, Air America, Homicide, Pascali's Island, Mountains of the Moon, The Kitchen Toto, Sid and Nancy -- Love Kills, Passion Fish, Long Walk Home, Secret Garden, White Mischief, Stormy Monday and 1984. Deakins has come a long way from Devon, England, a rural seaside town, where he was born and raised. "I was very insular during my youth," he says. "I have vivid memories of my mother teaching me how to draw when I was very young. I spent most evenings painting. She was an actress for a while and very artistic." Deakins subsequently enrolled in a fine arts program at a college in Bath. The problem was that instead of the fine art department, where future painters and sculptors were being molded, he was taken into in a graphic arts curriculum. "I had no interest in a career as a magazine or print ad designer," he says, "but the department had a large darkroom and I made my own key. I started taking photographs of people around the countryside. When no one else was around at night, I let myself into the darkroom and processed and printed my pictures. I loved photography." When the National Film School opened in London, Deakins was among the first applicants. He wasn't accepted during the first year, but got a commission to take still photographs of country life in Devon. It was a formative experience. A year later, Deakins re-applied successfully. He concentrated on learning about non-fiction filmmaking. "After graduation, I tried for a job as an assistant cameraman," he says. "No one would hire me, so I looked for work shooting industrial films and documentaries. " During the late 1970s, Deakins and a friend filmed Zimbabwe, a documentary sponsored by the African National Congress. They did it under the guise of making a tourist film, but in reality they were recording what was going on during the civil war. His next documentary was about an around-the-world yacht race. He spent a full year directing and shooting a film onboard the yacht as it raced around the world. There were also films about other guerrilla wars in Africa, and anthropological documentaries about endangered tribal communities. The latter were made at locations in India and Africa. Usually, the crew consisted of Deakins and a sound recordist. In-between these non-fiction films, Deakins was filming television dramas, mainly for Channel 4. In 1983 Deakins photographed Another Time Another Place for director Mike Radford, and that led to an opportunity to shoot an adaptation of George Orwell's 1984 with the same director. It was his first studio film with big time stars, including John Hurt and Richard Burton. It was also Deakins' first effort with a large cast and crew. It was a turning point in his career. "I'd always shied away from working with a lot of people on big productions," he says. "I discovered that I loved being part of a big team collaborating on a film." Two years later, Deakins shot Sid and Nancy - Love Kills in London, Paris, New York, Los Angeles, and New Mexico. Afterwards, he drove across country and got a feeling for the size and scope of the United States. When Deakins came back to film Barton Fink in 1991, he decided to plant his roots in Los Angeles. He explains, "There's an anything goes spirit about filmmaking that I love in this town. Your crews will try anything. That's a great way to work." Deakins was in the middle of filming Hudsucker, when he read the Shawshank script. "I knew it was special," he recalls. "I can't explain why. The characters were very strong. The bleakness of the situation appealed to me. Life can be ugly as well as beautiful. It requires a different approach to lighting. Some people think we shot everything in natural light. I suppose that's a compliment, but there isn't a single scene shot in available light. We started shooting at 8:00 a.m. before there was enough light inside the cellblock. It wasn't unusual to finish after 7:30 p.m. when the sun was going down. We basically lit through the windows and from a rig in the middle of the room, using silver reflectors and bounce light. That enabled us to control the angle of light precisely." Deakins says that no one anticipated that Shawshank would be a smashing critical success, but he understands that serendipity is an essential ingredient. "I thought Mountains of the Moon was a tremendous film," he says, "but it never caught on, Maybe it wasn't what people wanted to see when it was released. I hope it will be discovered someday by future audiences. But, that isn't what makes a film great." What makes a film great? "If a film creates a world that you can go into as though it's an entity to itself, you have succeeded," he replies. "A successful film should create a feeling of place and time, and a sense of how the people in the story live their lives. I always thought that if you could show people what life is like for their neighbors, it could only help change things for the better. I still believe that. That is what great filmmaking is - an exploration of ourselves." Fargo is set in 1989. It's a fiction film which feels like a re-creation of reality. The story revolves around a car dealer who hires two criminals to kidnap his wife. The goal is to extort money from his father-in-law. Deakins draws an analogy to Blood Simple. "Everything goes wrong," he says. "It's a dark comedy with great characters." Deakins says the reunion with the Coen brothers was a real advantage. "If you feel that you have the confidence of the people you're working with, it gives you more freedom to do your job," he says. "It eliminates questions about why you are using so little light, and why you are doing this or that. If you don't feel you can take risks, you can't achieve anything of any interest as a cinematographer." The look came from his reading of the script, seeing the locations, discussions with the Coen brothers, and the interactions of the cast with one another." "In the beginning, Joel and Ethan, wanted the look to be bland and monotonous," he says. "It is to a degree. We shot in Holiday Inns and deliberately chose other mundane settings. That was the nature of the story they wanted to tell. They wanted it to suggest reality -- a documentary feeling. One of the things we did was rely on longer lenses. We actually got up to a 135mm, and sometimes 200 mm. It was probably the first time that the Coen brothers had shot with that lens. It distances the audience, and casts them in the role of voyeurs." Fargo is photographed in 1.85:1 format. There are landscapes and huge flat, white snowscapes that are germane to the setting. That sparked a brief discussion about shooting in anamorphic format to capture the essence of that environment. But, much of the story happens in drab motel rooms and bars. Deakins explains that it was important to frame the story in the normal format ratio. But, unlike Shawshank, there's a riot of colors. "It's more in the vein of Stormy Monday, which was kind of a noirish, colorful film. We visually associate bright colors with cheap motels and bars," he says. "It's pure Americana. In Shawshank, we intentionally muted colors to create an underlying disturbing visual tone. In Fargo, I shot interiors in tungsten light, and let the windows go cool. The interiors got really warm with lots of fluorescent and colorful signs. Many scenes are dominated by one color with little splashes of something else. I used a lot of red splashes. It was fun following my instincts." Night exteriors are punctuated with a sodium vapor look from streetlights. "It used to be cool a mercury look for streetlights," he says, "but that no longer reflects reality. Sodium vapor light has kind of a sickly color, and that worked for us. There's this one scene where a murder of sorts (guess what that means) occurs on a rooftop, in the aura of this sickly orange light. In no way does it look prissy. That's what I mean about sometimes things are ugly, and you can use that to your advantage in shaping the mood." Basically, in Fargo, colors come from environments, costumes and props. Deakins is a purist when it comes to filtering the quality of light coming through the camera lens. "I very rarely put anything on the lens," he says. "I prefer clarity. I think that's the essence of photography, whether the images are still or moving. I like everything to be punchy. I don't like gauzes and things in front of the lenses. There are probably films where that would be the right thing to do, but I haven't shot one yet. I want the audience to feel the experience of being there, and not be distanced by artificiality in a way." Deakins continues, "I'm not a technology freak. I've used the same light meter for 15 years. I think a lot of films today rely on special effects and digital wizardry. It's great if it helps you tell the story, but all of us tend to get seduced by new toys. Remember, when everyone was over-using the zoom lens? Now, the camera is moving like crazy in so many contemporary films. It's okay if that is the best way to tell the story. But sometimes, new technology gets in the way of telling the story." Fargo was, as with all their films, storyboarded from the start, but Deakins says that there was a significant amount of visual interpretation at the moment of photography, though noticeably less camera movement than they used on Hudsucker or Barton Fink. In those films, the camera flowed with the action like an invisible actor. In Fargo, the camera places the audience more in the position of a passive observer of seemingly very real events. Deakins believes in testing film stocks to see how they fit the look and the requirements for photographing his picture. His testing before shooting Fargo led him to the decision to shoot primarily with the Eastman EXR 5293 film. "It's fast enough (E.I. 200 in 3200 K tungsten light) for almost any situation," he says, "and there's almost no noticeable grain intruding on the quality of the image. Generally, I would rather squeeze an extra stop of exposure latitude out of 5293 than resort to the use of a 500-speed film. I think you get as much speed with less grain." On the other side of the equation, Deakins says, "I don't think the grain is appreciably more than (Eastman EXR) 5248 (film), so why use a slower stock? It's a matter of individual taste and preferences for lighting and shooting, and it changes everytime someone induces a new film. I shot Homicide with 5296 precisely because it gave me a grainy, harsher look. I don't know if I would make the same decision today. I'm a different person with broader experiences today, and I have more options."
"Sometimes I get up in the morning and look in the mirror and remind myself that I helped to create this movie that 10 million people are going to see. It could be a billion people by the time it goes through TV and videocassette distribution. I don't consciously think about it everyday, but I find the lack of responsibility on some films, where the violence isn't justified in any way by the content of the movie, appalling. Hopefully, 25 to 35 years from now, I'll be able to look back and feel proud of the films to which I have contributed." Deakins' next release is Dead Man Walking, directed by Tim Robbins. "It's about a guy on death row, but it isn't a prison film in the genre of Shawshank," he says. "Shawshank was a little bit of a fairy tale in many ways. Dead Man Walking is based on a true story about the relationship between a man on death row (played by Sean Penn) and a nun (played by Susan Sarandon). It is much more a provocative discussion of the morality of the death penalty and less poetic, if you like, than Shawshank."
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