INTERVIEW DEAKINS
Army in London, which he followed with a short fiction film and another short documentary, this time about the Tiverton stag hunt in Devon. By the time he finished film school, he had shot 15 films. From there, he worked on a number of documentaries before landing his first feature, Cruel Passion (1977). Deakins believes his documentary background helped shape his approach to filmmaking due to the way he saw and reacted to things. “I think you’re a product of everything you experience,” he explains. “I hadn’t experienced much of the world until I started working on documentaries. I travelled and met a lot of people in different cultures and that was really informative.” WAR IS PEACE One of the first films to put Deakins on the map was 1984 . Originally intending to capture the film in black & white, he wanted to craft a look that would convey the grimness of George Orwell’s dystopian Britain. The film demanded meticulous planning, and production opted for practical effects. Deakins admits the joys of working with in-camera effects have been lost now almost everything is done in visual effects. “I loved getting the chance to do everything in camera on that film,” he enthuses. “We even did glass shots, which probably nobody understands how to do any more.” Another film that relied heavily on in-camera effects was Barton Fink (1991), Deakins’ first of many collaborations with the Coen brothers. Recalling a shot of John Goodman stampeding down a hotel corridor as the building bursts into flames, he explains that, if it was made now, that sequence would be done with visual effects. “We constructed two corridors in a large warehouse in Long Beach,” he says. “Each corridor was rigged with gas pipes with little holes in the side, so you could run the fire all the way down the corridor. The effects guys could control how far down it went on different lines of pipe. Luckily, John Goodman looked like he wanted to be sweating anyway. He was covered in fire gel for protection, as were the rest of us. Bruce Hamme (our dolly grip who was pushing the little rig I was on) and I had asbestos suits on. It was
Growing up, he always loved going to the movies. There were five local cinemas, as well as a film club that showed a lot of European and foreign movies. There, the young Deakins encountered films such as Alain Resnais’ Last Year in Marienbad (1961). “I did not have a clue what it was about,” he laughs, “but I thought the way it was photographed was so interesting. I remember seeing Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville and Peter Watkins’ The War Game before the BBC banned it because of the profound reaction against it.”
In 1971, the National Film and Television School opened, and Deakins applied. He was denied admission due to his work not being ‘filmic’ enough – a term he admits he still doesn’t understand the true meaning of. He was finally admitted the following year, however. “I thought documentaries were something I could potentially get into,” he says. “At school, I started shooting films for other students as well as making my own. That led to me being a cinematographer.” His first project at film school was a short documentary about the Salvation
HOT PROPERTY Deakins shot The Shawshank Redemption (top) and The Big Lebowski (bottom)
10
DEFINITIONMAGAZINE.COM
Powered by FlippingBook