Quotes from Roger Deakins

If I bring anything to the Coen Brothers' films, it's my ability to change tack and create a different mood from film to film.

I feel every shot, every camera move, every frame, and the way you frame something and the choice of lens, I see all those things are really important on every shot.

My time in documentaries was very educating, in terms of life experience as well as the filmmaking side of it.

There are some sequences in films that I think work filmicly, that stand out to me, but that's much more to do with the staging and the cutting and the mood of the thing as a sequence, the way everything comes together.

I don't really believe in the mystery of cinematography - what happens in the camera is what the cinematographers create and all that nonsense - I want the director to see what I'm trying to do.

I do think observing is important in learning.

If reviewers don't mention your work, it's probably better than if they do.

If you shoot with a billion cameras, then there's no perspective. You want to use one shot at a time, so it's better to discover what that is before you shoot, rather than trying to make something in the cutting room, and then it just becomes generic.

I like simplicity. I like using natural sources. I like images to look natural - as though somebody sitting in a room by a lamp is being lit by that lamp.

I never really considered film as a career, but I knew I didn't want to be a builder. So I went to art college, and it just gradually happened.

I don't study any films. I'll watch them, but I don't study anyone else.

I think of filmmaking as a form of communication. Maybe it's also an art, but that's for somebody else to decide.

I love the writing of Walter Tevis and what he views as the possibilities of science rather than science fiction.

I don't do that virtual reality stuff. I'm not even into 3D, actually... I've been offered it. I just don't want to.

I want a script to affect me in some way. I am usually drawn to character studies, scripts about real people and the world we live in not some fantasy.