“I asked somebody who worked on that film: ‘How many days did you use those?’ And they said: ‘I think we used them once.’ That was over five or six weeks. He remembers a shoot in New Mexico where a rival production – a huge-budget blockbuster – hired heavy-duty cranes that sat unused for much of the shoot. “It is about honing it down: taking away the flowery, peripheral stuff and simplifying,” he says. Left with limited film stock while shooting Around the World With Ridgeway, a film about the tensions between the crew on a round-the-world yacht voyage, he was forced to learn to shoot economically. Inspired by Mayne’s photojournalism, Deakins went to film school and began shooting documentaries. “That’s not saying you’re not trying to create something visually interesting, but there’s a balance between being visually interesting and being ostentatious.”īorn in Torquay, Deakins was passionate about painting as a child at art college in Bath he developed an interest in stills photography and was influenced by the photographer Roger Mayne, whose pictures of postwar kids in London were among the first to capture the new “teenage” generation. “If somebody says, ‘Oh, I loved the shot with such-and-such’ then you’ve failed, because really you want the whole thing to be of a piece,” he says. Sicario’s stars and director talk to Andrew Pulver Guardian His best work, he says, isn’t the flashy stuff – the zoom back from the guards’ amazed expressions through the hole in the cell wall in The Shawshank Redemption, the phantasmagoric light show in the background of a Bond Skyfall scrap – but the films that are consistent: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford’s old-world dinge or the black-and-white noir of the Coens’ The Man who Wasn’t There. He likes to shoot single camera where possible, doing the operating himself. I’m not for that anyway – I think that’s all bull. “It wasn’t the sort of film where you want to shoot between three and six because there’s this lovely golden light. So much of it is: you do your best with the schedule and what you’re thrown. You make use of it because it’s there, and because you can’t shoot it another day. “So we got these incredible thunderclouds. “When we started shooting there was a quite active monsoon season,” he says. The scene has been praised for lending the film a doomy portent, but it’s not like Deakins could control the weather. In Sicario there’s a scene where a police car is driving into the distance shrouded by a huge black cloud. People tend to load his work with intent, he says, when a lot of it is based on improvisation. The Guardian’s film critics discuss Sicario Guardian If something good can be made of it, all the better. ![]() ![]() Today - perched in a Toronto hotel room with his wife, script supervisor James Ellis Deakins, listening in - he amiably bats around theories about his work, tackling the interview much as he deals with inclement weather on a shoot: a problem to be worked around. Thoughtful and shy, the only LA thing about him is his tan, which he probably picked up puttering around in his fishing boat near his hometown of Torquay. He’s one of the top three in the business, says director Andrew Dominik (“Roger and two other people and its the two other people that change”), the Coens’ go-to (he’s shot most of their films since Barton Fink), and been Oscar-nominated 12 times for films as diverse as Skyfall and Martin Scorsese’s Dalai Lama biopic, Kundun.ĭeakins is, according to Villeneuve, “the opposite of a Hollywood person”. Its cinematographer, Roger Deakins, is one of the most lauded film-makers in Hollywood. ![]() Head here to watch the new “Blade Runner 2049” trailer, and click through the gallery to see all of Deakins’ best shots from the footage that has debuted so far.It’s no surprise that Sicario looks great. has released two full trailers for Denis Villeneuve’s sequel to Ridley Scott’s landmark 1982 science-fiction movie, and they are jam-packed with so many jaw-dropping shots that we’d give Deakins an award just for the four minutes-worth of footage we’ve already seen. With “Blade Runner 2049” shaping up to be one of the most visually stunning releases of the year, this awards season could finally do the trick for Deakins. The 68-year-old cinematographer is one of the legends of his craft, and it’s about time the Academy recognizes it. Roger Deakins’ 13 Oscar nominations and zero wins is hardly new news, but it’s never not shocking anytime we hear about it.
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