American Cinematographer - January 2011 - 68

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A League of His Own

Deakins prepares to take to the skies to capture a shot for Courage Under Fire (1996), his first collaboration with director Ed Zwick. They reteamed two years later for The Siege (1998).

months on a yacht during an aroundthe-world race. He came under mortar fire in Ethiopia during its guerrilla war. He filmed anthropological documentaries in India and Sudan. Working with 16mm and an Éclair NPR, he became increasingly adept as a camera operator. Radford was among his early collaborators. One of their documentaries followed Van Morrison on tour through Ireland( Van Morrison in Ireland). “Roger’s camerawork was amazing,” the director says. “For the first concert in Belfast, we’d hired six cameramen, and they all missed the plane, so Roger literally shot the first half of the concert on his own, and every single foot of it was useful!‘How to shoot a concert with one camera’ was what that lesson was about.” For Deakins, a turning point came on a documentary about schizophrenia that followed eight patients after their release from a London hospital. When one suffered a horrendous breakdown in her apartment, his partner wanted to keep filming, but Deakins instead put the camera down to assist the woman. After that, he stopped shooting documentaries. “I began to feel
68 January 2011

that what I was doing was very voyeuristic,” he recalls. “I questioned how much effect I was having, or whether it was just me trying to further

“I’ve had no formal training, even though I went to film school and art college. Both were places of anarchy, really.”

my own career. I was quite conflicted. So when I got the chance to shoot dramas, I decided that was more me.” His first dramatic project was a TV miniseries called Wolcott, which came through a friend of a friend. Soon thereafter, Radford called. He was planAmerican Cinematographer

ning to direct his first theatrical feature, Another Time, Another Place, a love triangle set in Scotland during World War II, and he’d been impressed by Deakins’ work on the miniseries. “It was also an instinct that he was going to deliver,” says Radford, who adds with a laugh, “Then I had terrible second thoughts! I thought, ‘What am I doing? I know the guy, I’ve seen this TV series, but it doesn’t tell me anything,really,about what we’re going to do now.’But in the end, the decision paid off in spades. The film worked very well, and not at all solely because of my direction, but because of Roger’s stunning photography— in Super 16mm! At that time, Super 16 was very marginal. You had about half a stop of variation on it, so Roger had to light very precisely, with a forest of little lights in these very tiny spaces. The film was a real success in Europe; it got a 10-minute standing ovation at Cannes. It was really a big break for both of us.” “I never looked back after that,” says Deakins. He reteamed with Radford on 1984, an adaptation of George Orwell’s novel. “That was a big movie,” says Radford.“I remember

American Cinematographer - January 2011

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