We have a team in America and a team in the UK we’ve worked with and known for years and years. Roger: I do love the collaboration with the crew. James: That’s true, when you’re looking back on it. James: We suddenly needed witnesses, and he was there.įilmmaker: When you were talking about your filmmaking last night, you said things like, “I don’t want to put pressure on myself.” And, “I would be in torment thinking about shooting.” I’m wondering if it’s ever fun for you? We were in Hong Kong when it was still a colony, doing a seminar. We haven’t seen him for years, but he was our best man when we got married, just by chance. He just looked at his hand and judged the light from that.įilmmaker: I think Chris Doyle often skips using a meter. They say Douglas Slocombe never used a light meter. I do use a light meter, but I don’t zone system. I don’t do that in cinematography or photography. Roger: That’s a bit too sophisticated for me. Sometimes I wait because I have an image in my head, but more often it’s just an excuse to explore, you know?įilmmaker: Are you using a zone system when you’re shooting? Roger: I just like wandering the streets, I don’t really think about it.
You waited and waited for the right person to come. James Deakins: But also your photo of the woman at the bus stop looking at the naked woman in the poster. It’s completely luck that the lightning is a bolt pointed at the bar, you know? Yes, I went to that location two or three times, waiting for a thunderstorm. Roger: You’re thinking about the lightning striking the bar. You do the same thing, like your photographs in Albuquerque. I thought, “That’s a perfect shot.”įilmmaker: You make it sound like luck, but Cartier-Bresson put himself into situations where his imagery could exist. Then we just stood there and it happened again-this dog came halfway down and looked at the camera. We were just walking on the beach and somebody was throwing a stick off the promenade, and the dog was jumping after the stick. Roger: Yes, somebody else said the dog leaping off the promenade is like Cartier-Bresson’s man leaping over the puddle. Most people use color as just eye candy, especially in movies.įilmmaker: Your book made me think of Cartier-Bresson and the “decisive moment.” I like the simplicity of the image, the composition. Roger: With black-and-white, you are looking at the elements in the frame. Have you thought about shooting in color? But otherwise I don’t really connect taking still photographs with filmmaking.įilmmaker: Your photos are black-and-white. Roger: No, I think that is the similarity.
You still have to make a choice of where you put the lens relative to the subject.įilmmaker: Is it a different approach with still photography? It just so happens that on fiction you’ve got a second chance and can do a second take.
You are trying to interpret what’s happening in front of you, and react immediately in terms of where you position yourself to record the action. But if you watch as they rehearse on a fiction film, I’d liken it to being on a verité-style documentary. Don’t you take a different approach in fiction, where you have to create the subject? If you experience more of life, then you have more to add to your work.įilmmaker: In documentaries the cameraperson is trying to find the subject, frame the subject. It’s educational as much as the way it had any effect on my work as a cameraman. Roger Deakins: It was through documentaries that I first started to experience different aspects of the world, really. The two spoke with Filmmaker at the Chelsea Hotel, where Deakins shot scenes in Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy almost forty years earlier.įilmmaker: At your book signing last night you said that documentary filmmaking informed your perspective. With his wife James he also hosts the Team Deakins podcast and a Team Deakins YouTube channel. North Devon farms, British seaside towns, the deserts outside Albuquerque: Deakins’s singular vision is apparent no matter what the subject.ĭeakins is known for his collaborations with directors like Denis Villeneuve, Sam Mendes and the Coen brothers. It includes previously unpublished black-and-white photos spanning five decades, from 1971 to the present. Byways, published by Damiani Books, is the first book from the two-time Oscar-winning cinematographer. Cinematographer Roger Deakins-CBE, ASC, BSC and recently knighted-and his collaborator and wife, James Ellis Deakins, recently visited New York to talk about his book of still photographs.
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