Top 62 Quotes & Sayings by Roger Deakins

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English director Roger Deakins.

Last updated on September 17, 2024.

Sir Roger Alexander Deakins is an English cinematographer, best known for his collaborations with directors the Coen brothers, Sam Mendes and Denis Villeneuve. Deakins has been admitted to both the British Society of Cinematographers and to the American Society of Cinematographers. He is the recipient of five BAFTA Awards for Best Cinematography, and two Academy Awards for Best Cinematography from fifteen nominations. His best-known works include The Shawshank Redemption, Fargo, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, A Beautiful Mind, Skyfall, Sicario, Blade Runner 2049, and 1917, the last two of which earned him Academy Awards.

English - Director | Born: May 24, 1949

Source: Wikipedia

Some of the smallest things on a smaller film, to me, are greater achievements than on a big film when you have the resources and the time and everything else.

Roger Deakins

I always had an interest in seeing people within their environments.

Roger Deakins

The little town I was brought up in, I'd go to the film society to these very extreme sorts of films that you wouldn't normally see in the movie houses. But I never dreamed that I would get into the position to be shooting movies equivalent to the ones I loved as a kid.

Roger Deakins

There's nothing worse than an ostentatious shot. Or some lighting that draws attention to itself, and you might go, 'Oh, wow, that's spectacular.' Or that spectacular shot, a big crane move, or something.

Roger Deakins

If you shoot with a billion cameras, then there's no perspective. You want to use one shot at a time, so it's better to discover what that is before you shoot, rather than trying to make something in the cutting room, and then it just becomes generic.

Roger Deakins

I shot film with the Coen brothers on 'Hail, Caesar!' That's fine. I'm sentimental about film; I've shot film for forty years or something.

Roger Deakins

I'd done a big movie that I wasn't happy with, and I was moving out of London when I got approached about Barton Fink, because my agent said the brothers were in London. We hit it off immediately, and suddenly I found myself on the way to America!

Roger Deakins

I came up, I suppose, a fairly traditional way. I went to art college. I always wanted to be a stills photographer, really, when I was younger, and I briefly worked as a stills photographer.

Roger Deakins

I couldn't imagine 'True Grit' in 3D. I think the idea is sort of absurd.

Roger Deakins

I've always been a fan of Westerns, but my favorite kind of Westerns mostly were Sam Peckinpah's Westerns, and they mainly took place in the West that was changing.

Roger Deakins

Every scene is a challenge. There are technical challenges, but often it's the simplest challenge where you feel a sense of achievement when you pull it off.

Roger Deakins

I don't approach films purely in context of genre.

Roger Deakins

My dad was a builder, so I didn't have any connection to the arts at all. I never really considered film as a career, but I knew I didn't want to be a builder.

Roger Deakins

I did a few documentaries as co-director and cameraman. I started off shooting a film about the war in Rhodesia. Then I did a film about an 'around the world' yacht race with a friend, and we spent nine months on a yacht. The film was about how people get on in confined spaces under extreme stress.

Roger Deakins

When I left art college, I was a still photographer for a year.

Roger Deakins

I don't really believe in the mystery of cinematography - what happens in the camera is what the cinematographers create and all that nonsense - I want the director to see what I'm trying to do.

Roger Deakins

I think that lens flares can work really well under certain circumstances. Personally, I am trying to get rid of them most of the time. I don't like artifacts that draw attention to the surface of the image.

Roger Deakins

There are some sequences in films that I think work filmicly, that stand out to me, but that's much more to do with the staging and the cutting and the mood of the thing as a sequence, the way everything comes together.

Roger Deakins

I love the writing of Walter Tevis and what he views as the possibilities of science rather than science fiction.

Roger Deakins

I don't do that virtual reality stuff. I'm not even into 3D, actually... I've been offered it. I just don't want to.

Roger Deakins

I loved movies ever since I was a kid.

Roger Deakins

I feel every shot, every camera move, every frame, and the way you frame something and the choice of lens, I see all those things are really important on every shot.

Roger Deakins

I don't really like watching 3-D.

Roger Deakins

I think technology has advanced so far now that there are some cameras on the market that give film a run for its money. It's all about flexibility in capturing images, and digital or film, it doesn't matter to me.

Roger Deakins

I love everything that Cormac McCarthy has written.

Roger Deakins

I do think observing is important in learning.

Roger Deakins

If I bring anything to the Coen Brothers' films, it's my ability to change tack and create a different mood from film to film.

Roger Deakins

On 'Sicario,' we storyboarded key sequences but not everything.

Roger Deakins

I've always painted or drawn pictures or taken still photographs; now I shoot movies. It's just about making images, really.

Roger Deakins

I don't study any films. I'll watch them, but I don't study anyone else.

Roger Deakins

There's so many films from around the world, I emphasize, that are so beautifully photographed, but they don't get the recognition.

Roger Deakins

People confuse 'pretty' with good cinematography.

Roger Deakins

Some of what I consider my best work, and some of the best films that I've ever worked on, kind of disappear without a trace. There's no accounting for it. Something connects, or something doesn't.

Roger Deakins

What's seemingly a simple thing can actually be the hardest to achieve.

Roger Deakins

I love reading different scripts and helping create different looks, different environments. Sometimes you go to meet a director over a particular script, and they'll say, 'I want you to do this because I want it to look like Shawshank,' and I'm like, 'Well, I'm not that interested in doing that again.'

Roger Deakins

The biggest challenge of any cinematographer is making the imagery fit together of a piece: that the whole film has a unity to it, and actually, that a shot doesn't stand out.

Roger Deakins

I like simplicity. I like using natural sources. I like images to look natural - as though somebody sitting in a room by a lamp is being lit by that lamp.

Roger Deakins

My time in documentaries was very educating, in terms of life experience as well as the filmmaking side of it.

Roger Deakins

Every shot I have ever made has been a compromise in some way. No image has ever been as good as the one I envisioned in my mind's eye.

Roger Deakins

I think of filmmaking as a form of communication. Maybe it's also an art, but that's for somebody else to decide.

Roger Deakins

There's nothing worse than an ostentatious shot or some lighting that draws attention to itself, and you might go, 'Oh, wow, that's spectacular.' Or that spectacular shot, a big crane move, or something. But it's not necessarily right for the film — you jump out, you think about the surface, and you don't stay in there with the characters and the story.

Roger Deakins

I am not a fan of having too much gear.

Roger Deakins

Maybe that sounds a bit pretentious, but I think life experience is always more important than technical knowledge.

Roger Deakins

You can’t learn your craft by copying me or anyone else. I hope what I do can do is in some way inspire others but I would be appalled if I thought my work was being studied as ‘the right way to do the job’. My way is just one of an infinite number of ways to do the job.

Roger Deakins

I am concerned that the subtlety is being lost and every film tends to look very contrasty and saturated.

Roger Deakins

If I am creating the shots from scratch I may have to spend more time holding the directors hand and therefore have less time to finesse the shot or the lighting etc. but it really all depends on the project. Some films benefit from their spontaneity.

Roger Deakins

I thought that was a pretty stupid argument, really, because it's the final product that matters. The look of the film, however it's done, is still the cinematographer's vision in my mind. People said the same when color film came in, didn't they? The world evolves, and image-making evolves.

Roger Deakins

Am I nostalgic for film? … I mean, it’s had a good run, hasn’t it? You know, I’m not nostalgic for a technology. I’m nostalgic for the kind of films that used to be made that aren’t being made now.

Roger Deakins

I want a script to affect me in some way. I am usually drawn to character studies, scripts about real people and the world we live in not some fantasy.

Roger Deakins

There are some sequences in films that I think work filmicly, that stand out to me, but thats much more to do with the staging and the cutting and the mood of the thing as a sequence, the way everything comes together.

Roger Deakins

To me if there's an achievement to lighting and photography in a film it's because nothing stands out, it all works as a piece. And you feel that these actors are in this situation and the audience is not thrown by a pretty picture or by bad lighting.

Roger Deakins

Partly why I love to operate is that I love to watch an actor within a shot. When you watch a shot, and you know that everything's come together, I feel I'm the first person watching it. I always get pleasure out of that.

Roger Deakins

All I’ve ever wanted to do is take stills of people, or take documentaries about people, and try to express to an audience how somebody lives next door. You know what I mean? Just how similar we all are as individuals.

Roger Deakins

Someone said to me, early on in film school... if you can photograph the human face you can photograph anything, because that is the most difficult and most interesting thing to photograph.

Roger Deakins

If reviewers don't mention your work, it's probably better than if they do.

Roger Deakins

When you move the camera, or you do a shot like the crane down (in Shawshank) with them standing on the edge of the roof, then it's got to mean something. You've got to know why you're doing it; it's got to be for a reason within the story, and to further the story.

Roger Deakins

When I first started, I saw myself shooting documentaries or making documentaries, which is what I did, mostly, for a number of years. So it was quite a surprise how I found myself shooting features. It was like my wildest dreams as a kid collided.

Roger Deakins

The balance of the frame - the way an actor is relating to the space in the frame - is the most important factor in helping the audience feel what the character is thinking.

Roger Deakins

Your whole life informs your eye.

Roger Deakins

I don't really believe in the mystery of cinematography - what happens in the camera is what the cinematographers create and all that nonsense.

Roger Deakins