ASC Hearts Deakins (and you should too)
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
and No Country for Old Men - Two by Roger Deakins
The American Society of Cinematographers has nominated Roger Deakins twice for Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography for his work on No Country for Old Men and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. According to Awards Daily, Deakins is the first cinematographer to receive two nominations in one year. He’s been nominated five times and won for The Shawshank Redemption and The Man Who Wasn’t There. For the former he lost the Oscar to John Toll for Legends of the Fall and the latter he lost to Andrew Lesnie for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.
The ASC nominees for Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography:
The Assassination of Jesse James - Roger Deakins
No Country for Old Men - Roger Deakins
There Will Be Blood - Robert Elswit
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly - Janusz Kaminski
Atonement - Seamus McGarvey
The Directors Guild of America announces their nominations tomorrow morning. Stay tuned.
See there how I managed to avoid using the word ”lensed” even once?
Filed under: News
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I haven’t seen Diving Bell yet, so I would pick Deakins’s work on Jesse James as the best of the year, he’s certainly overdue.
Jesse James is my pick too, though I don’t pretend to be expert in the technical categories.
Kaminski deserves bonus points for getting under Jeff Wells’ skin and also for using the cinematography to help tell a difficult story.
Elswit is certainly no slouch either.
As I commented over at AD, I love these choices. I just hope Deakins, who is overdue for a win, doesn’t cancel himself out.
I fear it, yet I wouldn’t exactly be destroyed if one of these other fellows win. Still, Deakins is the way to go.
All 4 nominees are outstanding but Deakins work in Jesse James is my favorite too.
I always wonder how these specific groups (cinematographers, directors, etc) choose to acknowledge achievement: is it weighted towards artistic merit, technical viruosity, or a mix of both? Or do they just vote for the movie they found the least annoying to watch?
I have two friends that are audio engineers and I know they are driven to distraction by movies with poor sound mixing. I have a background in still photography and I am sometimes taken out of a movie completely trying to deduce how a shot was technically constructed (there’s a specific shot in Blue Velvet in the police precinct where the use of a wide-angle lense is so distracting as to be obviously intentional…can’t decide if it’s brilliant or foolish).
Anyway, I wonder how they consider it? Not having seen TWBB or Diving Bell or Atonement yet, I can’t even consider the nominees but for technical achievement I would have to give Deakins the nod for No Country where as for artistic merits, Jesse James is the front runner. If it’s a combo of both, I’d go with No Country since I think it’s an overall better film and Deakins deserves credit for adding to the brilliance on display.
I wonder with all these things how much the popularity contest factors into it. You figure all these people know each other to a dgree and probably have personal opinions. I like to think though it’s all purely professional and based on technical merit.
We’ve talked about this before Joel, but can you give any examples of where No Country excels for you on a technical level.
Primarily the lighting and Deakins’ ability to find detail and emotion in very simple settings. Those opening shots that act as sort of a visual postcard to set the emotional weight under Ed’s narration are gorgeously composed and executed.
The entire chase sequence that (sort of) opens the movie is amazing. Llewelyn hunting, his discovery of the dog, his discovery of the crime scene, his stalking the last man, his return to the crime scene specifically, and his mad race to escape are all moments where Deakins is carefully setting the lighting to give us a somber combination of atmosphere, detail, and tension.
That very restrained elegance continues as Chigurh chases Llewelyn and Llewelyn attempts (vainly) to hide out from his pursuer. Both of Llewelyn’s hotel rooms are beautifully lit and articulated visually and both have completely different feelings to them. I also am in love with the shots into the dead TV, which is not only a brilliant framing device but a wonderful way to contrast two radically different characters completely visually. From what I understand, those two shots weren’t really planned but happened on set.
It is so subtle sometimes that we’re not aware of how specific the visual queues are, but Deakins is carefully lighting certain shots in the movie to limit the visual details to only a handful, using the camera to tell the story as much as any narration ever would. It’s technically noir but not used in the standard noir-ish ways.
The hard part is that it would be easy to ascribe too much credit to Deakins for the visuals of No Country, knowing as I do how the Coens meticulously plan all their films. I’m sure the framing, pacing, and editing of the shots is mostly a credit to their skill but Deakins deserves credit for making those ideas work.
I think Jesse James is cinematographically great and all but the visuals of that movie sometimes overwhelm the storytelling (well, that and some of the narration). Since James is more obvious in its visual style, it gets a lot of attention. Since No Country is about subtley evading all the tenants of the thriller genre’s storytelling cliches to subvert the audience’s expectations, the simplicity of No Country is ultimately more appealing and more notable to me.
Thank you for that Joel.
Hmm…where to begin. The subtlety you describe I think is what disguises the brilliance from people who aren’t photographers. In a way, it also makes the work more brilliant if you agree with the idea that the technical details are best when they don’t call overt attention to themselves.
As you say, it’s unclear where the Coens and Deakins begins, but it’s fair to say there is a good reason he’s photographed all of their films since Barton Fink. They work well together. It also wouldn’t be surprising that whatever their grasp of the visual language is, they learned a good measure of it from Mr. Deakins.
Well it’s telling that they’ve only worked with two cinematographers over their entire body of work and although I can discern some of the frenetic camera movement and wide-angle shooting of Sonnenfeld over Deakins’ more restrained camera work, visually the movies have a really consistent style to them.
I’d also like to mention that I don’t know which movie I would bump, only having seen two of them, but Harris Savides’ amazing lighting and camera work in Zodiac really deserves to be nominated. I know you thought it was muddy at times, but I think he opens up a whole new level of creepy detail with his nighttime digital photography in Zodiac.
I also don’t want to trumpet simplicity or subtle technique for the sake of subtle technique. I think Jesse James is visually amazing but No Country is the better of the two films and the craft of what is being done reinforces every thing the film is trying to narratively, thematically, emotionally, and cinematically. In Jesse James, it feels more like style for the sake of style as opposed to something essential to the narrative or the character development of the movie.
Of course, I’d like to revisit that movie just to study the times when Deakins chooses to do those visual effects over the times when he shoots it straight. I doubt it’s a random choice at all.
I think I missed the whole point of the digital photography of Zodiac the first time I saw it because I wasn’t getting my “true blacks damnit!”
I wasn’t against it, I just wasn’t used to seeing it that way. Ironically I thought I was missing something when in fact I was seeing things that didn’t used to be possible.
I’ll be curious to hear what you thought of Kaminski’s work in Diving Bell when you see it and what you think of his work in general off the top of your head. Jeff Wells has a major bee in his bonnet over the man for reasons that aren’t altogether clear.
Kaminski is also pretty damned talented. He has done some incredible stuff for Speilberg and he’s also a lot more open to pushing the boundaries with technical tricks that are more obvious and showy (and by default more daring and innovative) than a lot of other cinematographers out there.
Who ever thought that you could make that high-speed shutter effect on old school VHS cameras into such a visual staple of war movies? But there it was in Saving Private Ryan and everyone has been copying it since.
You should sit down with Jeffrey Wells sometime. Apprently he has issues with the man’s use of “milky-white-light”. Or something.
I suspect that for the ASC awards they don’t think as much about which nominee shot ‘the better movie’ as much as focussing on the work itself independent of narrative and direction, and who is ‘due’ as Lubezki certainly was last year (Deakins not so much since he’s already won 2, but he’s overdue for an Oscar).
Ditto to Joel on Deakins’ No Country and Savides’ Zodiac work. The shots Deakins achieves at dawn and dusk in the film have a completely naturalistic look, not affected or overly romantic like most d.p.’s would go for. The camera’s deliberately paced movement and high-contrast lighting in the showdown scene amp up the suspense incalculably. I haven’t seen Jesse James yet, but Deakins did some fantastic work on No Country.
I think digital is suitable for certain films and certain d.p.’s. The look and feel of Zodiac (and Collateral a few years back) suited the film perfectly. Though the art direction can also be attributed for this, Zodiac genuinely feels like a ’70s film — so much more so than Savides’ other period film this year, American Gangster. The CG shots mesh seamlessly with the on-location/on-set cinematography. Clearly, a lot of thought went into the visuals of Zodiac at every level.
To this “best-of” list, I’d like to add the cinematography of The Lookout, which hasn’t been recognized anywhere. I’d never heard of before this, but he did a fantastic job on this relatively low-budget film. The flashback sequence at night was incredible. Also, the establishing shots of the bank are interesting. It looks like the bank was drawn from an Edward Hopper painting and its contrast with the dark street at night adds to the isolation of Gordon-Levitt’s character in the robbery scene.
Alar Kivilo shot The Lookout, btw — forgot to add that in the last post.
What’s really impressive about Zodiac is that not only were they pushing the digital cameras by a huge latitude to see shadow detail previously impossible to capture on film, but they did it in such a way that didn’t call attention to itself in obvious way PLUS it had to all blend seamlessly with the extensive CGI inserts that Fincher was using to complete the time-period authenticity of the film.
Collateral is an excellent example because Mann was pushing those cheaper cameras so far that the grain was severely evident in the film. I think he wanted the grainy effect to some extent but it was also a byproduct of the process.
On Zodiac though, the only “tell” is that the shadows have this unsettling depth to them. The deep black of total shadow in other films is replaced with a murky, semi-coherent recognizability that only adds to our discomfort. We can almost see the killer’s face. We can almost see what’s lurking just outside of the light.
I suppose you could say that two of the most experimental films produced this year were Zodiac and No Country.
I didn’t mind the graininess in Collateral. Like Zodiac, the story was communicated as a procedural rather than a typical Hollywood “thriller.” It added to the feeling of authenticity. But I was especially impressed by the shots looking out the office building over the city lights.
Mann and Beebe pushed their luck (and the camera) too far with Miami Vice, though. Most of the colors in that film were muddy and the images grainy — even the daylight shots. It also didn’t work for the story. Miami Vice comes with baggage. The audience came with certain expectations of what the film should look like. The grain and realism couldn’t possibly meet them. If you’re going to sit through 2 hours of Colin Farrell and the laughably “laconic” Jamie Foxx, at least have the decency to humiliate the windbags by having them wear pastel shirts or leisure suits. ;-)
Oh man I hated Miami Vice. Not from a photographic standpoint, just everything else.
Here’s a technical but interesting conversation with Robert Elswit on TWBB and the decision to use stay away from digital except for some effects and the editing. People who haven’t seen the movie yet should probably bookmark it for another time, there are some spoilers.
http://digitalcontentproducer.com/mil/features/video_oldfashioned_filmmaking/index2.html (courtesy of JD on the H-E boards)
Yeah, I don’t think that grainy look suited Miami Vice, but then again neither did making Collin Farrell dress up like Don Johnson in 1989. That movie would have done well to ignore the built-in audience of MV and just go it’s own way.
Anyway, I think Mann takes it a little too far for my tastes but I like the style of filmmaking he’s trying to evoke by having all the freedom that those digital cameras offer him.
Deakins is simply amazing. Three films this year, and while I haven’t seen in the Valley of Elah, No Country & Jesse James are very differently, but both amazingly shot. I think I’d go for the flashier Jesse James work myself - that shot just before the train robbery was breathtaking - but Joel points out the more subtle touches of No Country.
By the way, I think the best work Deakins has ever done is still The Man Who Wasn’t There. I had the privilege of seeing Deakins’ own print projected about 2.5 years ago at UCLA, and those black and whites are simply amazing, the shadows and the cigarette smoke… Deakins was there, and he had some very interesting things to say about finding the right stock for it, and all the experiments they did to get it just right.
Ah. Sometimes the world is a grim place. Other times, you’re just grateful that the Coen brothers, Roger Deakins, and Carter Burwell found each other. Those four (and the esteemed elder British gentlemen Roderick Jaynes, of course ;-) ), make a hell of a team.
Yeah, it wouldn’t be the same without Jaynes. The Coens owe him a lot. Of course, the Academy has ignored his fine work many, many times. Jerks.
Good call on Carter Burwell as part of team Coen, Hedwig.