Lots of people in Devon enjoy a bit of fishing, and Roger Deakins is no different. But he really realized that he was different when a man he didn’t know called after him as he was picking up bait, “You got robbed for Jesse James!” The man was referring to Deakins’ cinematography on “The Assassination of Jesse James by The Coward Robert Ford” — IndieWire agrees, as the 2007 film is tied with “The Tree of Life” in our ranking of the best cinematography of the 21st Century — which lost out at the Academy Awards that year. Although Deakins now owns two tiny golden Oscars for “1917” and “Blade Runner: 2049,” so he’s doing OK.
But the story of how the director of photography got from his roots in the South West of England to Sir Roger Deakins is twistier and more surprising than a worm on a fishhook, and is now the subject of Deakins’s new book, “Reflections: On Cinematography.”
When a publisher approached Deakins about writing a book, thinking of it more as a straightforward autobiography or Hollywood tell-all, Deakins was much more interested in the roadmap of how people get started as storytellers and the usually unusual, winding roads their careers take them on. In addition to his film collaborations with the likes of the Coen Brothers, Sam Mendes, and Denis Villeneuve, the savvy IndieWire reader may already be aware that Deakins and his wife and creative partner James host the Team Deakins podcast and put all kinds of behind-the-scenes and planning material on the members’ section of his website for that purpose.
“Reflections On Cinematography,” then, was designed to be an extension of that educational and hopefully inspirational work, and the book is stuffed with lighting diagrams and sketches and plans, from the number of dinos needed for the cross-burning sequence in “O Brother Where Art Thou?” to Deakins’s exposure notes on “Jarhead” to the camera and lighting positions on K’s roof in “Blade Runner: 2049.”
“What I cared about in terms of filmmaking and an extension of basically what we’ve done on the website [and] the podcast [is] how did you start and what’s your career path?” Deakins told IndieWire. “I grew up in Devon, basically at the seaside. And the idea of filmmaking was, like — you know, I might as well have thought of being an astronaut. It was just kind of ridiculous. So part of the reason for the book is hopefully to demystify it, to try and make apparent that if you really care for something and you want to do it, you’ve just got to stick at it and maybe you’ll get lucky like I did.”
Deakins’s guidebook is chronological, starting with his early experiences in art, graphic design, documentary, and, crucially, travel. Getting to go all over the world and study different disciplines prepared him for crafting the elegant frames and masterful manipulation of natural light he puts to use — to very different effect — in films as wildly diverse as “Nineteen Eighty-Four” to “1917”
“ I was very adamant,” Deakins said about including his early life and work in the book, “My life, my background, and my documentary experience is part of who I am and why I see the way I do and why I’ve shot the way I’ve shot.”
But maybe the most fun thing for cinephiles is how honest Deakins is about all of the limitations and constraints — and weather, too; Roger quipped, “Maybe I should have been a meteorologist,” and James added, “Probably better hours” — that also shape a film’s look. “Reflections: On Cinematography” is as much about the collaborative relationships within which any cinematographer must work.
Deakins told IndieWire that writing the book was like revisiting old friends, remembering some of the “complete madness” of the business, and also documenting what it’s been like to make movies in the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries, because the process is changing rapidly.
“ They’re all tools, you know, the industry changes. I mean, we’ve just enjoyed the industry as it’s been while we’ve been part of it,” Deakins said.
“Reflections: On Cinematography” is now available online and in bookstores in the US and Canada. It will be available in the UK on February 12.