{"id":110660,"date":"2017-05-09T14:00:59","date_gmt":"2017-05-09T18:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=110660"},"modified":"2017-12-19T16:33:01","modified_gmt":"2017-12-19T21:33:01","slug":"master-light","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/05\/09\/master-light\/","title":{"rendered":"Master of Light"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cinematographer Roger Deakins uses his blog to pull back the curtain on the\u00a0lighting tricks that have made him famous.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Roger Deakins, 2004, via Buena Vista.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Sometime in the late nineties, the cinematographer Roger Deakins took a kind of pilgrimage to visit his friend and mentor Conrad \u201cConnie\u201d Hall, who was living in semiretirement on a tiny island off Tahiti. The timing found Deakins visiting the older Hall\u2014a three-time Academy Award winner and sort of tribal elder to directors of photography\u2014as the industry-wide shift toward digital cameras was being met by a renewed nostalgia for film, and Deakins was excited to share how he\u2019d recently remodeled his LA home to include a darkroom. \u201cMy expectations were shattered,\u201d Deakins later wrote, \u201cwhen Conrad pronounced the photochemical process \u2018antiquated.\u2019 \u201d Hall praised the possibilities of digital, telling Deakins he was happy to indulge any \u201ctechnique that might have helped him develop as a visual storyteller.\u201d That was Hall\u2019s guiding mantra, and one the younger artist soon took up: \u201cStory! Story! Story!\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

I came across this anecdote a few years ago while reading Deakins\u2019s blog, Looking at Light<\/em>, where practically every day, and especially when he\u2019s between projects, the sixty-seven-year-old writes what must be among the most admiring and detailed prose about lampshades and light bulbs, fields questions about his own movies, and gives advice to readers about their own low-budget projects. Lately, his posts have been explanatory notes about Denis Villeneuve\u2019s forthcoming Blade Runner 2049<\/em>, which is due out in October, and detoxifying rants about Hail Caesar!<\/em>, Deakins\u2019s twelfth movie with the Coen brothers and the first he\u2019d shot on film in many years. He likened the return to film to riding a bike\u2014except that, as Deakins later admitted, he doesn\u2019t know how to ride a bike. \u201cBut I\u2019m sure it\u2019s the same,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Looking at Light<\/em> can be numbly dense with jargon, but the stories and curio knit together into a narrative of Deakins\u2019s career, which now spans an epochal forty years and nearly all genres. His IMDB page reads like a list of reliably rewatchable movies from the late-night nineties and aughts. He was the DP for Shawshank Redemption<\/em>, every Coen brothers\u2019 movie since Barton Fink<\/em>, more than a few great directors\u2019 beacon achievements (Ron Howard\u2019s A Beautiful Mind<\/em>, Sam Mendes\u2019s Skyfall<\/em>), and at least a handful of movies that are, to my eye, more visually striking than they are coherent (House of Sand and Fog<\/em>, Kundun<\/em>, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford<\/em>). He\u2019s been nominated for thirteen Academy Awards (a tie for the most by a DP), and may well be the most in-demand cinematographer alive; the actor Josh Brolin apparently agreed to do Sicario <\/em>only after hearing Deakins was in, the sort of nod you mainly hear about auteur directors. When Robert Elswit accepted the American Society of Cinematographers Award for There Will Be Blood<\/em>, he joked that the ASC should establish a separate category for \u201cfilms shot by Roger Deakins.\u201d<\/p>\n

Part of what makes Looking at Light<\/em> such a weird and wonderful Internet forum is that Deakins is so freely and readily available there. I\u2019m not aware of anywhere else a fan or student can peer inside the craft of a transcendent artist with such lucidity. And I do mean artist<\/em>\u2014there\u2019s little hint of a Hollywood persona at work. Deakins says he created the site partially to ease his ability to answer fan mail, but\u00a0it also seems to demystify an art form that, despite its direct interface with the public\u2019s eyeballs, isn\u2019t written about or understood all that much. He responds to even the most squeamishly artless questions (\u201cDo you like documentaries?\u201d) in just a few hours\u2014and kindly. In a recent thread called \u201cContrast ratio: Skyfall vs Sicario<\/em>\u201d he and \u201csimon m\u201d have this exchange:<\/p>\n

simon m: Hi Roger, I\u2019ve noticed that, in general, the images from Skyfall<\/em> have a higher contrast than those from Sicario …<\/em>\u00a0I enjoyed the images of both movies but am wondering why you chose this different look for each. Thanks for your time.<\/p>\n

Roger Deakins: I can\u2019t say I am aware of the difference. Could it be in the way you are viewing the films?<\/p>\n

simon m: Oh\u2014I don\u2019t think so … Perhaps what I’m seeing is not more contrast in Skyfall<\/em>\u00a0but in the image above from the opening sequence. For example, it looks to me that the highlights are brighter than the image from Sicario<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Roger Deakins: That makes sense as I was timing the opening of Skyfall<\/em>\u00a0to look quite bright and \u2018hot.\u2019 That shot from Sicario<\/em>, on the other hand, was an early-morning shot.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cBright,\u201d \u201chot\u201d? \u201cAn early-morning shot\u201d? There\u2019s such a weird anthropological air to the encounter, it takes a moment to realize Deakins is describing his creative approach to a movie that grossed over a billion dollars, a movie that earned him an Oscar nomination. But it\u2019s an exchange typical of the website: Deakins is polite, vaguely esoteric, yet also friendly and self-effacing. His description seems to draw on, as if from the very wisdom of Hall, the notion of an art form uncomplicated by the anxieties of craft.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s plenty of craft in cinematography, of course, but what you gather from Deakins\u2019s blog is that the form aspires not toward the creation of startling images but the absorption of a seamless narrative. The highest achievement a cinematographer can garner, Deakins says, is to have his or her work go unnoticed. If the viewer is made aware of a frame\u2019s composition, the thinking goes, they\u2019re taken out of the narrative, maybe not unlike a reader noticing a novel\u2019s font as they stumble over a cluster of adjectives. A cinematographer should have style, in other words, but only in service of story. Deakins puts it this way: \u201cpeople confuse pretty with good cinematography.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Still from No Country for Old Men<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

*<\/p>\n

Deakins was born in 1949, in the seaside town of Torquay, England, and began painting and photographing in his teens. His people were construction workers and fisherman, but Deakins earned entry to the Bath School of Art and Design, going on later to the National Film & Television School, where he was at first denied admission for not being \u201cfilmic\u201d enough. He next spent a year wandering the countryside, photographing woodsmen, seeking out a looser, uglier form of realism. He liked Tarkovsky, the grit of seventies Hollywood, especially the washed-out, noon light of movies like Fat City<\/em>. But much of it also seems to have struck him as needlessly contrived\u2014photographic realism, professionally lit. Deakins wanted the camera to see the world as he did. \u201cI always had an interest in seeing people within their environments,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

That way of seeing merged easily with documentary work for British TV, which sent him to war zones in Rhodesia, Ethiopia, Sudan, as well as on an around-the-world yacht race. Deakins brought, to each assignment, his own immersive style\u2014an intense sensitivity between cameraman and subject that could verge on the humanitarian. One day, during a shoot in a psychiatric ward, he was jolted from behind the lens when a schizophrenic patient broke down. Stopping to assist her, some illusion, already too thin, seems to have broken in him, and he hasn\u2019t returned to documentary since.<\/p>\n

Deakins\u2019s artistic origin story is tinged in an offhand assuredness. He swears he never aspired to shoot movies, so when he wound up doing so, in the early eighties, he brought the journalistic sensibility he knew to his early films: 1984<\/em>, Sid and Nancy<\/em>, David Mamet\u2019s Homicide<\/em>. \u201cMy life just sort of gradually grew into my dreams,\u201d he says. He doesn\u2019t so much share this past with his readers for insight as refer to it as hard evidence of the work\u2019s difficulty. Asked by \u201crileywoods,\u201d a film student, how he came to master lighting, Deakins replies, \u201cI have been lucky over the years and have been pretty constantly working.\u201d He continues, \u201cI do think observing is important in learning\u201d\u2014meaning, observing the world, not others at work. In a recent thread about how to create the look of a thunderstorm, film students go back and forth on the right diffusion gels and light screens before Deakins chimes in with a one-sentence solution: \u201cYou could always shoot at night.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

One of Roger Deakins\u2019s \u201cbattle plans,\u201d from Looking at Light<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

It isn\u2019t difficult to make the connections between the triage training Deakins got shooting in the field and the work habits he\u2019s now famous for. He insists on handling the camera himself, something most cinematographers delegate to a camera operator. He likes shooting on handheld and without zoom lens. \u201cI like to feel someone\u2019s presence in a space,\u201d he says. He doesn\u2019t like any format in which the depth of field is too shallow or anything in the frame out of focus; background, he seems to feel, tells the viewer as much as the actor in the foreground. A story goes that during the shooting of No Country for Old Men,<\/em> the Coens had storyboarded a simple close-up of a watch, as Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) checks the timing of a possible ambush. Deakins suggested a slight change: that Moss hold the watch up, framing it against the desolate West Texas landscape. It\u2019s onscreen for only a blip\u2014an \u201cinsert shot,\u201d they call it\u2014but when you rewatch the scene, you find you\u2019re better inside the vigilance of the character. Not just looking out at the landscape but feeling the stretch of desert lengthen with dread.<\/p>\n

Deakins explains these decisions to his fans with an almost absentminded clarity. \u201cThe balance of the frame\u2014the way an actor is relating to the space in the frame,\u201d he says, \u201cis the most important factor in helping the audience feel what the character is thinking.\u201d Watching him reduce a technically complex art to \u201cstory-character\u201d gives one the sense of being in the presence of an artist who has achieved stylistic stability, one who can\u2019t be bothered to overthink it. He has no truck with \u201cmystery of cinematography\u201d\u2013type talk. \u201cDon\u2019t get distracted with technique\u201d is perhaps his most consistent piece of advice.<\/p>\n

Readers will often compare their images, side by side, with similar ones from Deakins\u2019s movies and want to know why their shots don\u2019t look as \u201ccinematic\u201d as his. \u201cThere is no \u2018trick\u2019 to making one image more \u2018cinematic,\u2019 \u201d he writes back, \u201cother than what you see.\u201d Even if I can\u2019t begin to comprehend what\u2019s involved in pulling off what Deakins does, I understand what he means here\u2014one can train their eye too<\/em> much. On a thread titled \u201cWays to create a feeling of isolation and being lost,\u201d for instance, Deakins advises against the character actually looking isolated and lost:<\/p>\n

Perhaps your character can be motionless, silhouetted against a bright window, whilst the bustle of the city takes place around him. He could be static, in silhouetted close profile against the moving crowd out of focus in the background or against the headlights of moving traffic.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

*<\/p>\n

A strange but beautiful thing you will hear cinematographers say is that they conceive of each frame as, at first, completely black. The creative act lies in what to light and how\u2014where to send viewers\u2019 eyes, using each beam like a stroke or word. And Deakins thinks about this canvas of blackness not unlike the way blues guitarists\u2014I\u2019m thinking of the Keith Richards quote here\u2014do the beats between notes: \u201cThe lighting of a film makes the pauses speak as eloquently as the words.\u201d<\/p>\n

Deakins wades deeply into the technical aspects of making such abstract ideas possible. He posts reams of what he calls battleplans, carefully drawn lighting schematics indicating how to hang bulbs and where to place lamps, all of it notated in candle feet (a perfect-sounding unit for light intensity). Gaffers on Deakins\u2019s sets are apparently given stacks of these, many of them necessitating DIY fixtures and rigging. He likes using household bulbs, bare fluorescents even, for the naturalism of it. Like his mentor Hall, he has become known for using \u201cmotivated-source\u201d light, where a scene is lighted by sources already in the frame, such as the lanterns carried by Jesse James\u2019s crew in The Assassination<\/em>. In movies with darker palettes, like Villeneuve\u2019s kidnapping-thriller Prisoners<\/em>, you also see a lot of \u201csingle-motivated source\u201d\u2014a sole bulb, say, dangling in a bathroom.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Still from Prisoners<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Technically speaking, what source lighting allows for is a reality \u201cjust slightly enhanced,\u201d as The<\/em> Deer Hunter<\/em>\u2019s Vilmos Zsigmond once put it, a subtle act of illusion that requires intricate discussions down at the level of wattage. The trick, Deakins says, is blending the illumination necessary for the frame into the very verisimilitude of the scene, so you don\u2019t have a nighttime shootout in True Grit <\/em>looking brighter than the nineteenth century should. Asked by \u201czola_rad\u201d how he decides on such light intensity, Deakins writes, \u201cI might look at the photometric specs of a lamp if I am unsure what level of light I will get at a certain distance.\u201d Notice that he\u2019s hedging against<\/em> using technology here; for Deakins, usually the archetypal Brit, such questions can reveal sides of a soulful, almost devotional, connection to light (he once told NPR <\/em>that slashes of light gave him a kind of high). It\u2019s a level of obsessiveness that can lead him, on occasion, to working at the very edge of physics. In one thread, he shares in \u201ctumbleweed\u201d\u2019s frustration controlling the shape of soft cuts of light on skin, asking the message board for ideas.<\/p>\n

Such exceptional sensitivity helps assure, first and foremost, a movie\u2019s continuity\u2014which can be a task of nightmarish proportions if a scene has to be shot, as many do, over multiple days. Among the most demanding scenes of Deakins\u2019s career, he writes, was the one early in No Country for Old Men<\/em> when Moss is chased on foot by a floodlit truck at sunrise. Because of the movie\u2019s schedule, Deakins had to shoot some of the frames on different days, and not necessarily in order, forcing him to blend several dawns into one. To prepare, he rose early for a week before the shoot and walked through each frame of the sequence, studying the timing and contours of West Texas daybreak. It was a means, he says, of disguising the machinations of making a movie, but also of getting all the preparation out of the way\u2014metering the light, recording the distances\u2014so he might concentrate solely on positioning Brolin in the frame.<\/p>\n

Famously, Alfred Hitchcock storyboarded so meticulously he sometimes found himself half-bored on set. For him, a movie wasn\u2019t being created so much as realized. A similar taste for preparation, it seems, has kept Deakins and the Coens collaborating for the past twenty-six years. And I am struck, going over Deakins\u2019s posts, by how his work-style reads like an exercise in \u201cfreedom within constraints.\u201d You might even look at his entire track record, stretching as it does across genres and formats, as proof of the fact that photographic sensibility probably matters less for a cinematographer than script planning. And this is why it can seem, falsely, that cinematographers are closer to technicians than artists. They\u2019re simply not in control of enough factors, some say, to be responsible for a movie\u2019s artistic effect. Only rarely does a cinematographer get to pick fundamental stuff like focal length, format, camera type, or color. More often they\u2019re in charge of the technical aspects of making the fundamentals expressive: the lighting, focus, depth of field.<\/p>\n

Deakins\u2019s name and talent has insured him a larger creative role in these decisions (the Coens now bring him in as early as storyboarding), but the fundamental truth of the profession still applies: his job is to act as an intermediary\u2014a translator\u2014of his director\u2019s vision. Which is partly why I understand him to mean it humbly when he says he\u2019d rather have his art go unnoticed; as a cinematographer, it\u2019s professionally unwise to develop a recognizable style. But now that I\u2019ve read Deakins blog for a few years, I also understand how he might mean it artistically, and honestly so. How having one\u2019s work go unnoticed might in fact be an achievement.<\/p>\n

For most of my movie-watching life, this would have sounded absurd to me. What liking cinematography has meant to me, over the last fifteen years, was that I liked watching movies at home; I\u2019ve always liked pausing and rewinding movies to better admire certain shots as still photography. I began watching movies this way with American Beauty<\/em>, which I rented nearly every week of 2002, when I was fifteen. My family lived in rural northern Colorado, and movies weren\u2019t a thing we went to with any regularity. More often they were DVDs rented long after the release date and brought home to be consumed, then picked over, like cultural relief packages.<\/p>\n

And I can still picture, with a strange, framed brightness, the movie\u2019s unforgettable red door, which Annette Bening\u2019s character, Carolyn, reveals to the viewer by rolling her window down during a night rainstorm. At the center of the shot: a door, deeply saturated, lipstick red, lighted by a single overhead bulb. The radiance of the porch light in the darkness makes it appear as though the rain is parting around the door, like an island in a stream. The image is gaudy, rudely symbolic of the murder to come\u2014but it also feels<\/em>, in a movie too full of hard thinking. As a teenager, I watched the scene over and over, conscious suddenly of the presence of photography in movies. (Only years later did I learn the movie was shot by Conrad Hall.)<\/p>\n

Which is why I wasn\u2019t a little horrified to learn that my habit of pausing and praising still frames, which I\u2019d been doing for years, thinking myself a thoughtful noticer of an \u201cunderappreciated\u201d art, was anathema to what many cinematographers considered their art. Still, it seemed somewhat disingenuous to me that cinematographers would say they weren\u2019t trying to create memorable images. (Could a painter avoid it?) But Looking at Light offers clear proof of Deakins\u2019s belief that \u201cthere\u2019s nothing worse than an ostentatious shot\u201d\u2014a belief even more convincing when refracted through the reality that many of cinematography\u2019s most celebrated shots were \u201chappy accidents,\u201d as Conrad Hall called them. Deakins never bothers to point this out, but it\u2019s there in a thread about the trailer for Blade Runner 2049<\/em>. A fan inquires about what he or she sees as a brilliantly off-center shot, and Deakins writes back: \u201cthe framing was probably just \u2018human error.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Not long ago, after reading some of Deakins\u2019s recent posts about Prisoner<\/em>s, I rewatched it, trying to notice what Deakins hadn\u2019t wanted me to. He describes the practicalities of shooting the movie\u2014arriving early to interior sets to change all the bulbs, the good drizzly days of wan light\u2014but also of finding himself inhabiting its mood:<\/p>\n

Denis [Villeneuve] was keen on seeing things in obscured ways with more complex frames. You know, you talk in general terms during prep but these things carry over when you are setting up the camera. It\u2019s not always conscious but you have these ideas in your head and when you are on a film there is nothing but that film in your head, so that’s what comes out.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What came out, exactly, I initially couldn\u2019t see. In fact, the first time I watched Prisoners<\/em>, I don\u2019t think I noticed what now seems its most remarkable moment. It\u2019s during the first few scenes, when the families come to accept their daughters have been kidnapped. Inside the living room, nearly all the lamps are turned on, despite it being mid-afternoon. Deakins probably needed a light source in the room; but the way it\u2019s done, it doesn\u2019t appear like a contrivance. Partly that\u2019s because of the lighting\u2019s subtlety\u2014the\u00a0drapes are drawn, it\u2019s raining\u2014but more because you can so easily imagine grieving families huddling inwardly in this way, turning on lamps to fend off the darkness. The beauty is: we don\u2019t see them do it. We see only the moment after, as they stir in their private anxiety. And it\u2019s suffocating. A logic of grief expressed almost solely through lamp light. As Hall used to ask Deakins: \u201cDoes the story tell without sound?\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Noah Gallagher Shannon lives in New York. His work has appeared in the <\/em>New York Times Magazine,<\/em> Oxford American, <\/em>Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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