Veteran cinematographer Roger Deakins is competing against himself at the Academy Awards this year, with nominations for "No Country for Old Men" and "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford."
These are his sixth and seventh Oscar nominations he's never won. And in his typically self-effacing, dry British manner, he says he truly doesn't believe he's going to win this year, either.
Deakins, 58, is probably best known as the longtime director of photography for the Coen brothers. He's shot all nine of their movies since 1991's "Barton Fink," creating the signature imagery for films including "Fargo," "The Big Lebowski" "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" and their latest, "No Country."He grew up in Devon, England, and began as a still photographer before going to film school and making documentaries. Besides his work with the Coens, he's shot "A Beautiful Mind" "House of Sand and Fog" and "Jarhead," to name a few, and received Oscar nominations for "The Shawshank Redemption" and "Kundun."
(Multiple nominations for one person in the same Oscar category are not unheard of: Steven Soderbergh, for example, got best-director nods for 2000's "Traffic" and "Erin Brockovich." This is the first time a cinematographer has been up against himself since Robert Surtees, with the 1971 films "The Last Picture Show" and "Summer of '42.")
Later this year, Deakins has Sam Mendes' "Revolutionary Road," starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, and he's currently shooting "Doubt" with Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams.
AP: What was your reaction to the two nominations?
Deakins: It was a real surprise. I thought "No Country" had a chance but, you know, "Jesse James" didn't really get much of a release. When the nominations came out, the most pleased I was, was for Casey (Affleck, for supporting actor in "Jesse James") and ... Tommy Lee Jones (for best actor in "In the Valley of Elah," which Deakins also shot). And I thought he'd been so overlooked.
AP: With the writers strike going on, what's it like for you to think there may not be any Oscars?
Deakins: It's a hard one 'cause, I mean, they've got a point. It just seems absurd to me that we can't all come together and talk about it like adults. But on the other hand, most of it is a business, isn't it? And people have to work out their contracts. So it's quite understandable, what's going on. It's just a pity.
AP: How did you hook up with Joel and Ethan Coen?
Deakins: I'd done a few pictures by then. I think they'd seen, like, "Sid and Nancy" on the one hand and seen "1984" on the other. It was just, I kind of guess, the range of what I do I suppose that attracted them. I was a bit nervous when I met them 'cause I thought, well, two of them, how do they work together? But we hit it off. We met in London, actually, in Notting Hill. And they're well, you know what they're like they're really sort of low-key and matter-of-fact and totally unpretentious and we hit it off straight away, really.
AP: What is it about your working relationship that's been a good fit?
Deakins: Maybe it's that we've got a similar sense of humor or something. They've got this very sort of dry, laconic, almost English sense of humor. We see the world quite similarly, I suppose.
AP: Can you pick a favorite movie you've done with them?
Deakins: I like them for different reasons because most of them are very, very different. I would probably have to say "The Man Who Wasn't There." I love that movie there's something about it that is, I think, it kind of works as a piece more than any of the other films we've done.
AP: That's one of my favorites of theirs and I think it's underappreciated. But again, that's a tough sell because it's in black and white.
Deakins: Yeah, tough sell, absolutely. But that's the thing with them I've had such opportunities to work on films like that with different kind of looks, different kind of feels.
AP: You've been a still photographer for a long time, but how challenging was it to shoot a whole film in black and white?
Deakins: Technically, there were a few challenges just to get the sort of purity of the black and white, but in terms of lighting and feel, I think I kind of light in black and white anyway, really I light for light and shade, I don't light for color so much. I find a lot of the time that color is sort of a distraction and it's easy on the eye. It's easy to make something attractive by putting in pretty colors but it's not necessarily right for the content of the piece.
AP: Do you still shoot photographs?
Deakins: When I get some time off. I love it it's my favorite thing to do. That and fishing.
AP: Do you ever do both at the same time?
Deakins: Well, I take my camera out. I've got a little boat in south Devon. I go out fishing and I take the camera with me sometimes. ... I'm trying to do a series about the English seaside in the southwest and I spend most of my time wandering around with my camera in the odd seaside resort, trying to find photographs. I like observing people, I suppose.
AP: Would you want to direct a feature of your own someday?
Deakins: I kind of looked into it a few years ago and it's like, everybody in Hollywood has got a script. I've got a script. It's set in Africa in World War I that's not going to go down very well, is it? It's a comedy, but it's also about colonialism. I enjoyed writing it it was a few years ago, now, and I sort of took it 'round to a few people. But I love what I do so why would I change that? I love being on the set, I love the contact.
AP: Do you ever get so drawn into what's happening that you forget ...
Deakins: To turn on the camera?
AP: No, just get lost in what you're doing and forget that you're at work.
Deakins: Well you do. You get totally drawn into the characters and the piece and that's what's amazing. That's why I love it. ... There are scenes in "No Country" when we were shooting them like in Ellis' cabin in the end just watching that through the lens, you get a tingle up the spine.
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