CELEBRITIES
Is 14th time the charm for Deakins?
One of Hollywood’s undisputed masters of light, British cinematographer Roger Deakins earned his 14th Academy Award nomination this year for his typically dazzling work on “Blade Runner 2049.” Yet Deakins, 68, has never actually taken home an Oscar statuette.
Fans of his work in such varied films as “Sid and Nancy,” “Dead Man Walking” and “The Big Lebowski” may call this an almost criminal oversight. But Deakins isn’t one to complain. Here, he looks back on a few films that earned him nominations.
Deakins, who’d started in documentaries, brought his naturalistic style to Frank Darabont’s adaptation of a Stephen King novella about a man unjustly sentenced to life in prison. A box office dud that became a hit on home video, “Shawshank” earned Deakins his first Oscar nod.
“What attracted me to it was the story — it was a brilliant script — and then, of course, the casting. But the challenge is always to immerse the audience in that world. You could say that a prison isn’t that visually interesting, but it actually was. Less is always more — that’s my mantra. In so many movies now, the camera is always moving, the light is always glittering. ‘Shawshank’ was the antithesis of that.”
Deakins received his second Oscar nomination for the Coen brothers’ darkly comic crime film, the third of his 12 collaborations with the Coens. Deakins’ cinematography beautifully captured the bleakness of the winter landscape of the Upper Midwest.
“The Coens are just so meticulous, and their craftsmanship and their ideas are so brilliant, and every film they do is so different. They said to me they were going to do this small film and I might not be interested because it was no money and all this — and it was ‘Fargo.’ I was like, ‘You’re kidding, guys?’ It was one of the best and most memorable experiences I’ve ever had on a film.”
Though few saw director Andrew Dominik’s revisionist Western in theaters, the slow, contemplative film featured what many consider Deakins’ most stunningly beautiful work, with his camera patiently lingering on the landscape.
“When I meet students and enthusiasts at screenings and they say, ‘?“Jesse James” really affected me’ or ‘?“Jesse James” is why I want to be a cinematographer’ — you only have to have a couple of comments like that and it makes up for all those people that didn’t go to the cinema to see it for whatever reason.”
As a fan of director Ridley Scott’s original 1982 neo-noir sci-fi film, set in a dystopian future in which humans and androids live side by side, Deakins was excited about working on the sequel. Both he and director Denis Villeneuve were aware of the risks of trying to follow in the footsteps of a classic.
“It’s not Ridley doing it — it’s Denis doing it. It’s the same world, 30 years later, but this was Denis Villeneuve’s film. The story is more expansive than the original in that you see more of the city, you see outside the city, you see more environments. So it was about creating the sense of the world.”
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