Roger Deakins, My Idol.
Disclaimer: This is gonna be a nerdy blog post.
O Brother Where Art Thou was the name of a movie that
sounded very familiar, but I couldn’t quite grasp where I knew it from. I mistakenly
attributed the familiarity to the Coen brothers, but then was oh so pleasantly
surprised from the very first scene of the movie. The legendary cinematographer
Roger Deakins had shot this movie.
I wouldn’t necessarily call myself a film nerd, but I would
definitely call myself somewhat of a cinematography nerd (which isn’t really
even a thing, I just made it up). I’m not super versed in the vast library of
classic films, but I have probably seen most of the iconic shots in those
films. And the opening shots of the film, along with the baptism scene and the initial
recording scene, I had seen many of these scenes before, although I had never
watched the movie before.
For those who do not know of Roger Deakins, he is the visual
genius who was the cinematographer for a huge selection of movies such as the recent
Blade Runner 2049, Skyfall, The Shawshank Redemption, so many more (80 DP credits to his name!) and
has worked very closely with the Coen Brothers in their films (No Country for Old
Men, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, Fargo, etc).
If you’re confused as to what a cinematographer is, I
recommend you watch this
video essay on Roger Deakins, explaining why Deakins is so awesome. (I
tried writing about him, but it was suuuper rambly and not very good, so you’re
welcome haha).
But moving away from Roger Deakins himself, and towards the
movie we watched: O Brother Where Art Thou. This movie was the first movie that
was color graded digitally,
ever! (start at 6:00 if you don’t want to watch the whole thing).
Nice post. I totally agree with you. One of those little touches that I hugely appreciated from O Brother Where Art Thou were those wide sweeping shots of the Mississippi back roads. They would only be up for a few seconds at a time but I really felt like they contributed hugely to the enjoyment of the movie. I watched some of the videos you linked and I kinda get it. My favorite shot might be when they first pick up Tommy Johnson on the side of the road, but there are a few others.
ReplyDeleteThis blog post was a nice bucket of cold water for me! I tend to have a problem with forgetting about the work that goes on backstage to get a movie like this to function, so thinking about people like the cinematographer, and the background crew is something really important in my mind. As a side note, I also ran across an article which described the filming of the baptism scene. It was something that really made me think about the struggles of filming, since the baptism lake was extremely boggy and apparently a lot of their filming equipment was getting stuck and stuff.
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