Quotes from Roger Deakins

I love everything that Cormac McCarthy has written.

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.'

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.

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!

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

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

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.

People confuse 'pretty' with good cinematography.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Your whole life informs your eye.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.