“No Country For Old Men” (2007)
The film that finally won Joel & Ethan Coen the Best Picture Oscar (not that they care, probably), “No Country For Old Men” was perhaps the darkest thing they’ve ever made, sometimes quite literally, bringing out work in Deakins that’s perhaps the closest thing he’s done to that of Gordon Willis. The film was adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s bleak neo-Western novel about an ordinary man (Josh Brolin) who locates money from an ill-fated drug deal and finds himself pursued by Javier Bardem’s borderline-Satanic killer —Deakins says that he was on board even before the script was written. In marked contrast to the artificiality of ‘O Brother’ and “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” “No Country’ is mostly in naturalistic territory: Deakins allows the spectacular Texan landscape to do the talking most of the time (unlike some earlier pictures, hardly any color-correction was done during the DI). But it’s in darkness where the film looks particularly special. Much of the film plays out at night (including that staggering chase sequence, running through dawn as Brolin’s character is pursued by killers, and their fearsome dog, which Deakins says is “one of the most difficult sequences I’ve ever done”), and Deakins always keeps things coherent without losing the atmosphere. Just as great are the chiaroscuro shadows and silhouettes, which bring a sense of noir to the Texan setting, most notably in the impossibly tense sequence where Tommy Lee Jones’ sheriff enters a hotel room he believes contains Bardem’s killer. “You get this really fractured, odd image,” Deakins told NPR. “I love light! When you see something like that, you get high, if that makes sense. It’s the little things in life…”
“The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” (2007)
Right from the start of Andrew Dominik‘s “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” we see Deakins’ masterful hand at work: the nighttime train robbery is one of his most amazing sequences, visualized largely by means of a single light traveling through the dark woods. Rippling through the trees and illuminating the criminals in their sackcloth hoods, the camera then hooks the front of the train, while in silhouette, Jesse James steps into its path. Deakins used a bleach bypass process to enhance the blacks and wash out the color, and worked on something he called “Deakinizers,” which gave a “pinhole” look to some of the images, with the center of the shot being crisply focused but the borders looking frayed and blurry. As he toldAmerican Cinematographer magazine: “Most of those shots were used for transitional moments, and the idea was to create the feeling of an old-time camera. We weren’t trying to be nostalgic, but we wanted those shots to be evocative. The idea sprang from an old photograph Andrew liked, and we did a lot of tests to mimic the look of the photo,” The results add a haunting layer to the nostalgia-tinged naturalism of the movie, which even extend to the perfectly anticlimactic assassination, which Deakins shoots with such stillness and simplicity that you scarcely want to breathe throughout. ‘Assassination’ feels like some kind of antique treasure, and a lot is down to Deakins’ timeless photography, which netted him yet another Oscar nomination.
“Skyfall” (2012)
Deakins had worked with Sam Mendes twice before, on “Jarhead” (see above) and period melodrama “Revolutionary Road” before being drafted in to make sure “Skyfall” looked different (and frankly better) than any other James Bond movie ever. Deakins, shooting digital for only the second time afterAndrew Niccol‘s “In Time,” was if anything liberated by the format’s potential. The backlit fight in Shanghai (captured largely in a single shot); Bond riding in a gondola surrounded by Chinese lanterns; the reveal of Javier Bardem’s desolated island stronghold; the climactic, dark showdown at Bond’s ancestral home: that he captured these pictorialist images within the dynamic context of an action film (though we can argue about just how actiony “Skyfall” really is) all operate as more or less an advertisment for the Arri Alexa camera he used. Even Deakins himself, previously a film doyen, was utterly converted, telling Film School Rejects: “I get a lot of flack when I start talking it up so much, but I don’t really see much in terms of downside anymore… We shot for 128 days with the camera, and I can’t remember one problem… the low-light night stuff in the Shanghai set [and] on the other side of the spectrum, we’re shooting the bright sun on the Mediterranean. That was unexpected. I thought shooting in such extreme, bright sunlight would have had problems, but it didn’t. The camera behaved as well or better than it would have on film.” For his efforts, Deakins was nominated for the Oscar for the tenth time (and again failed to secure the award). Still, has any other $1 billion blockbuster ever looked this good?
“Prisoners” (2013)
Another brilliant example that great cinematography often has very little to do with pretty pictures or widescreen landscapes, Denis Villeneuve’s child-abduction thriller “Prisoners” is told largely in nighttime rainy mid-shots and gray and low-contrast exteriors. It is the definition of unshowy and clever, rather than beautiful, filmmaking. In fact, our overall pick for the single greatest shot of 2013 came from this film — while you may not remember it, you doubtless recall how it made you feel. “Prisoners” proves how Deakins is concerned with creating an effect in the viewer through photography, rather than with the photography itself. Deakins and Villeneuve seem to have a real meeting of minds, something he acknowledged in this Thompson on Hollywood interview: “I feel every shot, every camera move, every frame…all those things are really important on every shot. [Denis] really gets that. He really understands that the subtlest change from 25mm to a 32mm, or a push-in as opposed to a pull-back, or a track as opposed to a static wide shot —they all have an impact on the audience…I don’t like a shot or scene to stand out of a film; I like the whole thing to work as a piece. Denis gets that every shot is valuable, not only in what you do in that shot to represent what’s within the frame, but the way all those shots fit together to make a whole. It has to be seamless, otherwise the audience is suddenly taken out of the story.” There aren’t too many director/cinematographer pairs that could have us anticipate rather than dread the “Blade Runner” sequel, but Villeneuve/Deakins is one.
“Sicario” (2015)
It’s early days, but the relationship between Denis Villeneuve and Deakins looks to be one of the major ones of the cinematographer’s career, with “Prisoners” followed by this week’s breathless, tangled drug-war thriller “Sicario.” Following FBI agent Emily Blunt, who’s borrowed by a mysterious government task force for operations across the border, the film returns Deakins to similar landscapes and similar themes as “No Country For Old Men,” but with a very different end result, blending realism and abstraction. Inspired by the photography of Alex Webb, and with clean, saturated colors that are an entirely different palate from “Prisoners,” it probably laps even “Skyfall” as Deakins’ best digital work to date (it was shot on the Arri Alexa), effectively capturing the chaos of Mexico City and the emptiness of the desert. Perhaps most memorable of all is a late-in-the-game nighttime infiltration sequence in which Villeneuve and Deakins steer into the night-vision clichés familiar from elsewhere in this genre —rather than chasingKathryn Bigelow-ish verisimilitude,they turn it into something nightmarish, abstract and almost alien. The film is proof that handheld verité style isn’t the only way to go with a real-world action movie, and Deakinsrevealed a rather more classical influence to the AFC, saying “One of the most notable influences on our choices of camera placement, framing and lighting was the style of Jean-Pierre Melville. He’s able to attain a sort of simple yet stylish realism… we tried to stick with that spirit in filming Sicario, with an economy of means that in English we refer to with the expression ‘less is more.’”
Honorable Mentions: As with actors, cinematographers sometimes get nominated for movies that aren’t necessarily their very finest. While we included nine of Deakins’ Oscar nods, he also picked up nominations for “The Reader” (co-shot with Chris Menges), “True Grit” and “Unbroken.” “True Grit” nearly made the list, while the other two are rather anonymous for such a fine DP, though still handsome-looking pictures.
Beyond that, we’d also highlight his work on “The Hudsucker Proxy,” “Dead Man Walking,” “The Big Lebowski,” “A Beautiful Mind,” “The House Of Sand & Fog,” “A Beautiful Mind,” “Doubt,” “Revolutionary Road” and “A Serious Man.” And though he wasn’t officially DoP, Deakins was ‘visual consultant’ on animated films “Wall-E” and “How To Train Your Dragon,” and was instrumental in making them some of the most beautiful CGI-animated films ever made. Any other Deakins works you think deserves a mention? Let us know in the comments.
— Jessica Kiang, Oliver Lyttelton, Drew Taylor