54 | Sight&Sound | April 2020
ROGER DEAKINS7
SHOWDOWN IN THE GLASS TOWER
Skyfall (2012)
If you make enough indelible images, the
James Bond people come calling. Deakins was now
the exemplar of a fully digital filmmaker, one who
could add sizzle to even the oldest franchise. The
Ken Adam-designed Bond productions of the 1960s
and 70s were triumphs of elephantine modernism;
Deakins brought back some of that classic-feeling size
and swagger. His signature contribution is a Shanghai
gun-fu office fight shot in silhouette. Behind the
combatants floats a building-wide jellyfish. (Don’t ask
why an office façade needs a screensaver – it works
beautifully.) Panes of glass splinter and Daniel Craig
sulks; elsewhere in the film, a Macau casino beckons
as Deakins serves up our hero on a floating platform
of Chinese lanterns. He totally gets it, supplying de
luxe exoticism and sharp edges in every frame.
8
BATTLE ON ANOTHER PLANET
Sicario (2015)
The Godfather cinematographer Gordon Willis
earned the nickname ‘Prince of Darkness’ for his
daringly underlit compositions (the epithet came
from friend and fellow cameraman Conrad Hall, who
himself dimmed the lights in such noirs as Road to
Perdition, 2002). Deakins mostly doesn’t get that glum.
But has anyone topped the dusk raid in Sicario: tense,
black-ops soldiering illuminated by the shallowest
strip of fading orange light? The eerie, otherworldly
shot emphasises the alienness of an undeclared war.
Embedded in tunnels or filming the campaign from
high above the US-Mexico border, Deakins supplies
the film with a near-abstract sense of surreality. The
action is morose, furious and inconclusive; there’s
a politics to the camerawork that went widely
unmentioned at the time. Now it’s no longer subtext.10
ENTERING THE
FIERY CITY AT NIGHT
1917 (2019)
Assembling a whole film as though it were a single shot
doesn’t feel so impressive these days, particularly not to
those of us who have seen the real thing in Alexander
Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002). But Deakins pulls off a
dazzlingly phantasmagoric effect within Sam Mendes’s
much-praised World War I drama which deserves all the
attention: Lance-Corporal Schofield (George MacKay)
emerges from his concussed state into an atmosphere of
dread – a town reduced to rubble, mostly deserted. Fires
and flares streak the darkness. A church blazes. Once
again, here is Deakins the nighttime master, turning
pools of shadow into expressive black-on-black oils. Light
slants across ruined buildings, rising and falling with
every overhead blast; as a feat of coordination alone, it’s
unmatched. (Deakins planned his moves using a scale
model of the village.) We creep behind, pulled inexorably
toward danger – or destiny. The sequence, exquisitely
paced and executed, could be its own horror film.9
GREETINGS FROM THE FUTURE
Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
If you were following along at home,
this was the project that finally earned Deakins
his first Oscar (after 13 previous nominations).
Even more impressively, he emerged unscathed
from the assignment with a distinct sci-fi
psychodrama that somehow managed to
please the fanboys – not bad for a sequel to a
bona fide classic, one shot by the great Jordan
Cronenweth. Because it’s Blade Runner, there’s
smoke. And rain. And interiors thick with dust
motes. More subtly, Deakins captures the morbidity
of a civilisation lost in mourning for itself. His
outstanding moment has sad-sack replicant ‘K’
(Ryan Gosling) approached by a Godzilla-sized
pink hologram of a nude woman, sprung to life
from a billboard: “Hello, handsome,” she coos,
blinking soulless eyes. It doesn’t cheer him up.
Their exchange is arrestingly strange and
emotionally delicate – two ghosts in the machine.