When you are an Academy Award-winning cinematographer even the choice of a living room lamp can feel fraught.
Or at least that’s the way James Ellis Deakins, wife and frequent collaborator of two-time Oscar-winning British cinematographer Roger A. Deakins, tells it. Speaking from the couple’s arts and crafts home in Santa Monica, California, James — who has often worked as a script supervisor and on digital workflow on films with her husband — recounted the time she attempted to furnish their new home with a light fixture.
“Whoa, wait a second” James recalls her husband saying as she contemplated the purchase. “Describe the light. What did it look like?”
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
The inquisition continued. What sort of shade did the lamp have, Roger wanted to know. James told him it was an amber-tinted shade.
“No, no, no,” James remembered her husband saying. “We’re putting it by a window that has the blue light coming in and then it’ll be amber,” he told her.
“And I just had this moment of, I’m never going to be able to buy a lamp,” James said, laughing.
“He does see light and he’s made me see it too,” she added, sitting next to Roger in their sun-filled home.
Team Deakins, as they are known on their regular podcast centered on film talent, will be in Atlanta from Dec. 5 to 7 to screen and discuss some of the films that Roger has helped make legendary for his cinematographic mastery of light, shadow and mood.
While in Atlanta Roger will screen three of his films, “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” “Prisoners” and “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” at the Plaza and Tara theaters. The Deakinses will also sign Roger’s first book of black and white photography, “Byways,” which showcases images he captured while on film locations from 1969 to the present as well as many that he shot in his native Devon, along England’s coastline.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
As testament to Roger’s formidable talent and reputation, all screenings and the book signing scheduled for the Deakinses’ Atlanta visit sold out well in advance of the events, though organizers note that a few tickets may be available on the days of the film screenings.
Nominated 16 times for an Academy Award, Roger is a two-time Oscar winner, for “1917″ and “Blade Runner: 2049,” and his film repertoire includes “The Shawshank Redemption” and the James Bond thriller “Skyfall.”
The cinematographer, 73, has become one of the most revered working today, noted for his collaborations with Joel and Ethan Coen on films beginning with “Barton Fink” and including “Fargo” and “No Country for Old Men.” He’s worked with other top directors too, among them, John Sayles, Martin Scorsese and Sam Mendes.
Along with his reputation for collaboration and professionalism, Deakins is known for combining an artful, atmospheric approach with technical finesse. Keeping up with innovations in technology, Roger said, is often one of the most challenging parts of a cinematographer’s job. “Because the way we make films kind of changes every year,” he said.
“When I really enjoy the job, it is that marriage between having some sort of creative input on a project and being, you know, technically proficient with what you do,” Roger added about the two-fold nature of cinematography.
He initially studied painting at Bath Academy of Art and then film at the National Film and Television School (NFTS). His first films were in the documentary realm before making his feature debut with the British wartime romance “Another Time, Another Place” (1983).
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
“A lot of my paintings are very sort of naturalistic, but kind of surreal,” Roger noted of his art student days. “And in a way a bit like my photographs. I mean, that’s where I discovered I liked photography,” said Roger of his time at Bath Academy.
Roger describes “Byways” as a “sketchbook.” Released in 2021, the book shows a more personal, subjective side to his aesthetic choices. Roger’s photographs often focus on a decaying, inhospitable human-built cityscape and solitary people dwarfed in its shadows. The images also show a quirky, formalist side to his point of view, as when he focuses in “St Pancras station, London” (2017) on a woman’s legs shown from a low angle against the steel and glass roof of London’s St. Pancras train station. In “Christmas, New Jersey” (2003) he focuses on the bleached white light of the seashore where a metal sign proclaiming “Happy Birthday Jesus” is set against a swarming flock of seagulls.
One of Roger’s favorite aspects of his job as a cinematographer, he said, is the collaborative nature of filmmaking. “It’s fantastic feeling when you’re working with a whole group of people to one end — you know, everybody’s getting satisfaction from the individual contributions they make to the end product. And you know, it can be a real high.”
And a real low, too, Roger added. Without naming the specific film, he noted, “A director can screw up a really good project. Something we saw only recently.”
The biggest challenge in filmmaking, Roger said, is “as soon as you pick up a camera, you’re compromising,” something he said he grapples with less often in his still photographs.
“You never have enough time to light a shot. You never have enough time with the director to discuss the whole concept or you never get a location that’s absolutely perfect,” he said.
This will not be Roger’s first visit to Atlanta. The 2013 child-abduction crime thriller “Prisoners,” for which he served as cinematographer, was shot on location in Conyers, Stone Mountain, Porterdale, Monroe, Covington, Lithonia, Snellville, East Point and downtown Atlanta with director Denis Villeneuve. Roger and James lived just outside the city, and he fondly remembers jogging on Atlanta trails and through Piedmont Park.
Despite Atlanta’s notoriously mild weather and blue skies, the cinematographer found that an exceptionally wet winter provided the ideal grim, depressing backdrop for “Prisoners’” psychologically murky tone.
“I think there is only one scene in the film where the sun’s out. We were so lucky,” Roger laughed.
EVENT PREVIEW
Roger A. Deakins and James Ellis Deakins
The book signing for “Byways,” 3:30-5 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 5, at A Cappella Books, and the three screenings are all sold out. Check with the theater box offices on the day of the event for possible ticket releases. “The Man Who Wasn’t There” (7 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 5) and “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” in 35mm (7 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 6) screen at Plaza Theatre, 1049 Ponce de Leon Ave. N.E., Atlanta, 470-410-1939, plazaatlanta.com. “Prisoners” (7 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 7) shows at Tara Theatre, 2345 Cheshire Bridge Road N.E., Atlanta, 470-567-1968, taraatlanta.com.
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