American cinematographer - Western destinies DEAKINS

American Cinematographer – Western Destinies

By Stephen Pizzello, Jean Oppenheimer

October 2007

Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC explores the existential perils of the American West in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and No Country for Old Men.

p.30 – p.47

p.31-32

You shot both pictures in super 35mm. why did you choose that over anamorphic?

Deakins: I prefer Super 35 because it allows you to use short focal-length lenses. I also like the scale of that format – the intimace – and the texture of the film grain. In some cases I find anamorphic to be almost too clean, too grain-free and pristine.

The opening scenes of No Country provide an interesting contrast, because you were dealing with a large desert basin that was lit partially by the lights of modern pickup trucks.

Deakins: That was kind of frustrating, because that whole sequence -- when Moss [Josh Brolin] goes back to a crime scene at night and is pursued by drug dealers -- had to go from night through dawn and then into full daylight. I wracked my brain about how to do that, because the area we were filming in was a half-mile square in this big, dusty basin. I couldn't see any way around it other than to use a big wash of light on top of the escarpment above the location, so I put three Musco lights up there to create a moonlight effect. I didn't want to do it, but I didn't see any other possibility. After we set up the Muscos, I knew we needed more of them, but I was lucky to get the three.

To try to make the transition to dawn, we picked out a rise where Moss parks his truck; when the drug dealers come back, they park their truck in the same spot with their headlights on. We tried to make the transition to dawn by lighting behind the trucks, as though the sun was starting to come up beyond the rise. We got about eight 18Ks and literally just shot them up into the air to light the sky while flagging them off everything else. Those basically lit the dust in the air and created a very faint glow behind the trucks.

p.44

Through much of No Country, Moss is help up in motel rooms, but you managed to create a lot of suspense through your lighting

Deakins: The lobby of the big hotel was a location in Las Vages, New Mexico, and we shot those scenes at magic hour to get the feeling of dusk outside. The hotel room itself was a set because we had so many specific shots to do there. Inside that room, I wanted the feeling of the street lights coming through the windows so that when Moss turns off his bedside lamp, we’d get this reddish sodium light coming through the windows. Then we had white light under the door so we could shoot Chigurh’s shadow creeping down the hallway toward the door. The shot of Moss diving out the window was done on a set, but the shot of him landing in the street was done on location.

During the big shootout that follows, Chigurh seems like an invisible force, because you never really get a clear look at him

Deakins: In the book, Chigurh is the personification of evil, and it’s implied that he’s almost like a ghost.  So throughout the film, we wanted to make him feel very shadowy or indistinct figure.

The big shootout was pretty complicated, we had small rigs of four or five 1Ks bunched up on rooftops and we had little gag lights on street lights to create more defined pools of light. I stuck with the orange sodium look for that chase because I wanted it to feel pretty grim.

There’s also some interesting lighting in the subsequent scene, where Moss crosses the border into Mexico and dumps the money off a bridge.

Deakins: That was one of the trickiest setups in the movie because it was staged at a freeway crossing. The art department put in the border posts. I wanted the American side to have blue light, so we changed out all the streetlights. We lit the border post with cool white fluorescents. For the main action on the Mexican side, I wanted more garish colors. When Moss stops to talk to those three kids, you can see colorful lighting coming up from below the bridge, as if theres a street down below. I enjoyed playing with the colors because the lighting for the preceding shootout consisted entirely of orange sodium light.

p.46

What kind of enhancements did you make in post?

Deakins: The most involved scene in No Country was the whole night-into dawn exterior we discussed earlier. The DI was invaluable for that, especially for a bit involving a dog paddling down the river after Moss. One shot would be cloudy and the next would be in clean morning light, with reflections on the water. In the DI, I could use a power window to add a little highlight in the sky to create the impression that the sky was brighter and was reflecting in the water.