Man of Light

Photo by Francois Duhamel © 2007 DREAMWORKS LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Although Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC, says he prefers to keep his films simple, the complexities, nuances, and great success of his work are routinely analyzed, debated, and emulated by cinematography aficionados and students around the world. Deakins, in fact, is routinely inundated with requests to participate in seminars and panel discussions in order to describe the technical specifics of his work to the film community — so much so that he has started posting lighting diagrams from his movies and answering direct technical questions on his website, www.rogerdeakins.com.

“The web thing progressed from doing Q&A sessions and people coming up to me and asking so many questions,” he says. “At one point, my wife suggested I start the website so that people can ask me questions there. That took off, and then, at some point, people were always asking how I light every set on every film. I began getting requests for the diagrams, so I started putting them up there. Most of the people who ask me questions on the site are film students or young people considering studying film, and I find it nice to be able to help them. When I started, there was no one giving that kind of help, so I'm glad I can do that.”

On the forums on his site, Deakins is already discussing his work from a very busy past couple of years — a prolific run that saw him shoot Revolutionary Road for Director Sam Mendes and start The Reader for Director Stephen Daldry before handing that project to Chris Menges, ASC, BSC, during a lengthy hiatus so that Deakins could take on DP duties for John Patrick Shanley's film Doubt. At press time, Deakins was nominated for an ASC Award for his work on Revolutionary Road, and he and Menges were jointly nominated for ASC and Academy Awards for their work on The Reader. (One of the surprising ironies of Deakins' career is that he has received six Oscar nominations without a win, including two last year following another prolific cycle on No Country for Old Men and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.)

To maintain the consistent feel of natural light in the Connecticut house location where
Revolutionary Road was primarily shot was extremely complicated. Deakins'' team battled to overcome this problem using a series of 12K Arri Compact HMIs to bounce light off strategically located 12x12 ultrabounce reflectors and large muslin sheets, by rigging an artificial sun, and by using a variety of other production tricks.
Photos by Francois Duhamel © 2008 DREAMWORKS LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Deakins, however, doesn't view his recent flood of work — or the challenges involved with rapidly switching productions, aesthetics, or whom he is working for — as a major concern. In fact, he prefers quick transitions from one project to another, and he hints that working almost constantly is one factor that allows him to get into a spot sweet enough to earn all the attention he's been getting.

“It's quite easy to switch productions actually,” he says. “I like doing a couple of films in a row and then having time off. It's quite nice, because you get into a real groove. You get used to going from one kind of film to another — that's part of what makes the job interesting. I get excited by changing my approach from one shoot to another.”

Those transitions were helped, Deakins says, by trending toward character-driven material “that is usually straightforward filmmaking built around the acting — the camera is just there to record the acting.” Indeed, the performances of Kate Winslet in The Reader and Revolutionary Road and Meryl Streep in Doubt are the heart of the three films. According to Shanley, Deakins' willingness to keep things simple lies at the heart of his brilliance.

“[For Doubt], we did a screening in Los Angeles and [cinematographer] Vilmos Zsigmond [ASC] came up to me after seeing it and told me the greatest thing about Roger Deakins in this film was the fact that he recognized how good [Streep] is, and he wasn't afraid to keep it simple,” Shanley says. “Roger isn't going around trying to show what a great cameraman he is. He does great work, but it's subtle enough that if you weren't paying attention to it, you wouldn't even notice it.”

Director Sam Mendes (pictured, left) had DP Roger Deakins rely as much as possible on natural light for Revolutionary Road.
Photo by Francois Duhamel © 2008 DREAMWORKS LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Revolutionary Road — a tale of an idealistic marriage falling apart in 1950s New England — posed a particular concern for Deakins because the Richard Yates novel upon which it is based is, as Deakins describes it, “observational,” meaning there is a certain distance between the characters and those observing them. In a feature-film format, Deakins was concerned it would be hard for audiences to connect with the characters.

“At first, I was thinking of employing a more static camera, to make the camera work more observational,” Deakins says. “But it didn't seem like that would work for the entire film. We started off that way, but then the camera gradually becomes more involved with the characters. It was basically having the camera record reality, but in a reserved sort of a way. My last film with [Mendes], Jarhead, was much different. It was all handheld, and none of the film was storyboarded. Based on that experience, Sam was not interested in storyboarding Revolutionary Road either. He did have specific shots in mind for particular scenes, but usually the camera work was about reacting to the performances. We would work out coverage and camera positions in rehearsals and on the day of the shoot.”

Doubt was similar in the sense of the film also being a character-driven piece revolving around a battle of wills between two strong personalities: a nun, played by Streep, and a priest suspected of pedophilia, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman. Once again, acting determined the overall lensing style of the piece.

“Though both films appear seemingly simple — both were shot on location and neither is complex in terms of its effects work, exotic locations, and so on — the challenges they posed were actually considerable,” Deakins says. “Doubt was quite a low budget and was shot on location [in New York], and the problem on a film like that is to maintain consistency. We were shooting in the winter in New York, so it was impossible to rely on daylight — and in fact, the existing daylight proved to be more of a problem than an advantage because of changing sunlight and the blue cast of dawn and dusk. I also consider that a large portion of a cinematographer's job is to create the right environment for the actors, and this demands that not only the way a scene is shot and lit to allow sufficient space and flexibility for the actors, but also that the crew work quietly, efficiently, and be adaptable to last-minute changes.”

One difference between the two projects was Deakins' approach to lighting the leading ladies. In Revolutionary Road, Winslet is filmed in a harsh manner, frequently bouncing raw light off the floor onto her face in an attempt to emulate natural light. In Doubt, Streep needed to look older than she really is, with her face framed by the nun's bonnet her character wears.

“I don't generally like cosmetic lighting, but the face is the most important part of any performance,” Deakins says. “It was no different in the case of Meryl's performance — just made practically more difficult by the costume, particularly the hood she was wearing.”

Deakins shot Revolutionary Road using Kodak Vision2 200T 5217 Super 35 stock for day interiors, 5212 for day exteriors, and Kodak Vision2 5218 stock for night work. (Doubt was shot entirely relying on Kodak Vision2 5218 stock.) Night exteriors posed challenges for him on Revolutionary Road, particularly in the sequence where a car is on a highway at night. His desire to light the scene with three practical sources and the lights of passing cars — all of which needed to be rigged with higher-output period bulbs — meant, by necessity, working at extremely low light levels and using a wide aperture.

But Revolutionary Road primarily challenged Deakins in terms of the main location: a suburban house in which much of the story develops. Mendes wanted, for the most part, to shoot the story in chronological order. That meant constant light struggles as Deakins' camera team hustled about the different rooms as the actors moved around in the Connecticut house where the film was shot.

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Most of those sequences were shot in single takes, and at first, Deakins captured much of that action using an Aerocrane Jib Arm with a Power-Pod remote head. Eventually, as the intensity of the characters' marital strife increased, he switched to a handheld approach.

“The final breakfast scene was very deliberately static and bathed in sunlight to give it a slight sense of being unreal,” Deakins says.

Maintaining the consistent feel of natural light in the Connecticut house location was extremely complicated. Deakins' team battled to overcome this problem using a series of 12K Arri Compact HMIs to bounce light off strategically located 12×12 ultrabounce reflectors and large muslin sheets, by rigging an artificial sun, and by using a variety of other production tricks.

“The house was the hardest thing,” Deakins says. “We didn't find the location until a very short time before we were scheduled to start shooting. It's always hard to find a period-looking house if you don't have enormous money to just build whatever you want from scratch. We were lucky to find this place, and the owners let our art department strip the whole thing apart and rewire it to make it easier to run cables. We shot all our interiors and exteriors at this one location. But it was very difficult to keep the light natural and consistent as we went from downstairs to upstairs at different times of day.

“The house was surrounded by trees, so in actuality, it was possible to shoot with natural light inside for a few hours a day provided the sun was out. Every shot we did, though, had to be lit to maintain a consistency of mood and look to each scene. Not only was this a case of lighting for the sunlit look we were after during the opening and closing sections of the film — including the creation of a sunlight effect with a large lamp on a crane — but also flagging off the real sun so that it didn't alter the look of a shot during filming. You can imagine the exposure change alone from the natural sun going in and out behind clouds, while my artificial sun continued shining without change. Some days, it would be raining heavily while we were trying to shoot a sunlit interior, and other days, the sun shone while we were trying to shoot for dusk. Also, when we were shooting upstairs in the house, we had to platform the exterior so as to get light through the windows. These platforms then had to be removed quickly when we moved back downstairs to continue shooting. Since we shot in continuity, this happened regularly. For night interiors, we were forced to shoot night for night in many circumstances so that I could light through the windows when I was creating a street-light effect. At one point, our schedule even forced us to tent the whole house using a truss rig that gave us some 10ft. clearance from the house for lighting. Our key grip [Mitch Lillian] had to rig and dismantle the whole thing during our off time to enable us to shoot downstairs and outside of the house the day before we used the tent and again the day after.”

Even with all of these strategies, of course, it was still necessary to rely on the digital-intermediate process on both films to ensure consistency shot to shot. Both Dis were performed at Efilm in collaboration with Colorist Michael Hatzer. Deakins, of course, helped pioneer the DI process at Efilm (on 2000's O Brother, Where Art Thou?), and he used it quite efficiently on these two projects.

“The DI helped quite a bit. It's such a great tool, but I rarely do major changes in the DI, except for the first one we did on [O Brother],” he says. “What it helps the most for is matching shots, particularly on day exteriors where one has to deal with the inconsistencies of natural daylight. I also use it to change contrast and saturation, but in subtle ways. There is a scene in Doubt that exemplifies how it helps. One long scene between Meryl's character and the character played by Viola Davis is a walk and talk. This was something we shot over a number of days, and the daylight was different each day, and even from shot to shot. You could never match a scene like this as well photochemically as we did in the DI. In this case, it was awkward to get light on Meryl's face during the walk because her character wears that bonnet. So we windowed the face and did various little tweaks. None of it was particularly extreme, but it makes quite a big difference to the final effect of the scene as Meryl's face is so much more present.”

Doubt was only the second feature film directed by John Patrick Shanley, but having penned the piece originally for the theater, he was intimately involved in crafting a color palette and shooting style for the movie.
Top photo by Brigitte Lacombe/Andrew Schwartz/Miramax Film Corp. Bottom photo by Andrew Schwartz/Miramax Film Corp.

Despite his screenwriting success (1987''s Moonstruck and this year''s Doubt), John Patrick Shanley has been, first and foremost, a theater man, writing a string of theatrical hits—including the Broadway play Doubt—and he is perfectly content with that life. In fact, Doubt is only the second motion picture he has directed and his first in 18 years, following 1990''s quixotic Joe Versus the Volcano.

Bringing Doubt to the big screen was easy in a sense, Shanley admits, because this time around he had an all-star cast and an all-star crew to help him along. Still, much of the process was entirely different from the process back in 1990, and Shanley says it took some getting used to.

“I was terrified to make this film,” he says. “Extended dialogue scenes, no gunfire, no cars—could we hold an audience? We worked day and night to address that problem while we were shooting. But when we did Joe Versus the Volcano, we were cutting that thing with razor blades—digital editing wasn''t happening yet. The editorial process is an entirely different one now, but fortunately, a much better one. It is so much quicker and efficient now. I had to bring myself up to speed on those things, but that is part of what preproduction is for—to get up to speed on the latest technology and how it affects your particular film.

“But shooting was pretty much what it has always been. Figuring out where the master shot would be with extended dialogue scenes was tough, especially because some of those scenes were so long. I would say, ‘Maybe the camera should be over here,'' and Roger Deakins would nod and agree with me, but then point to a totally different place [to put the camera]. It was Roger Deakins, after all, so I felt like he knows more than I do, so I would defer to him on those kinds of shots. But otherwise, the breakdown on individual shots and extended dialogue was usually pretty obvious—the acting dictated camera placement most of the time.”

Shanley says that he was particularly fortunate to get Deakins to help him out to begin with. Their partnership was made possible when actress Nicole Kidman became pregnant, holding up production for The Reader, which Deakins was already committed to. Because of this, Scott Rudin—The Reader''s co-producer—handed Shanley''s Doubt script to Deakins, who wasn''t enjoying the unscheduled hiatus.

“For me, it was a lucky stroke of fate to get Roger,” Shanley says. “I had started with another cameraman, but I realized it wasn''t working out, and around the same time, The Reader shut down production. They were holding onto the crew, and Roger was stuck in Berlin. Scott asked him to let him know what he thought about my script, and Roger said he would like to do it. So Scott flew him in just a few weeks before we started shooting, he got up to speed, and it worked out really well.”

Shanley asked Deakins to reference Carol Reed''s 1948 film, The Fallen Idol (shot by Georges Périnal). With that film in mind, they set about designing the palette and shot compositions for Doubt.

“The scale of Fallen Idol was similar to our film, and Roger knew there would be the occasional Dutch angle that I would want in this story with all the extended dialogue,” Shanley says. “We had all these people in a room, and I didn''t want a Law and Order camera going on. So we had to figure out how to keep the camera alive past a certain point. There are tricks like blinds opening and closing and light bulbs blowing out and phones ringing and things, so we tried to use the physicality of the space to motivate camera moves. But in addition to that, I also felt I was going to need the occasional Dutch angle to keep the audience from being visually lulled into not listening to dialogue. Roger went with that and helped me compose some really beautiful shots.”

Shanley had strong opinions about the film''s color design—preferring to take the story in an entirely new visual direction from the play version.

“I didn''t direct the stage play, but they did a wonderful job with a photorealistic kind of thing where they went back to the church school I went to as a child, photographed the rooms, and recreated them on stage. For the film, I felt the autumnal colors we had for exteriors [the film takes place in the Bronx]—the grays and dull browns—would be nicely offset by some vibrant interior colors. I told our production designer [David Gropman] I wanted particular colors on the walls of the rooms. They would basically bring me big pieces of plywood painted different colors until we found the ones I liked. So the church office is a very rich and vibrant green, and that''s a powerful and very different green from what we had on the exteriors. The sort of Virgin Mary blue of the nun''s sitting room is another one of those colors, and so is the kid''s red room at the start of the picture. My hope was they would make you want to stay in those rooms because they were colors you would be starved for. They are much stronger colors than David would probably normally use.”
—M.G.