article.php

At film school, I started by shooting my own documentaries and dramas, and then other students asked me to shoot their dramatic films. I used the 16BL. I had my own Eclair MPR, and then I moved to an Aaton when that came out.

When I left film school, I got work shooting documentaries that other people didn’t want to do, like going into war zones and sailing around the world on a yacht. But that’s what put me on the map, I suppose. People in the documentary world in England knew who I was.

I did that for six or seven years, then gradually some of the students I had been with at film school started getting TV commissions, and I got work from that. Then suddenly, I was being offered feature work.

Some directors are totally focused on the script and the performances, and that places a lot of responsibility on you as the cinematographer. Other directors, such as Joel and Ethan Coen, have a very clear idea of all aspects of filmmaking. So you’re starting from a fully conceptualised film with them. But they do give everybody in the various departments the freedom to take the ball and run with it. They have this overall concept of where they want to go, and you can stretch it further.

I don’t know what they saw that I’d shot – Sid and Nancy, I’d guess – but my agent got a call one day saying they were interested in talking to me, and it was as simple as that.

They’re so organised, so in tune with what they want to do and enthusiastic about why they’re doing it. Any time I’m working with them, I know it’s going to be a great experience.

When you get offered the chance to work with a producer or director for the first time, you have to think about it. Read the script, and see if you can relate to it. Try and weigh up whether you’re in tune with the director, whether you’re happy with the way the film’s going to be made, and not frustrated by anything else. If you have questions, the best thing is not to take it.

Cinematographers have such a responsibility, and on some films more responsibility than they should have. You not only want to fulfil the director’s ambitions; you want to do more than that visually, because that’s your job. But then the producer has their own agenda, and the actors have another agenda. I’ve even heard of actors trying to dictate what lens you use to shoot them. There are a whole lot of issues, so you really have to think about it before you jump in.

I’m a great believer in prep and having a clear idea of where you think you’re going, because if you don’t have any idea on the day, at least you have something to go back to. It’s a way of working through the possibilities and saying, “this is the minimum we need to make it work.”

With Joel and Ethan, most of the time you shoot the storyboards, but you can still turn up and say, “given the way the light is, given the way the location is, given the way the actors feel more comfortable doing the scene, why don’t we do this instead?” And it can change completely. I’d say 75 per cent of what I do is on the set; it’s instinctive, and sort of spontaneous.

On 1984, we experimented a lot with different processes and film stocks. I knew Mike Radford, the director, from shooting documentaries, and we’d made a picture together called Another Time, Another Place, so we had a pretty close relationship. We talked about the look, and we both thought that ideally, we’d like to do it black and white. But there was no way they’d let us. The budget was too big for that. So we discussed how we could desaturate it, give it more contrast and produce the sort of images that each of us had in our heads. Like with any director, you start discussing the concept, then you start looking at locations and the thing gradually builds up. This was the first time bleach bypass was used on a whole movie. We used it on the print. Nowadays you can use it on the camera negative or the internegative, but back then all the prints had to be done with this bleach bypass. If we could have done then, what we can do now, we wouldn’t have needed all those weeks and weeks of agony, experimenting in the lab, and trying to get the look on 1984. Now you can virtually just turn a dial and you’ve got it.

I’ve come across some great pieces of kit over the years. When I did Barton Fink with Joel and Ethan, there was one particular shot, which started under this bed, and it moves off the springs of the bed going up and down, across the floor and into the bathroom and then up over the bathroom sink and down the plug hole. It’s kind of a tricky shot. You can’t do it on a standard Dolly. So we figured out how we could do this. We got a little jib arm and a remote head. Then we had to recalibrate the lens so it worked on a bigger cog, so we could pull focus as it went into the plug hole. Then we did a match cut just going down the drain and we got right tight into the plug hole, into black so we could fade into the next shot.

Well I’ve been working on that, with a similar system ever since, because it seemed to me, that it’s so flexible. So now I work with this little sectional jib called an Aerocrane, and the same remote head – a power pod classic. It’s very old fashioned. There are millions of heads that have come out since, but none that are any better and I still work with this system, because it’s just so flexible.

So innovations like that have made a huge difference on the way I shoot for sure. And the DI is, of course, the other major one. That’s effected the way I shoot a huge amount. On Oh Brother Where Art Thou I shot in neutral. It was the opposite of what we wanted the film to look like. Normally I would have put super filters on and tried to get as close as possible to the final look before I went into the DI. But on that I had to have this separation of the colours. I needed the colours to be as clear and uncluttered as possible so I could select colours individually and manipulate them. But on everything else, (unless I was going to do something like that again), I still try to get the negative as close as I can.

Part of Pleasantville was done with a DI process, but Oh Brother Where Art Thou was the first film that was done totally DI. Joel and Ethan had a concept of the kind of look, of the kind of film they wanted. They wanted this kind of picture book quality, with very reduced colour, but also they wanted everything to feel very warm. They didn’t want any greens. We were locked into a certain timeframe because of the actors’ availability, so we were shooting down in Mississippi in July and August, and they didn’t want greens! They wanted the fields to be burned browns as well as the trees! You go, “oh my God!”

So we spent weeks experimenting in a lab, seeing what we could do and then we heard that this DI technique was being developed. So we went to Cinisite just to find out where they were in the development process. We shot some tests and we went through the whole process and then figured that it was giving us something like what we wanted.

By the time the film was shot and edited it would be another nine months before post, so we took the gamble that the actual process would be at such a stage that we could do the whole film, because at that time, we couldn’t have done the whole film. At the time we were doing the test it wouldn’t have worked, but we took that gamble that they would get it together, basically, by the time we finished editing.

Now, if I’m on the set and I have a white wall and I want to shade the top of the wall, if I’m lighting somebody with a very soft sort of wrap around light that’s going everywhere and I try to flag off what’s immediately behind them, that might take me twenty minutes to flag it off on set. So sometimes, I’ll just do it in the DI. It’ll take me five or ten minutes in the DI as opposed to 20 minutes on set, and there are only two people in the room on the DI. It’s not like you’ve got the whole crew and expensive actors standing there. So there’s a balance now between doing it in camera and doing it afterwards in post. But that’s why it’s even more important that the cinematographer sees the project through the final imagery. It’s in my head. It’s not written down. I’m going to take the top of this wall down with a soft cut by one stop.

It’s like working with a timer at the lab really. It’s obviously going to save much more time if you work with same person and they know your likes and dislikes and kind of feel what you’re going for. I’ve worked with different timers over the years, and there’s always a danger in the whole process that somebody could take it away from you, and stretch that image any way they want to, but in a way, that’s always been the case even though you couldn’t do as much photochemically. You could still screw it up easily enough.

There was one case where I would have stretched the image a bit further than the director wanted to go. But you have that all the way through the process. I might want to put the camera there on a longer lens than the director does. I mean it happens in everything you do. In the end, it’s the director who’s making the film, and it’s his choice, so you can’t get upset about that.

It always comes down to the relationship you have with the director or the respect the producer has for you as cinematographer as somebody who is capable of producing the image that they want. If they feel that you’re the person to shoot the film, it’s only in their benefit that they trust you all the way through and I think it’s important that every cinematographer should have it in the contract. I think that we as cinematographers should stand together on this. The DI should be part of our process and it should there in the contract as such. And it has nothing to do with getting paid for it, it has to do with the principle that you’re the person who sees the image all the way through from start to finish, because a film can be taken away form you. The film can be taken away from the director and the cinematographer by the studio. It happens, so it’s not a protection against the director; it’s a statement of your role in the whole process.

The beauty of lab timing is that you weren’t there every day doing the timing yourself. You’d watch the first answer print, you’d have a couple of days and then you’d watch the second answer print and you could be somewhat divorced from it. And you could watch it with a fresh eye every time. That’s sort of a downside of the DI in a way. I don’t know what other people do, but I’m there every day. I work on every shot with a timer. I don’t say, “well you time this to match that and I’ll come back in week.” I want to be there during every shot, but then there’s a danger then that you get so close to it that you go too far.

That happened on O Brother, I suppose partly, because it was the first one where I stretched the image so far. And when the boys [the Coen brothers] came in to see it, after I’d been playing with it for a week, they said, “Oh my God!” And then it wasn’t until they described to me what they were looking at that I realised that I’d taken it way too far. But you know, I was just staring at the thing, saying, “That’s nice. Why don’t we take it further, and further, and further?” It’s like being in a red light – your eye gets attuned to the light and after a while you don’t realise it’s red.

Some people seem to fear the DI, and new technologies. I don’t fear it really. I say it’s about relationships. It’s about somebody trusting you to do your job.

We’ve talked about shooting digitally and we’ve been watching what’s out there, and watching what’s been done so far. And they… [the Coen brothers] haven’t felt that it looks as good as shooting on film, so we haven’t gone there yet.

I just watch other people’s movies to see what they’ve done. The one that’s impressed me so much more than any so far is Slumdog Millionaire. I thought the quality and the mix between film and the digital was excellent.

I want it to happen as soon as possible. I really do. I want to be shooting digital. Film seems so antiquated. It’s an antiquated process. It just happens to be fantastic at doing what it does. And I love it. On one hand, I love the mystery, but on the other hand, I hate the sleepless nights waiting for the lab report in the morning – I mean that’s so ridiculous. So I can’t wait until I’m shooting digitally.

I can’t wait because I want to see what I’m doing and see what I’m getting. And the director sees what he’s getting. It’s there we can discuss it. Either you’ve got the take, or not.

I’m not an expert on digital cameras, but from what I’ve seen and what I’ve experienced, so far it’s not yet got the dynamic range, and it’s certainly not got the resolution. At the moment, without going into specific cameras, they might look great if you’re going through the whole process digitally and you end with a digital projection, but that’s not what happens. These digital images actually have to go out onto film and that’s where they fall down at the moment. You don’t get as good of an end product when you go out to film as if you had shot film in the first place.

I don’t really see any point shooting digitally just for the sake of it. I mean, I shoot on film, I do a DI, and I get everything I need. I’ll start shooting digital capture as soon as it’s giving me more than I can get on film. There’s no point for me unless it’s giving me something I can’t have on film. There’s too much discussion about trying to get digital up to the quality of film, but it’s got to be better than film, otherwise there’s no point in changing, because film works.

There are a lot technically proficient directors, and a lot of technically proficient cinematographers, but there’s not necessarily that many that bring something that’s new and original, where you watch a film as an audience member and say, “Well, I didn’t see it that way before.”

And I think that’s what you need to do, not just be technically proficient. You can learn all the technology and the technique. I mean, it’s not easy, but it’s something you can learn. But it’s actually doing it; it’s finding your own kind of language – your own way to express yourself.

I’ve thought about directing in the past, but I no longer entertain the idea. I think you have to realise what your strengths are, and I love what I do. I love cinematography.

With intermediate effect

Roger Deakins ASC BSC