Though many of the frames in “Byways” capture seaside towns such as the one in which “Empire” is located, many of them British, Deakins says he didn’t draw on them for the movie’s visual vocabulary - there’s a bifurcation between the two media for him: “I don’t really connect the film work to my stills work at all. He was using me as a sounding board, really, for his script ideas.” But I felt there was more of that on ‘Empire’ than on the other movies. We’ve always talked about a script and gone through it. “I think he was a little bit more insecure about the script and about doing it. “A lot of it is very connected to his growing up,” Deakins says. The dog’s looking at the camera.”ĭeakins’ other current project is the latest in his long collaboration with Mendes, “Empire of Light.” The film draws from events and people in Mendes’ life and represents his only solo writing credit to date (his only other screenplay shared with Krysty Wilson-Cairns for “ 1917,” for which Deakins won his second Oscar). When he got into position and waited for it to happen again, just as the dog jumped off and Deakins snapped, “the dog looked at James and I. Then there is the “guy throwing a stick off the promenade and the dog jumping after it,” he says of a photo he shot from below, drastically exaggerating the height. Some people don’t even notice it, which is a shame.” I loved the idea that she’s in flight and she’s just an element in the whole picture. But in the background, much smaller, is the detail Deakins waited for - a girl nearly horizontal on a swing. In another image, a sign with “Jolly Roger” on it is in the foreground by a dock just behind it, a British flag flies. I took quite a few when the tree was exposed like that with different skies, but there’s something about this bland, empty sky and the light hitting the water that makes this much simpler.” Sometimes they cut down the bracken and everything this was one time the tree was opened up. I spent a long time looking at that tree and waiting for winter, when it was bare. “I live about four miles, and I jogged that cliff path. The face could be screaming.įor an image captured during a storm, Deakins let the shutter click away, hoping for - and miraculously getting - that ideal lightning strike in the desert expanse, this one bisecting the building in the center of the frame (during the filming of Denis Villeneuve’s “ Sicario”).īut even for a photo he waited literally months to get, of a barren tree leaning over a cliff path, there’s a certain quality of serendipity. Its postcard of Berlin is not the Brandenburg Gate, but an empty playground with holes cut in a wall that form an alarming face, with something that looks like a tank turret in the foreground and smokestacks in the background. Instead of famous landmarks, its souvenirs are moments, some ironic, some intimate. and Romania, among them) and the shots’ unregulated movement through time, it can’t help but feel like a uniquely curated travelogue. The photographer says there’s no conscious theme or sequencing to the rest of the collection, though considering the title, the wide variety of locales (Melbourne, Australia Budapest, Hungary Albuquerque, N.M. There was a bearded lady, there was the sheep with the two heads and strip shows.” There are shots of an old-fashioned English fairground, the kind Deakins says you don’t find anymore, with kids on spinning rides in front and signs in the back beckoning patrons to “Boxing” or the “Stripteaze.”Īt his exhibition at the Peter Fetterman Gallery in Santa Monica, he says of that print, “I remember when my brother took me to the fairground where I grew up in Torquay you could go in and join the boxing - they would call for somebody in the audience to come up and attempt to outbox their main guy. There are men with tractors, people with sheep, dogs with jobs, a determined fellow carrying dried brush on his back who brings to mind the cover of Led Zeppelin’s fourth album. But these are very much just me walking around.”Ībout the first third of “Byways” is a time capsule of life in a rural town in the early ’70s, an assignment Deakins had when working for an art center in northern England. “On movies, you still need to be instinctive and reactive to what actors do and everything else that happens on the day. “It’s more the instinct of the moment than generally on a movie,” Deakins says.

Roger deakins shots