Interview with Roger Deakins
Thursday / October 1, 2026
About Roger Deakins
English cinematographer of The Shawshank Redemption, Fargo, No Country for Old Men, Skyfall, Blade Runner 2049 and 1917, with Oscars for Blade Runner 2049 and 1917.
These answers are taken from A conversation with Roger Deakins on Cinematographers on cinematography's YouTube channel. You! Backstage did not conduct this interview.
What was a great moment for you as a filmmaker?
[1984] was Richard Burton's last film. I was 37, 30 probably. We were all really young, and this is this movie icon, and we were really nervous. On the second day, the AD came around and said, "Mr. Burton would like to talk to everybody at the end of the day." So the whole crew stood around the trailer at the end of the day, and his trailer was a little caravan actually. Richard comes out, and he said, "I'd just like to thank you. That's one of the most wonderful days filming I've ever had. When I came out on the set and I saw these young fresh faces, I was absolutely nervous, but you made me feel so comfortable and so welcome." That was really classy.
He used to spend lunchtime sitting around, and he'd tell stories about his life and loves and everything. We were on a hill outside Swindon when we were doing the Golden Country and the other dream sequences, and at lunchtime he would chat away about everything. That was great. Lovely guy.
How did your filmmaking career unfold?
I did mostly work for television. I did things other people didn't want to do. Nobody wanted to sail around the world, but I thought that sounds pretty cool. And then I went to Rhodesia during the war, to film the war in Rhodesia, and into Eritrea, to the war there, and a few different places people didn't want to go. That was a memorable experience in my life in many ways, because it really teaches you a lot. I don't regret doing that.
Michael Radford was at the film school a year ahead. When I left, he asked me to shoot some documentary work with him, and we ended up doing a film on Van Morrison, who went back to Ireland for the first time in 10 or 15 years. When Mike moved on to do a feature film, he had seen a TV series I did, and he thought that was enough experience that he could sell me as a cinematographer on his feature. So that was basically the first feature I did, Another Time, Another Place, which was made for Channel 4. That did really well at the Cannes Film Festival, and the producer came up to Mike and said, well, what do you want to do next? He'd always wanted to make a film of 1984, so he just blurted out "1984," and the guy said, well, okay. How lucky can you get?
What advice do you have for new filmmakers?
My advice is always just find what makes sense to you when you do something. Don't try and copy me or anybody else. Everybody's got their own sensibility, and to develop that is what's important.
And I think about actors: if you haven't got a performance, you haven't got a film. It's all right creating the most beautiful picture in the world, but if you haven't got performance, it means nothing.
How do you keep your cast and crew communicating well on set?
I'm always conscious that I've got to give the actors a space and create an environment that they feel comfortable in to do their work. So it is a balance. Sometimes it's frustrating, because there's things you want to do, but you can't because you know you're going to distract. On Doubt, we basically set one lighting situation that would just work for a lot of different positions in the room. We put up huge bounces outside to cut the daylight, so we didn't have the light change, and created a soft enough light in the room that we could pretty much follow the actors around and let them do what they wanted to do. We actually shot the first rehearsal in a wide shot and then started developing the scene from seeing the wide shot.
The Coen brothers have a very specific idea of their shots. Everything's storyboarded, so we go in with a known quantity, but on top of that you can change things. I really love working with them because you have this game plan that you can throw in the air. On No Country, a scene was storyboarded to be 10 or 12 setups, and there was a storm coming in, so we had very little time. I said to Joel, I just love the location, I could play it in silhouette, and he said, well, you talk to Tommy and tell him this is what we're thinking. And it was fine.
Who is your favorite filmmaker, and why?
I was lucky enough to meet Conrad Hall. I'd been in America a couple of years, and I'd been invited to the clubhouse, and I'm walking in and there's Conrad standing on the steps. He was one of my idols. I always watched his work. It was a case of anything he shot, I'd look forward to the next film he shot coming out.
I remember watching Fat City in the winter, and I was virtually the only person in the cinema. There were maybe two or three other people in the cinema and they were asleep. It was winter and it was raining. And I'm watching this film thinking, my god, why isn't this packed? This is the most amazing piece of work. I just thought it was so brave, the way he shot it. It was funny talking to him about it years later. It all seemed so effortless to him.
Describe your filmmaking style.
I like to keep lighting simple, and because I like operating, I think the framing and composition is as important, if not more important, than lighting in a way. I guess I come from documentaries. I just love framing. I like lighting to be naturalistic, and it's nice if you can light a set and almost forget about it. I'm not saying I don't change lighting, but I like to light a set and then shoot.
You can't explain why you frame something a certain way. You discuss a film with a director, or see the actors do a scene, and something just clicks. It just feels right for that moment.
On one of the first things I'd done, a big concert with nine other cameramen, I got a call to the producer's office, and the producer said the other cameramen don't understand how you can shoot it, there's no backlight. I said, well, there's no backlight because I don't want any backlight. I use backlight if there's justification for it, but I wouldn't just use backlight to separate. I kind of like it when things don't separate. I like playing that light and dark all the time.
Tell me about a production that was hard to pull off. What was it and why was it challenging?
The train robbery in Jesse James: the exterior was just two nights' work. The hardest thing was to get the light on the front of the train, because you didn't want to see it. You just wanted to see the light. As it gets closer, there's just a bit of detail that reveals the front of the train. For the shot where the train is coming toward us, I talked to Rick, the grip, and we just put the camera, handheld, on a flat car with a piece of foam in front of it, and the train came into it and we just kept going.
So much of what you do is luck. We had exactly the right night, so the smoke, a little bit of atmosphere, just hung in there perfectly. You don't get that often. I did actually have the cranes there with some lights on them, and just before we shot the first shot of the train coming, I turned them off. Somebody asked what they were for, and I just said they were work lights. You do that because you think it might not work. I'd never done that before. And then we practiced one run with the train and the light, and I had to dim the light as it came forward so it didn't completely flare the lens, and I just thought, I don't need anything else. That was it.
Tell me something I may not know from reading your filmography.
I got asked originally to go and do a seminar at Pixar, and I had kind of fun, and I guess they did, because then they asked me to be involved with WALL-E. I spent a couple of months, and I would go up there now and again and discuss lighting and camera setups with them. I suppose I did more on the first 20 minutes. Because I'd done that, Gore basically asked me to be involved in Rango, so I spent more time on Rango, getting the look of the picture. I'd spend a couple of days every other week with ILM creating test shots and playing with lighting styles, and when I was off shooting True Grit, I was getting images from them all the time that I could put into Photoshop and put my notes on and send back. Now I've been working with DreamWorks on a few films.
On Jesse James, I asked the guys at Otto Nemenz to play around with an old front element of a stills lens to get a keyhole effect, and they produced two different lenses. So now there's a set of lenses they rent out called the Deakinizers.
Roger Deakins's Full Biography
Roger Deakins is an English cinematographer best known for his work on the films of the Coen brothers, Sam Mendes, and Denis Villeneuve.
He is a member of both the American and British Society of Cinematographers.
Deakins' first feature film in America as cinematographer was Mountains of the Moon (1990). He began his collaboration with the Coen brothers in 1991 on the film Barton Fink. He received his first major award from the American Society of Cinematographers for his outstanding achievement in cinematography for the internationally praised major motion picture The Shawshank Redemption (1994).
He is also known for his work in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), No Country for Old Men (2007), True Grit (2010), Skyfall (2012), Sicario (2015), and Blade Runner 2049 (2017).
Deakins also worked as one of the visual consultants for Pixar's animated feature WALL-E.
In 2018 he won an Oscar for best cinematographer for his work in Blade Runner 2049.