The Essentials: The 15 Best-Shot Roger Deakins Films

“Kundun” (1997)
Director Martin Scorsese‘s sole collaboration with Deakins, 1997’s “Kundun,” is a biographical film depicting the life of the 14th Dalai Lama that upon release hardly anybody saw. This is a shame, considering the overwhelmingly beautiful images Deakins conjured for the film, captured largely in monastic golds, yellows and reds —from clouds rolling across the Himalayas, to candlelit scenes of a young Lama picking out the objects that belonged to him in a previous life, to footage from “Henry V” playing across a character’s face. Then at other times “Kundun” takes on the scope of a David Lean movie: a single, widescreen shot of a caravan of monks travelling with the young Lama away from his village, or a cluttered frame where a group of fallen monks creates a ghastly tableau, or a helicopter shot gliding across a placid lake. Deakins’ images, coupled with Phillip Glass‘ unrelenting (but never oppressive) score, help to create one of the more overwhelmingly sensual movies Scorsese has ever made (and the use of fades in and out makes for an almost kaleidoscopic feel). But Deakins himself humbly suggests that it was a different quality that made Scorsese choose him for the 103-day Moroccan shoot: “I think he asked me because of my documentary experience. Because ‘Kundun’ was a film where we were basically working with non-actors. So I think he just wanted that somebody that could react to them and fade into the background, maybe. It was a very particular film.” It’s arguable how much Deakins’ work fades into the background here, as it did net him yet another Oscar nod. Sadly, the home video release of “Kundun” is improperly formatted, so Deakins’ crisp, passionate visuals are a little neutered.

“O Brother Where Art Thou” (2000)
Deakins’ fifth movie with the Coens earned him his fourth Oscar nomination, and “O Brother Where Art Thou” is, along with “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” arguably the most immediately visually distinctive film he’s made with Joel & Ethan, not least because of another technological breakthrough he helped pioneer. Reframing the story of the Odyssey as a Preston Sturges-esque Depression-era comedy about three dimwitted chain-gang escapees (George Clooney, John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson), the film’s yellowish palette, like a slightly faded photograph, was always intended by the Coens, but in light of the film shooting in the summer with too much green foliage around, Deakins knew he’d have to tinker with the look in post-production. After fruitless attempts to recreate it photochemically (as he’d done with “1984”), Deakins decided to go the digital route, scanning the negative, which would enable him to do anything he wanted with the image. Other movies had gone this route before —“Pleasantville,” “The Phantom Menace”— but mostly because they needed visual effects elements, but Deakins was the first to do it for purely artistic reasons. The gorgeous results, a Steinbeck fever dream of sorts, were initially controversial among cinematographers (“I thought that was a pretty stupid argument,” Deakins told Vulture. “It’s the final product that matters. The look of the film, however it’s done, it still the cinematographer’s vision in my mind”), but these days, almost every movie will undergo the same process.

“The Man Who Wasn’t There” (2001)
Deakins’ collaborations with the Coens have all been exemplary, but perhaps the most pictorially show-offy is “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” a film that seems summoned into being solely to show off its experimental, black and white imagery. The effect was achieved after the fact — indeed, they were contractually obliged to produce a color version for foreign markets, so there’s a further layer of control and consideration, as they took color footage and could push the high-contrast chiaruscuro even further in post-production. The results are graphic images of hard-edged shadows, silhouettes and ultra-directional lighting that seem almost like black-and-white etchings: light seeping into an empty department store; James Gandolfini pressing Billy Bob Thornton against a plate of glass, so it looks like the camera lens itself is cracking; blood running down a man’s throat like black oil; a UFO uncannily peeking out from behind a prison wall (computer-generated, but looking like a stop-motion Ray Harryhausencreation). There isn’t a lot of camera movement in “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” and the stillness allows you to drink in the images, many of which remain long after you’ve forgotten the film’s thin narrative; one remembersTony Shalhoub‘s lawyer standing in a cell, talking with only the bottom half of his face illuminated for a lot longer than you remember what he was talking about. It’s ultra-noir of course, but the style feels non-derivative, despite fitting into a well-worn category, which Deakins accounted for by telling Hitfix: “It wasn’t ‘doing noir.’ … If it looks film noir, it’s just because I was playing with the lighting and what felt right at that moment…I didn’t have references or anything. I just approached it thinking, ‘What should this scene feel like?'”

“The Village” (2004)
“This one, really?” wrote our editor when it was suggested that we include “The Village” among our essential Deakins picks. And it’s certainly understandable —how can you leave out several Coen brothers movies in place of M. Night Shyamalan’s much-derided ‘period’ chiller? But strip away the narrative of the director’s decline, and “The Village” is both an underrated film and an atmospheric thriller mixed with an unexpectedly tender romance, topped with a twist that comes across as less “Twilight Zone”-y once you know it’s coming. It’s also one of Deakins’ best-looking films. Telling the story of an isolated Pennsylvania community surrounded by woods that contain cloaked monsters, the film has a kind of Gothic fairy tale feel to it, and an approach to the look both classical and quietly experimental: “Night definitely has a different idea about shooting, and it’s very minimalist. Often we weren’t even in front of an actor when he or she was talking, and sometimes you don’t even see the actor who’s talking… It’s much more of an abstract, impressionistic view of a scene,” Deakins told American Cinematographer. He would admit to Hitfix that Shyamalan’s approach, which adheres very closely to the storyboards, was “a little bit restrictive,” but he clearly still enjoyed the experience, and the work reflects that: it’s a great-looking movie, unfolding in careful, long takes, and taking advantage of “Barry Lyndon”-ish lighting for its nighttime scenes and startling use of the colors red and yellow to symbolize the monsters, and what will supposedly scare them away….

“Jarhead” (2005)
When Sam Mendes was looking for a cinematographer to replace his previous collaborator, the late, great Conrad Hall who had shot both “American Beauty” and “Road to Perdition” for him, and came knocking on Deakins’ door, “It made me very nervous, really,” Deakins admitted toAmerican Cinematographer. “Connie’s work inspired me so much when I was starting out.” It was not necessarily a natural fit, as the more recent work Deakins had done had been in a more classic mode, whereas Mendes wanted his Kuwait war film to be shot handheld. But the result is quietly stunning to look at, with the handheld aesthetic used not so much to create a Greengrass-y immediacy as to present a fluid, slightly woozy “lost” feeling to the images, which are as much about the boredom and inaction of modern warfare as they are about tremendous drama. In fact, it’s possible that the film itself does not quite live up to Deakins’ pristine photography, with its daytime desert scenes washed out like bleached bones, giving way to shockingly orange sunsets and army grunts silhouetted against oilfields on fire at night. Deakins is remarkable for making his pictures serve the story; “Jarhead” is one example of the pictures almost becoming the story in a subtle and typically humble way. As Deakins went on to say: “I really dislike the flamboyant style of camerawork you see in many war films, where the camera soars above the battlefield or tracks behind a falling bomb. That’s just war seen as a video game, and “Jarhead” is certainly not that.”