Roger Deakins: ​‘With film, I used to be the first per­son to see a performance’

Roger Deakins is a film indus­try titan who needs no intro­duc­tion. Accu­mu­lat­ing an envi­able list of direc­to­r­i­al col­lab­o­ra­tors in a career span­ning four decades (and count­ing), the pio­neer­ing, Torquay-born cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er is respon­si­ble for some of the most visu­al­ly stun­ning frames in films by the Coen broth­ers, Denis Vil­leneuve and Mar­tin Scorsese.

Work­ing once again with five-time col­lab­o­ra­tor Sam Mendes, Empire of Light sees Deakins pare back on the ambi­tious sin­gle-take brava­do behind his Oscar-win­ning work for 2019’s World War Two dra­ma, 1917, by mov­ing from a mud­dy bat­tle­field to a home­ly coastal cin­e­ma that con­jures as much nos­tal­gia as the movies that light up its screens. Nev­er­the­less, find­ing (or rather, build­ing) the per­fect cin­e­ma was just as much of a challenge.

LWLies: What did you like about Empire of Light the first time you read the script?

Deakins: It cre­at­ed a feel­ing of the time – the ear­ly 80s – that I remem­ber. I left [Eng­lish coastal town] Torquay by then, I was liv­ing in Lon­don and I was still shoot­ing doc­u­men­taries and segue­ing into shoot­ing fea­ture films. But I did still go back to Torquay a lot and so I remem­ber the peri­od very well.

Did you feel nostalgic?

I love sea­side towns, and I think a lot of them been ruined recent­ly by mod­ern devel­op­ment where it wasn’t nec­es­sary. Some of the Geor­gian archi­tec­ture and sea­side archi­tec­ture is being destroyed so I am quite sad about that.

I know the feel­ing. I’m from Aberdeen and the whole coast has changed so much in the past 20 years. The film made me think about the state of inde­pen­dent cin­e­mas, espe­cial­ly the local cin­e­ma, Bel­mont Film­house, which was recent­ly shut down. 

I remem­ber in Torquay there were five cin­e­mas with­in walk­ing dis­tance from where I was grow­ing up. But even then, I’d go and see a movie in the win­ter, there would be about four or five peo­ple. It’s sad! And now I think there’s only two, they’ve all gone.

Did you have a cin­e­ma you went to a lot grow­ing up?

There were quite a few, it depends on the show. There was one in Torquay that gen­er­al­ly showed Euro­pean art­house films. We had a lit­tle film club for a while that showed all sorts of films. And then there were the main­stream cin­e­mas that showed Sound of Music, which I remem­ber see­ing on my first date. You had so many choices.

Do you recall any par­tic­u­lar­ly fond view­ing experiences?

Only at this lit­tle film club. In the win­ter, there’s not much to do in a sea­side town, espe­cial­ly in Torquay. I would go to this film soci­ety and they had a lit­tle 16mm pro­jec­tor set up with a lit­tle free­stand­ing fold-up screen, and they would show Alphav­ille and Last Year in Marien­bad. I remem­ber see­ing Peter Watkins’ The War Game. That was a film that was only released to film clubs for a week or two and a cou­ple of film fes­ti­vals, and then it was banned by the BBC for 25 years. It’s basi­cal­ly about a nuclear attack on Lon­don, and it was so strik­ing as a bril­liant piece of film­mak­ing. But I par­tic­u­lar­ly remem­ber it because most of the peo­ple that went to this film soci­ety were old peo­ple who just went to the films because they had noth­ing else to do, and there were two elder­ly ladies in the front row who just col­lapsed. They faint­ed because it was so har­row­ing. The pow­er of movies! Even if you watch the film now, it’s got a chill­ing real­i­ty to it. An absolute­ly truth­ful account of what would hap­pen if a bomb land­ed on Lon­don. I remem­ber that quite vividly.

The last time you worked with Sam Mendes, it was for 1917, which had a lot of logis­ti­cal tech­ni­cal­i­ties and plan­ning behind it. Did this film feel of a small­er scale or was it just as much an under­tak­ing but per­haps in a dif­fer­ent way?

I felt it was on a small­er scale because we didn’t have an end­less shoot and we cer­tain­ly didn’t have an end­less amount of mon­ey for equip­ment – but you have to cut your cloth to fit. For instance, find­ing the cin­e­ma was a key thing which set us in Mar­gate, where­as the orig­i­nal con­cept would have been Brighton, Wor­thing, or some­where on the south coast. Once that’s made, then you have to decide what it offers you and what doesn’t work. The lob­by of the exist­ing cin­e­ma didn’t work, and that was always a prob­lem with all the places we scout­ed. There was no lob­by that worked in the way that Sam had envi­sioned it, so it was obvi­ous it had to be built. Then the deci­sion is, do you build it on stage, and do a whole fake back­ground with a huge light­ing rig? Or, do you try to build it on loca­tion? Luck­i­ly, there was this emp­ty lot a few doors away from the exte­ri­or loca­tion of the cin­e­ma where we could build the lob­by with vir­tu­al­ly the same view as you would get from the exist­ing build­ing. It seemed like too good an oppor­tu­ni­ty to turn down.

What was wrong with the ini­tial lob­by? What were the require­ments you were look­ing for?

Sam want­ed quite an expan­sive lob­by with this very strong view look­ing out towards the prom­e­nade and the sea. And he want­ed this stair­case going up to screen one – the upper lev­el cin­e­ma. That was very much writ­ten into the script, the stag­ing. All the lob­bies we saw in exist­ing cin­e­mas on the south coast had very low ceil­ings, and didn’t have very open views of the sea. Dream­land, which is the loca­tion we end­ed up shoot­ing at, was nice. It had a peri­od, but the lob­by was very low. And the entrance to the screen­ing rooms was through a weird way out the back. We nev­er found a lob­by any­where like Sam was envi­sion­ing, so we had to build it.

What con­ver­sa­tions did you have with Sam Mendes about the visu­al iden­ti­ty of the film?

Orig­i­nal­ly, he was toy­ing with the idea of shoot­ing it black-and-white, and we talked about shoot­ing it hand­held to make it raw and imme­di­ate. I didn’t like the idea of black-and-white, I must say, but we talked around it and then decid­ed, no, it should be much more restrained and qui­et. There was so much char­ac­ter – it’s an actor’s piece, real­ly. You don’t want to dis­tract from the per­for­mances. You just want to allow them to be the char­ac­ters with­in the frame. It’s quite a sim­ple approach. You do have those con­ver­sa­tions and then you scout loca­tions and it just grad­u­al­ly builds, but so much of the film is cre­at­ed on the day, and it relates to the loca­tion and how the actors work in the space.

How was work­ing with pigeons?

The pigeons were actu­al­ly great. We had a pigeon train­er, the whole bit. The awk­ward thing is if Michael [Ward] had one fear, it was pigeons. Absolute­ly ter­ri­fied of pigeons. So he had to spend quite a lot of time in pre-pro­duc­tion and prep time get­ting him­self over that so he could han­dle a pigeon. He had a real pho­bia about birds.

You’ve nev­er had any reser­va­tions about shoot­ing on dig­i­tal, but what was the deci­sion behind film­ing this on dig­i­tal? Espe­cial­ly because Empire of Light has so much rev­er­ence for the art of projection.

There was no deci­sion, real­ly. We’d done 1917 on Alexa LF Sig­na­ture Prime lens­es and Sam said, ​’Why don’t we just use the same sys­tem?’ I don’t remem­ber any dis­cus­sion about the idea of shoot­ing on film. That would have been nice but there are so many more advan­tages of shoot­ing dig­i­tal­ly now, espe­cial­ly in terms of cost-effec­tive­ness. Size of the cam­eras, using the sta­bilised rig. There are so many dif­fer­ent rea­sons if you analyse why it makes sense to shoot dig­i­tal. Do you see a dif­fer­ence any­more? Now and again, I’ll see a shot and think, ​‘That does look dig­i­tal.’ But then, when I remem­ber when I shot film, I was say­ing, ​‘Oh god, I don’t like the look of that because I can see it’s film.’ I shoot still film pho­tographs. I wish I’d been a still pho­tog­ra­ph­er, and that’s why we pub­lished a book last year of my still pho­tographs. I shot on film for years but I’ve been shoot­ing dig­i­tal ever since they made a dig­i­tal cam­era, and I don’t regret it for a moment. It’s about the image, the light of the image, the feel of the image. I find it hard to tell with some­thing shot dig­i­tal­ly or on film if it’s been shot by some­body who knows what they’re doing.

There was some­thing won­der­ful about shoot­ing film, when there were no mon­i­tors on set, the direc­tor next to me, the actor in front. There was some­thing pure and sim­ple about that. But that was anoth­er world, one that’s long gone. Now there’s mon­i­tors every­where, hun­dreds of mon­i­tors. I used to be the first per­son to see a per­for­mance in the frame, and that was always a thrill. It’s still a thrill watch­ing it because I still feel like I’m see­ing it before any­body else, even if it’s only the speed of light between that and the mon­i­tor. Now, the direc­tors are hard­ly ever by the cam­era. They’re usu­al­ly in a tent somewhere.

In film com­mu­ni­ties, peo­ple still treat shoot­ing on film as sacrosanct.

Well, they can do what they want. I love film, don’t get me wrong. The extreme ver­sion is I wish we were still shoot­ing on film, but in black-and-white. I would love that. Maybe even bet­ter if we weren’t shoot­ing sync sound. I mean, where do you stop? Where did colo­nial­ism start? As soon as we left Africa, we became colonists. We became impe­ri­al­ists. You can’t go back, the world changes. You can have regrets and you can be nos­tal­gic for the way the sea­side looked 50 years ago, but there are so many more advan­tages now. We no longer live in a beau­ti­ful, pris­tine world, but we have health­care and edu­ca­tion and hamburgers.