Sir Roger Deakins Breaks Down His Most Iconic Films | GQ

Joel said uh we're doing the script No Country for Old Men I just read the book I said well aren't you going to direct and they said well we might I said I'll never talk to you again if you don't direct it 1917 . Blick let's talk about this for a minute why I don't think you should move the camera unless you've got a very important reason for doing so I'm in 1917 it was really useful because you're telling a story in a very particular way and it's a real time story and you're following basically one character it worked it immersed the audience within this in this story you know we had to design basically the shot in our heads and on a diagram before the set could be built before the trenches could be darker because everything had to be built to the actual action at the time the action would take a time that the dialogue would take with two guys walking at a certain speed and we went to Aryan said you know we were going to do this film so I really like to shoot it on the LF but I can't do it on the studio LF I mean it's not as heavy as a 535 maybe you know film camera but it's still kind of too heavy to run on a lightweight gimbal sorry we said to Harry well oh if you can't do it there are some other cameras that we could use and Harry said well oh my well we thought about making one but not for a few years and I said well it's only it's next year they said okay we we promise you we can get you two prototypes it was a trick that I'd done on Jarhead actually leaving a set of Lights in shot and then just replacing those lights with a fire element the night scenes under the oil fires we basically shot them on stage at Universal we had the two big stages with the door open in the middle and basically filled it with kind of sand dunes and then I lit that entirely with household bulbs you get in my Home Depot and I had them on you know chasing dimmers and so they gave a sort of flicker so when we came to do 1917 and the burning church I thought well okay I need to like 360 but this time I need to light a huge space because a schofield's journey is enormous really running that's quite a long sort of old trip and there were very specific places where the light needed to be so I figured to make the biggest pile of Lights I've ever done I could just sort of balance each light in this huge rig and you know punch it out a little bit where I needed a bit more of a hot spot or soften it all down that was really very controlled prisoners tell me where they are that was the first film I did with Denny and I think some of it we storyboarded but I know Danny and I spent quite a while talking through the script talking about Concepts and ideas and just the feel of the thing which uh that sort of period I think is invaluable and I love it you know then he calls it the the one time you can dream because as soon as you get to the production and reality hits and everything's compromised I mean whatever you think of anything you've ever done you look at it and you know it's a compromise the trick was to get the rain and to get the rig on the car and to get the town where they're driving through the town and get the number of vehicles not only stunt vehicles but actually just local people to turn up with their cars that was a big effort that was the last day of shooting in fact and it took to the end of the shoot for us I say us for Danny and I really to get friendly to get production to sign off on it on on that number of cars and that and control that street luckily it was a small town street and it wasn't going to be very busy late at night I couldn't light it there's no way you could put lights in it so I needed the street lights to work you know the shops to be lit that lent to leave the lights on in certain times and you know so there's all those things you have to work out we were both very glad at the end we actually managed to do it because there was some doubt about it for a while we hereby Paul Dino a few months ago and he was really gushing about the energy that team deacons had that there was this quiet professionalism we've worked very much with the same core people you know my first assistant Andy Harris I mean I worked with since doing Fargo on every movie I every movie Mitch Lillian the key grip um you know early reader gaffer I've worked with many many times times since Sid and Nancy they all know the kind of set I like which is quiet and I I you know I'm always behind the camera they know that they have more responsibility because I am at the camera so they have to be attentive to things that might change rather than having me go and try and find where they are to get something else done you know so it's a very very tight group of people it's nice to hear somebody like pull down and say that I think one of the cinematographer's main responsibilities is to create a set that is it's in inviting it's a safe place for an actor to do what they have to do because if you didn't have the performance you wouldn't have anything in most films you owe it to them really and I think that's really important I mean I'm kind of a nervous person especially on on a movie set but I was nervous I am as I am you've got to understand and actors are as well and and they're the ones kind of putting themselves on the line on the screen really Redemption because if you do what did you say 35 000 35 000 all of it all of it every penny you better start making sense if you want to keep all that money give it to your wife I was the American Society of cinematographers Clubhouse one time in there some of my heroes that this obviously with years ago talking about this film and saying yeah it was really well shot but you know it's much easier when you just use natural light they didn't realize but I mean the whole cell block is a set that's built inside a warehouse yeah we shot in a real prison but only the exteriors and the messel was a real prison and some corridors and to do that I had to have every every HMI that my gaffer Bill O'Leary could get hold of in America in the states we had in Mansfield lighting that location the daylight because we were shooting a 12-hour day you could maybe shoot two or three hours with natural light in some of those rooms but you'd have to make sure it was a nice day you don't want to over dramatize it I mean the shot of timus when he escapes when he's standing looking up the Heavens with his arms out and the rain I mean that's as dramatic as it gets maybe that's a little too dramatic as well but so there was a huge amount of lighting in it and I thought it was kind of flattering when they said they they didn't feel there was any lighting involved sicario [Music] well that was like okay so it's getting dark so how are they gonna see and how are we gonna see how's the audience gonna see well I read this it was Danny well it's all very well but if you want the audience to see anything that's going to be a cheat and then he said well what if everything is seen through their assisted Vision And I said Okay well I've done night vision enough I did it in a film called courage Under Fire quite a lot of it but the problem is then how do you just differentiate between the characters points of view then he said yeah it'll be all right we need two different systems my wife and I James and I we kind of were doing research on this and and found this company called FLIR who were doing kind of high-end infrared imagery and they lent us a camera that we could um experiment with so you get a very different image like that from you know what is basically a heat sensor as opposed to something that is an image intensifier that is actually just taking the Starlight or whatever and just put the hell out of it one shot we we shot during the test which was following somebody as they were going down the steps into the tunnel a prop guy heated up the soles of their shoes so they're really hot so the beginning of the shot they're walking and it's like really you see these Footprints really bright and by the time they get to the bottom of stairs it's faded away you know it's a really interesting trick there's a shot in the film like that but it's never held long enough that you see the footprints disappear but my favorite scene in the film probably is in the kitchen it's just a simple two-hander between Emily and Benicio [Applause] I need you to sign this piece of paper it basically says that everything we did was done by the book originally that was like a few pages of dialogue Benicio said do we really need this I had a long long rehearsal time stripping it down to the Bare Essentials and I thought that was just fantastic I really enjoyed that at the end of all this all the rest of the stuff that's gone on you get to that point and it's like okay but I know it was really good Big Lebowski [Music] yeah it was very much Joel and Ethan you know their idea I mean we talked it through I mean we talk about little things about how you do the stars and the backing you know which I did it all with like 3M front projection material and cut it up stuff like that you know I remember when the Wardrobe was designed and they've got these big kind of bowling kind of hat things around them and it was really awkward but it actually was kind of interesting the way they worked and everything you know and then you find a way of tracking down the the bowling alley and one time we used this little remote car with a camera rigged on it but another time Bruce having my um Dolly group said I'll get a 30-foot pipe we'll put the camera at the end of it and I'll just push it down so the shot going under the legs of the girls down there it's just the camera on a little soft pad and my dolly grips got this long metal pipe and he's just pushing it down the middle and it's really low Tech but it's kind of fun we commit your final Mordor remains to the bosom of the Pacific Ocean which you love so well good night sweet prince we were standing down on the hillside down and Pedro and uh and it just happened that it was so windy they threw the ashes out of the French roast can French roast which is something we talked about as being kind of funny anyway the ash comes out and it disappears which is fine but I looked around and my assistant was completely covered in them so was I oh dude I'm sorry that's how I remember things like that was kind of funny I kind of love all those little challenges yeah No Country For Old Man call it Colin yes we're hot just got it well we need to know what we're calling it for here you need to call it I can't call it for you you wouldn't be fair I didn't put nothing up yes you're dead you've been putting it up your whole life you just didn't know it the thing about Gerald and Ethan they love getting into different kind of Worlds you know they kind of just move around in different genres don't they really interesting way but they're very prepared you know spend a lot of time talking about it doing drawings storyboarding studying locations you talk about the night sequence going into the river they were very very specific locations and the whole sequences split up the trucks are where the drug bust goes wrong is one location and then running to the river is about a couple of miles away from that so it was you know like any film it's a sort of jigsaws how you sort of schedule things but it was really important for this because it wasn't a huge amount of money it wasn't a hugely big budget film one of the things that early on that Joel and Ethan said when we're shooting this just be aware we're not going to have any music on it they knew right at the start well before we started shooting the only sound would be natural sounds so that impacts like okay when do you have dust going through or where do you have kind of grass so you can feel a wind and have that wind noise and like the peanut wrapper in the gas station you know the packet just going again everything's storyboarded in advance even though sometimes we would change change things fairly dramatically on set yes my gaffer Krishna politano and I spent many nights many days and then nights as well going to that town and saying well we were going to put lights and how we were going to rig Street lamps and which street lamps we didn't want on because it was kind of too flat with them on and which ones would be the key sources you know over I think it was two weeks they cabled the rooftops and put not a lot of lights but a little lights in very specific places we knew if we were in the truck looking out the window those lights had to be on and then we wanted this shop to stay open or we wanted to put some fluorescent tubes above the shop you know there's still things that happened on the day and you just find oh well that light doesn't work but I could put one here and that'll be really interesting you know it's partly creative and trying to get in the heads of the directors but getting the heads of the characters as well and reflect the characters and the story going on in front of you but it's also a technical challenge so you sort of break it down into all the aspects that you need to deal with and there's one shot where Tommy Lee goes back to the motel room he's standing in the doorway and his truck is outside and his Shadows playing on the wall and it's kind of this fractured kind of Shadow and there's a mirror with another bit of fractured light you know usually I don't use two lights I have two Shadows I mean because it's not really real but at this point it just seemed right and that's how you try and express something that's going on with the character and within the scene Skyfall who doesn't appreciate the occasional twists Mr Bond James Bond and first I heard about Sam doing a bomb movie he called me up and he said don't put a phone down but I I'm gonna do the next James Bond and I think I've probably said something why wouldn't I put the phone down he said we're just going to approach it it's just a film it's nothing to you know look at it just as a film like we've done already Jarhead or Revolutionary Road and it's just it's a film it's about a character it's about an aging spy who's the world's passing him by you know can he still compete and it's about those sort of things we weren't making a Bond movie that that's the way I saw it single camera you know I like to operate so I operated certain sequences we had 11 cameras you do on when you have big stunts in action but for the most part it was very controlled and very considered and like any other movie and you know if it had been multiple cameras and dozens of units I I wouldn't I wouldn't have taken it but um Sam said no we're gonna we'll concentrate it so it's it's as much a character study as it is an action movie that's that's what drew me in at one point we discussed about the attack coming off the water you know these guys in dinghies at night coming and the forest behind the castle going on firing it but you do that on a real location I mean with oh you know the frozen lake is CG in the background and when the building's on fire we shot some of it on this location with a brilliantly um controlled burn of the set and then we recreated that in a similar way as doing the church in in 1917 we recreate that on stage with a big light bank which was replaced with elements that which are of the house burning on on location the ice was fake ice the break in the ice was helped with CG but we shot underwater shots on a tank but again you kind of you you know what the wish list is and you sort of break it down into what shots you can do and you know as much as possible you do it in camera you know Saga I think I'm drawn to Desolation although it's my still photographs of desolated English Seaside or the American West I'm not very good at shooting crowds I like lonely people in big spaces I guess so Fargo is good for me you're the owner here Mr lundegaard now executive sales manager well you can help me my name is Marge Gunderson my father-in-law he's the owner uh-huh well I'm a police officer from up Brainerd investigating some malfeasance and I was just wondering if you'd had any new vehicles stolen off the lot in the past couple of weeks we didn't get any snow that year that was a real frustration one day we would shoot part of the scene in one location during the day the snow would melt and then we would have to go like another 20 miles north to get another place that could match and shoot there and we were it was funny some of the parking lot shots it's totally created snow so the effects team will work all night snowing new airport parking lot and the one outside the main office building can you even name all the movies that you worked on with your own Brothers ah but I'm thinking Fargo serious man Intolerable Cruelty Big Lebowski I'm losing track now yeah I see no country assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford open that safe you know I'm very lucky doing a western like that it's more like a tone poem in a way it's a kind of memory it's I don't know if you read the book a wonderful book The the film's based on it it's wonderful it's pure poetry [Music] there are a few existing photographs of Jesse James especially who won at one at his death in the morgue or whatever that vignette is a old box camera and it's vignetting and Andrew and I talked about it a lot and he said I think that would be a really interesting way to come in and out of sequences and give it a slightly strange sort of distance feel we got feedback from certain people saying can you shoot it without with a normal lens because we don't know about this we don't like it so I think we kind of pull back a little bit seeing the Final Cut I remember talking to Andrew and we both said we should have used it a little more because there's other places it could have built the transition between sequences and that's what it was really about our country down mine just Leon a director I mean justly no I would love to I did see the longer cut because I saw an edit we shot a lot of what happened after the film ends we shot what happens to Frank James which is really interesting because he had a a farm up in Maine or somewhere up there he used to take tourists around his farm and charge them for looking at his Farmhouse and stuff it's like gangster tourism or whatever you know what I mean it's like I thought that was really interesting and you just in the film there was more things with Ford before he shot his relationship with this woman in this town of creed up in the Rockies and this woman commits suicide jumps off a bridge I mean it's all true it's all what actually happened and I'm a sucker for true stories that are so strange and tell you so much about that period and those characters and that life that they had I think it's so good I could have done with the other hour you know and it wouldn't have made any more money or lost any more money so why the hell you know Empire of light the film for me when I first read the script was very much about a small world a character who's lonely but she gets Solace and comfort from the friends around her and most of her friends and most of the people she sees every day or in the cinema the people that she works with in the cinema the people of their supporter they know her problem and they support her so I for me the film's about Community it's not about the wonders of movie making all that rubbish it's it's really about this one Woman's World and felt much more of a film that needed to be quiet and sort of observational in a way and the camera was just kind of observing and allowing the characters to to be within the frame so when do we you know open up um 20 minutes what's up there I'll public out loud can I have a look oh I'm not sure go on please the film required a a upstairs abandoned Ballroom an abandoned part of the cinema and that's what Dreamland provided so we were lucky to find that really it was strange because the lobby at Dreamland is kind of very small and it's got a low ceiling and it's got no staircase or anything and and that script required something a little bit more you know you enter this space and there it is a Lobby and a staircase and the cinema is going on so the solution we had was actually building a set on a space facing the Promenade to marry it with what would be the view out of the location I used a lot of LEDs you know obviously they like changes you know and a lot of the action takes place inside and outside the lobby but it's actually open to the environment so I needed some way of being able to control the light level on the inside against the outside not only in terms of intensity but also color balance because at the end of the day light's getting Bluer and all the rest of it and the other reason was you build them into a set like that and if you use it you know traditional tungsten lights they get incredibly hot and that would have been kind of crazy especially with us shooting in the winter the glass doors hot inside cold outside that's recipe for a lot of Badness Blade Runner 2049 [Music] got her name officer KD 6-3 that's not a name serial number all right Joe what do you want Joe I love sci-fi one of my favorite films is tarkovsky Solaris but I like that kind of sci-fi I like something that feels kind of real I don't like science fantasy but you know the approach is different a kind of color scheme of Blade Runner the kind of world you're creating and you know if we hold this shot it's getting like Andre tarkovsky or Melville or whoever or bresson if we hold this shot a bit longer maybe it'll mean something else maybe the audience go why are we holding this shot what's going to happen you build attention through the use of the shot the frame and just little camera movements uh Denny's a master of that I mean again it's all went all started really with conversations we had in pre-production and a lot of things just develop they start as little things and then develop and then you find how we're going to do it technically you know the sequence of the Holograms with the Elvis singing and it's like a futuristic Las Vegas maybe it's not futurist I haven't been to Vegas for a while maybe it's like that now and the idea it's all kind of gone wrong so it's kind of this confusion of different people and different ideas but you you figure out how you're going to do it one of the big things about that was actually well how are we going to shoot it we want this big space but we can't afford the set so I suppose just do it in black as I said we just put black drapes up around it couldn't have been cheaper so we figured out well this whole I figured out okay I did yeah I figured out this whole uh rock and roll kind of lighting scheme I did it with a company in Budapest who actually do rock and roll and they had these lights and we worked together and programmed it all in so we had this whole sequence of lighting different lighting that goes with the different characters that appear on stage and Elvis had his own spot so it's a technical challenge I'd never done it before in such a complicated way it was great it was great fun doing it yeah

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Keywords: 1917, blade runner 2049, celebrity, empire of light, fargo, film, film and animation, films, gq, gq magazine, iconic, iconic characters, no country for old men, oscars, prisoners, roger deakins, roger deakins 1917, roger deakins blade runner, roger deakins blade runner 2049, roger deakins director, roger deakins films, roger deakins interview, roger deakins movie, roger deakins movies, sicario, skyfall, the assassination of jesse james, the big lebowski, the shawshank redemption

Id: CZ76u0WHXXI

Length: 27min 48sec (1668 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 10 2023