The challenges and pressures of film-making are just as great whether you are starting out or established, just different. I get as much satisfaction from my work today as I did when I started shooting way back in the 70s. For myself it was going to film school that opened up a range of possibilities for me and I would always recommend that as a path. There are so many ways that people enter into film making that is hard to advise one path rather than another.
ROGER DEAKINS HOW TO
How to get in to the business is always the first question I get asked, and the hardest to answer. I have sometimes been setting up a shot and then just realised that it is a little ostentatious but usually you don’t think about it. I don’t think making creative choices is a conscious thing so much as it is intuitive.
You simply have to be in tune with the director and with the kind of film you are working on. It isn’t a cinematographer’s job to shoot amazing images, because that jolts the viewer out of the story. I can look at the colour work of Alex Webb for hours and wonder how he got those shots. Their ability to capture so much in a single moment, so much within a single image, is something that is a real talent and shows their true connectivity with a subject. Larry Burrows, Don McCullin and, more recently, James Nachtwey and Alex Webb stand out for me but there are obviously so many more.
I admire a great many photojournalists and since having shot documentaries in some difficult parts of the world I can really appreciate the work they do. I think any style I have has just developed from there. I have always loved stills photography and I worked in documentary film-making for a number of years. I don’t think I took any particular ‘action’ to develop a style. Sound recordist Noel Smart and I spent nine months on that trip and to say it had some ‘interesting’ moments would put it mildly. I was brought up by the sea in Devon and I guess that was enough of a resume. I had hardly any experience of yachts before then but I convinced a producer at a television company that I was the right choice to shoot a documentary about life aboard one of the yachts. The biggest risk I ever took was probably to volunteer as a crew member on the Whitbread Around the World Yacht Race of 1977-8. The time I spent there allowed to me to gain confidence and to experiment. My experience at the National Film School had, probably, the biggest effect on my development as a cinematographer. I always loved painting and especially the work of Georgio de Chirico and Edvard Munch, but I would say that I was basically self-taught. At art college I was lucky to meet Roger Mayne, who was a tutor for a while, and grew to admire the quiet way he worked as a street photographer. Photography and photojournalism had quite an influence on me as it did on everyone in the late 60s. I was influenced by the films I saw when I was a teenager, films such as Culloden and War Game by Peter Watkins, films by Antonioni and Visconti, Mizoguchi, Resnais, Breton, Melville and Tarkovsky.