Words matter. These are the best Roger Deakins Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I’d done a big movie that I wasn’t happy with, and I was moving out of London when I got approached about Barton Fink, because my agent said the brothers were in London. We hit it off immediately, and suddenly I found myself on the way to America!
I don’t really believe in the mystery of cinematography – what happens in the camera is what the cinematographers create and all that nonsense – I want the director to see what I’m trying to do.
If you shoot with a billion cameras, then there’s no perspective. You want to use one shot at a time, so it’s better to discover what that is before you shoot, rather than trying to make something in the cutting room, and then it just becomes generic.
On ‘Sicario,’ we storyboarded key sequences but not everything.
I do think observing is important in learning.
I don’t approach films purely in context of genre.
When I left art college, I was a still photographer for a year.
I came up, I suppose, a fairly traditional way. I went to art college. I always wanted to be a stills photographer, really, when I was younger, and I briefly worked as a stills photographer.
Some of what I consider my best work, and some of the best films that I’ve ever worked on, kind of disappear without a trace. There’s no accounting for it. Something connects, or something doesn’t.
I always had an interest in seeing people within their environments.
There’s so many films from around the world, I emphasize, that are so beautifully photographed, but they don’t get the recognition.
I love everything that Cormac McCarthy has written.
I think technology has advanced so far now that there are some cameras on the market that give film a run for its money. It’s all about flexibility in capturing images, and digital or film, it doesn’t matter to me.
I don’t do that virtual reality stuff. I’m not even into 3D, actually… I’ve been offered it. I just don’t want to.
I’ve always painted or drawn pictures or taken still photographs; now I shoot movies. It’s just about making images, really.
My dad was a builder, so I didn’t have any connection to the arts at all. I never really considered film as a career, but I knew I didn’t want to be a builder.
There’s nothing worse than an ostentatious shot. Or some lighting that draws attention to itself, and you might go, ‘Oh, wow, that’s spectacular.’ Or that spectacular shot, a big crane move, or something.
I loved movies ever since I was a kid.
My time in documentaries was very educating, in terms of life experience as well as the filmmaking side of it.
People confuse ‘pretty’ with good cinematography.
Every scene is a challenge. There are technical challenges, but often it’s the simplest challenge where you feel a sense of achievement when you pull it off.
I like simplicity. I like using natural sources. I like images to look natural – as though somebody sitting in a room by a lamp is being lit by that lamp.
Some of the smallest things on a smaller film, to me, are greater achievements than on a big film when you have the resources and the time and everything else.
I think that lens flares can work really well under certain circumstances. Personally, I am trying to get rid of them most of the time. I don’t like artifacts that draw attention to the surface of the image.
I don’t really like watching 3-D.
