This story about Roger Deakins first appeared in the problem below the line from TheWrap Awards Magazine.
Roger Deakins remembers the moment he found out what he was going to do for a living. He did not arrive as a child in Torquay, a seaside town on the south-west coast of England, where he grew up surrounded by movies. “I think there were five or six theaters within walking distance of where he lived,” he said. “And now there are only two, which is a shame.”
It didn’t come in his teens, even though he gravitated towards movies then, too. “I used to go to the movies a lot, but what I remember most is when I was still at school and I joined a movie club,” she said. “They just had a temporary screen and a 16mm projector, and they put up about 20 folding chairs. But they used to show all kinds of wonderful films, like ‘Alphaville’ and ‘Last Year at Marienbad’, all kinds of films that I would never have seen in a cinema in Torquay.”
And it didn’t come when he went to art school, or when he started working as a photographer, or even when he got into the newly opened National Film School (on his second try, mind you). No, the key moment was after leaving school.
“Frankly, my whole thought was to be a documentary filmmaker,” Deakins said, speaking via Zoom from his Santa Monica country home a few days after wrapping up a European tour promoting his photography book “Byways.” “And it really wasn’t until I was on the set of 1984 and sitting with John Hurt and Richard Burton one lunch hour I realized that I had found my place, somehow.
He shifted in his seat and laughed. “Actually I was a director of photography. And I felt, ‘Yeah, this is good. This is to me.’”
Roger Deakins is a cinematographer, all right. The 73-year career spans from his early days filming “1984” and “Sid and Nancy” to his work on “The Shawshank Redemption,” “A Beautiful Mind” and “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.” ” along with long-running associations with the Coen brothers (12 movies, including “Barton Fink,” “Fargo,” “The Big Lebowski,” and “No Country for Old Men”), Sam Mendes (five movies, including “Skyfall” and “1917”) and Denis Villeneuve (“Prisoners”, “Sicario” and “Blade Runner 2049”).
Along the way, Deakins has earned his way to two Academy Awards and 15 Oscar nominations, five wins and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Cinematographers, and a knighthood from the Queen of England.
And now he has collaborated once again with Mendes for “Empire of Light,” which is about watching movies in a cinema located in a town on the south coast of England. The film is about much more than that, of course, and Deakins says he was drawn more to the mental health issues of lead character Hilary Small (Olivia Colman) than to the film’s subject matter.
But if you’re making a movie that deals in part with the power and glory of seeing pictures on a big screen in a room full of people, you can’t do better than have Roger Deakins as the guy who takes your own pictures.
Based on Mendes’ childhood memories of a mother who battled mental illness, “Empire of Light” is the first Mendes-Deakins collaboration since the epic “1917,” a World War I film designed to make it look like it was filmed on one. single uninterrupted shot.
“After ‘1917,’ Sam had been talking about a totally different project,” Deakins said. “So when this script came along and it was a much smaller, more personal story than what he had been talking about, it was quite a pleasant surprise.”
This is not to say that it was necessarily easier than “1917”; it was difficult in a different way. “It’s misleading,” she said. “’1917′ was a huge technical challenge, but we had a lot of preparation time and we figured out exactly what the shot was before production began. Was ‘Empire of Light’ easier? Not really. We realized that as soon as we started looking for locations.”
The problem, he said, was that the seaside theaters that were open in 1981, the era in which the film takes place, simply don’t exist anymore. “Not that long ago, but all the cinemas on the boardwalk are gone,” she said. “There is one in Worthing that is quite nice, but it is very small. The one Sam had originally written was in Brighton, but now it’s a casino and it’s right on the seafront, which would have been an absolute nightmare to control. We looked up venues online and found a great one in North Yorkshire, but when I asked (production designer) Mark Tildesley about it, he said, ‘Oh yeah, it was torn down last week.'”
They eventually found an old theater in Margate, a seaside town in the south-east of England. The cinema had been turned into a bingo hall, but they were able to restore it and then build another lobby a few doors away with glass doors that could take advantage of the Margate light that had inspired JMW Turner.
Then again, light was a little more problematic for Deakins than it had been 150 years earlier for Turner. “The hardest thing was shooting inside the lobby and trying to get the right light outside to balance the inside and outside,” he said. “On a sunny day, it was really difficult to increase the light level in the lobby to get information about the outside. That was always something you had to play with.”
However, shooting the movie gave Deakins an up-close look at another phenomenal performance from Colman. Observing great actors up close is a longtime perk of his job, dating back to the days before digital filming allowed everyone to look at monitors and see what the cameraman was seeing.
“I always operate the camera, and that’s partly why I love it,” he said. “It’s different now that you have the video support and everything else. But basically, I love looking through the camera, and I used to be the first person to see a performance. That was always exciting, and it’s still exciting for me to sit there.”
So, do you miss the days of the movies? “Yes, but no,” Deakins said. “Digital technology has opened up so many options. In general, capturing an image is a bit easier and certainly less stressful than waiting for the lab report the next day.
“But I miss the simplicity of the film, and I miss the fact that I’m there manning the camera, and it used to be the director standing next to me and the camera with the actors. I miss the intimacy of that core group of people. It’s not like that now, and I think that’s a shame.”
Mendes has said he conceived “Empire of Light” during the pandemic, at a time when he feared moviegoing would disappear entirely. And Deakins, his former collaborator, has similar fears.
“I think it’s changed beyond repair, really,” he said with a frown. “You could say it’s due to COVID, but it was happening before COVID. What the audience wants, what people want as entertainment, has changed. The kinds of movies that are being made and the way in which they are being made have changed beyond recognition.”
And while Deakins has had his share of hits—”Skyfall,” “True Grit,” “A Beautiful Mind”—don’t expect him to go looking for the next franchise or tentpole. “I’m not really interested,” he said. “The kind of movies I love, there are fewer and fewer. And I don’t think the producers and people at the studio are willing to take the risk of a movie that expands the language of cinema. I think we’ve gone backwards in that regard.”
Read more of the issue below the line here.
