Master of Light
Cinematographer Roger Deakins uses his blog to pull back the curtain on the lighting tricks that have made him famous.
Roger Deakins, 2004, via Buena Vista.
Sometime in the late nineties, cinematographer Roger Deakins took a kind of pilgrimage to visit his friend and mentor Conrad “Connie” Hall, who was living in semiretirement on a tiny island off Tahiti. The timing found Deakins visiting the older Hall—a three-time Academy Award winner and sort of tribal elder to directors of photography—as the industry-wide shift toward digital cameras was being met by a renewed nostalgia for film, and Deakins was excited to share how he’d recently remodeled his LA home to include a darkroom. “My expectations were shattered,” Deakins later wrote, “when Conrad pronounced the photochemical process ‘antiquated.’ ” Hall praised the possibilities of digital, telling Deakins he was happy to indulge any “technique that might have helped him develop as a visual storyteller.” That was Hall’s guiding mantra, and one the younger artist soon took up: “Story! Story! Story!”
I came across this anecdote a few years ago while reading Deakins’s blog, Looking at Light, where practically every day, and especially when he’s between projects, the sixty-seven-year-old writes what must be among the most admiring and detailed prose about lampshades and light bulbs, fields questions about his own movies, and gives advice to readers about their own low-budget projects. Lately, his posts have been explanatory notes about Denis Villeneuve’s forthcoming Blade Runner 2049, which is due out in October, and detoxifying rants about Hail Caesar!, Deakins’s twelfth movie with the Coen brothers and the first he’d shot on film in many years. He likened the return to film to riding a bike—except that, as Deakins later admitted, he doesn’t know how to ride a bike. “But I’m sure it’s the same,” he said.
can be numbly dense with jargon, but the stories and curio knit together into a narrative of Deakins’s career, which now spans an epochal forty years and nearly all genres. His IMDB page reads like, every Coen brothers’ movie since , more than a few great directors’ beacon achievements (Ron Howard’s , Sam Mendes’s ), and at least a handful of movies that are, to my eye, more visually striking than they are coherent (, ,). He’s been nominated for thirteen Academy Awards (a tie for the most by a DP), and may well be the most in-demand cinematographer alive; the actor Josh Brolin apparently agreed to do only after hearing Deakins was in, the sort of nod you mainly hear about auteur directors. When Robert Elswit accepted the American Society of Cinematographers Award for , he joked that the ASC should establish a separate category for “films shot by Roger Deakins.”
