The five movies that informed Roger Deakins’ style
One of cinema’s greatest injustices was finally remedied when Roger Deakins finally won an Academy Award for ‘Best Cinematography’ for Blade Runner 2049, which arrived after his 14th nomination. Doubling down, he only went and won it again with his very next nod for Sam Mendes’ 1917, before normal service resumed when Empire of Light saw him walk away empty-handed once again.
Since making his feature film debut on 1977’s Cruel Passion, Deakins has become lauded as one of the finest and most influential cinematographers in cinema history. During that period, he has become a regular collaborator of the aforementioned Mendes, the Coen brothers, and Denis Villeneuve and a touchstone for any aspiring director of photography who wants to follow in his footsteps.
Of course, he hardly arrived on the scene as a fully formed and consummate professional touted as one of the best in the business, with Deakins sharing the five movies that inspired and informed his style with A.Frame, with the first title listed by far the most curious as a pseudo-documentary that originally aired on the BBC.
The War Game depicted the potential impact of a nuclear war and its aftermath, proving so realistic that it was pulled from its initial broadcast date and delayed for a year until 1966. As Deakins put it, it was that immersion that made it stand out: “I’ve always remembered that film and the style in which it’s done. People think that the handheld camera and documentary realism is something new, but that film is the ultimate in shooting that style,” he said. “It’s still not really been beaten in terms of its visceral connection to something like that.”
Wartime suspense thriller Army of Shadows left Deakins enraptured by its “sense of mood and the sense of place,” remarking on how the frame can be “so haunting and so difficult to watch at times”. Initially polarising, time has been kind to the movie as it underwent a reappraisal, and it made the would-be cinematographer realise that “you don’t have to do fancy camerawork and fancy lighting” to convey the importance and effectiveness of a scene.
Andrei Tarkovsky’s existential sci-fi Stalker outlined to Deakins that narrative isn’t the be-all and end-all of cinema, which directly informed his own approach: “So much is done with the camera moves, holding a shot until it becomes something more than what you expected of it,” he explained. “Sometimes you can hold a shot and you think, ‘Why are we holding this shot?’ And then, it becomes something else.”
Torn between his two great western loves, Deakins opts for The Wild Bunch over Once Upon a Time in the West, partly due to his opinion of Sam Peckinpah as “one of the greatest directors to ever live.” In addition, he cites its timelessness, particularly in the way that “it wasn’t about contemporary society, but it damn well reads like it.”
Another classic that doesn’t adhere to conventional narrative structure, L’Avventura left Deakins awestruck at the way director Michelangelo Antonioni found a way of “adding to that experience of the storytelling in a really interesting way” through his method of shot composition that doesn’t drive the story forward but is nonetheless “damn well telling you something about what he’s trying to put in front of you.”
Movies that inspired Roger Deakins:
- The War Game (Peter Watkins, 1966)
- Army of Shadows (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969)
- Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)
- The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969)
- L’Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960)
