The Essentials: The 15 Best-Shot Roger Deakins Films

Here’s a fun bit of trivia. What do these eleven films have in common: “Legends of the Fall,” “The English Patient,” “Titanic,” “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” “Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring,” “There Will Be Blood,” “Slumdog Millionaire,” “Inception,” “Life of Pi,” “Gravity” and “Birdman“? Answer: These films won the Best Cinematography Oscar in their respective years and which prevailed over nominated films from peerless cinematographer and all-round class actRoger Deakins. Deserving as many of those awards might have been, it is, to put it politely, getting a little bit ridiculous. Over the past twenty years since his first nod for “The Shawshank Redemption” back in 1995, Deakins has managed a dozen nominations (even netting two in one year) but zero wins. This week’s “Sicario,” from director Denis Villeneuve (read our review), is so startlingly well shot, especially for a procedural crime movie, that it could well bring him his thirteenth nod, though whether it can necessarily convert to his first win is entirely another question.

It’s hard to say exactly why he’s had this run of great/bad luck with the Academy, but we’d suggest it’s because traditionally the Academy has a habit of awarding the prettiest, showiest cinematography, and while Deakins can churn out such shots in his sleep, it does not seem to be where his heart really lies. As he told Thompson on Hollywood last year, he’s not a fan of “ostentatious” camerawork: “Sometimes a shot becomes too clever for its own good. It draws attention to itself. Sometimes, you watch a film and you see a big elaborate shot and think, ‘I wonder what that would look like if you played it on a close-up and a reverse.’ You know, a close-up on an actor and a point-of-view. It would have had more power.”

But that’s not to say he’s in any way begrudging his peers —in fact, you’d be hard pressed to find any Hollywood professional so unceasingly admiring of his fellow cinematographers and supportive of aspirants too. He’s even a vocal supporter of digital, despite having worked so long and so lovingly with film, saying firmly: “When it comes down to it, it doesn’t matter what you record the image on. It’s the image you’re recording that’s important. It’s the framing, the way you move the camera, the choice of shot, the lighting within the scene. I think this argument is a little irrelevant actually.”

There are maybe a hundred reasons to admire Roger Deakins; here are just 15 of them.

“1984” (1984)
Before Denis Villeneuve, before Bond, before the Coens and before his twelve Oscar nominations, Deakins broke through into features (after mostly working in the documentary world) in a bigger way with this neatly-timed adaptation of George Orwell’s dystopian classic. Directed by Michael Radford, with whom Deakins had worked frequently in the non-fiction sphere, and starring John Hurt as unlikely rebel Winston Smith, Richard Burton (who died only weeks after shooting wrapped —“I will always remember working with Richard Burton,” Deakins told The Telegraph. “Richard was lovely. On the first day, he called the whole crew over to his trailer and said ‘I just want to thank you for one of the nicest days filming I’ve ever had. When I came on set first thing this morning and saw all these young faces, I was absolutely terrified, but it’s been the most wonderful day”) as sinister party member O’Brien, and Suzanna Hamilton as Julia, it’s a solid version, elevated in large part by Deakins’ superb photography. The film was acclaimed for its special effects (though everything was done in-camera), but the film’s greatest legacy came from a subtler technique: to fully portray Orwell’s bleak, hopeless vision, Deakins desaturated the color using a process known as bleach bypass, where the silver is retained in the print, giving a washed-out look. The technique had been invented for Kon Ichikawa’s “Her Brother” in 1960, but Deakins was the first Western cinematographer to apply it, and it became enormously influential: films like “Saving Private Ryan” and “Seven” would go on to deploy it memorably.

“Sid & Nancy” (1986)
A far cry from the likes of “Unbroken,” the punkish, blow-it-all-up energy of “Sid & Nancy” was perhaps more than any other the film that helped to push Deakins’ talents towards the U.S. Alex Cox’s film tells the story of Sex Pistols bass player Sid Vicious (Gary Oldman, in a performance that also proved a breakout), his American girlfriend Nancy Spungen (Chloe Webb), and their heroin-addled, ultimately tragic romance, neatly capturing the raucous energy of the punk scene as well as the deep sadness of their story. Deakins’ approach is a little more verité than we’re used to from him these days —his early documentary work still shines through— with a loose, handheld feel to much of the photography (“So much of that was made up as we went along,” Deakins would later tell Hitfix). But the film is also embellished with an almost magic realist quality that elevates the story to almost mythic levels. The recreation of the video for Vicious’ “My Way” captures the spirit of the original but with touches like a sort of neon-soaked Powell & Pressburger or Bob Fosse, while in one of the most iconic images the DP’s ever shot, the title characters passionately make out in silhouette as garbage rains down in slow-motion around them (“Alex said, ‘we want it down and dirty, but it’s poetic… but we don’t want it too pretty. What if there’s maybe bins and heavy things falling down as well?’” Deakins would later recall).

“Barton Fink” (1991)
If there’s one association more indelible than any other in creating the mythos of Deakins as our greatest working cinematographer, it’s his frequent collaborations with possibly our greatest working directors, the Coen Brothers. Their partnership started back in 1991 when the Coens approached him to shoot eventual Palme D’Or winner “Barton Fink.” It marked a stylistic change up into more experimental territory for the Coens as well as a moment of rejuvenation for Deakins, who told Vulture that immediately prior to hitting it off with the brothers, “I had kind of soured on the industry, I suppose. I’d done a big movie that I wasn’t happy with …” Looking at the film in retrospect after 11 films together, and the 12th, “Hail Caesar” on the way, you are struck anew at how many different visual styles this one creative collaboration has spawned, but certainly “Barton Fink” is shot with the verve, texture and creativity of a man falling in love with his job all over again. If each one of Deakin’s team ups with the Coens has its own distinctive look and feel, “Barton Fink” is the one that oozes —it is slick with sweat and globs of wallpaper paste, its clammy walls and carpets practically reeking of mildew and rot. And it also contains perhaps the first utterly unforgettable Coens image: John Goodman charging down that infinite corridor, as it progressively bursts into flames, showing us “the life of the mind”. “”They’re notorious for storyboarding everything” Deakins said of the Coens, “and my world was documentaries…To combine those two approaches, I think that’s probably what changed the way I saw things.”

“The Shawshank Redemption” (1994)
Both critically and commercially, the initial response to Frank Darabont’s “The Shawshank Redemption” was muted —it barely recovered its production budget, and that was only after a theatrical re-release tied to its seven Oscar nominations, one of which was for Deakins. But as underwhelming the initial reaction might have been with this now-beloved classic, it’s always looked wonderful, and perhaps it’s partly the glowy, late-afternoon timlessness of the images that have seen its appeal grow year after year. An elaborate homage to the kind of prison movies Warner Bros. produced in the ’30s and ’40s, the film indicates more than a hint of nostalgia to Deakins’ work, with every shot just slightly more honeyed than strictly necessary. But since the story is concerned with finding glimmers of hope, freedom and beauty in the bleakest of places, and is itself unashamedly sentimental (and damn effective), the cinematography is entirely complementary. The ease and sweetness of the images also belies the difficult, taxing shoot, but as Deakins told Hitfix, he took it as a compliment that the result, which involved large numbers of complex lighting set-ups, looks so effortless: “[At the time] nobody knew me. Why would they? There was a conversation going on with a couple of very well-known cinematographers, and one was saying to the other, ‘Yeah, ‘Shawshank,’ it’s wonderful photography. But I wouldn’t vote for it because it’s all natural light. I would vote something that’s been lit.’ And I thought, ‘Natural light?? Jesus!’ I just laughed. As I say, it’s probably the biggest compliment anybody’s ever paid me.”

“Fargo” (1996)
Deakins can do romantic, nostalgic, lush visuals that look like they’re dipped in honey. He can do sweeping vistas and epic widescreen cast-of-thousands shots. In other words, he can do the kind of beauty shots that bring to mind the word “cinematic.” But his versatility is such that his prettifying instincts often take a backseat to the storyline and tone of voice of the specific film. “Fargo” is maybe the greatest major example of how Deakins dramatically modifies his aesthetic, chameleon-style, to suit the story —it’s hardly what one would call beautiful, but the bleak, droll, snowblinded simplicity of the images is an indivisible part of what makes the film so evergreen. In fact, there needs to be an element of the prosaic to the pictures to give the story its off-kilter naturalism —just as the Coens faked the “based on a true story” myth, the images almost fake a true-story, verité style. It’s an impulse they had intended to push even further, according to this interview with Deakins: “There are a number of times I’ve started a film and had a conceptual plan… when we started “Fargo,” Joel and Ethan and I thought the film was going to be more observational. We would shoot it more with a static camera —a little bit more like Ken Loach would approach it, and pan more often on a longer lens than anything else. It’s so funny —we discussed it for a long time, and I do think the film does have that quality to it to a degree. But I remember the first day, the first thing we set up was a hundred and twenty foot tracking shot. You create these rules in your head, but they’re there to be broken.”