Roger Deakins on His True Grit Oscar Nod and the End of Film: 'Next Year Will Be It'

What was the most rewarding shot that you managed to get?

The most difficult shot, that kind of freaked me when I read the script, was the work just tracking with Blackie in the night. You think well, it's a simple shot -- a shot of a horse's head galloping -- but when you think it's at night, and the horse is black, on this rough terrain... at one point we were actually considering, and got the effects company to figure out how they could do it as a completely CG shot. Create the horse's head and the foam coming out of his mouth and everything else. We shot some tests and got something halfway decent in pre-production, but then we dedicated a Saturday night to doing some of this work. We built a road, a 1,500-foot road, in the cottonwood forest so we could track alongside the horse in this electric golf cart thing. So it was a matter of knowing how to do it. But the fact that we did it live had a much greater impact than if we would have done it with computer generated images. It just seemed right for the film, to do everything in camera.

There were moments in True Grit, just simple dialogue-free scenes, really, that inspired such emotional responses. Do you ever get that feeling when you're filming a scene when you know that you've nailed it?

The trip of actually doing the job -- I operate the camera myself, I always have -- and sometimes you'll be shooting a shot and you get that tingle down the spine when you realize you're watching something that's really unique. That it really works and has something to say that's more than the sum of its parts. They're not my images; they work because of their context, because of the script, because of the performances and everything else. That's what the power of film really is; something can be more than the sum of its parts. It's something you can't really describe in words.

How much do you owe your cinematic leanings to your experiences with physical media, painting and photography?

I was sort of into painting when I was a kid, gradually discovered still photography, and moved from that into documentary work. I'm sure that affected the way I shoot fiction.

You acted as a consultant on How to Train Your Dragon, which recently did very well at the Annie Awards...

Thank you! I'm really pleased about that film. Animation now has gotten to the point now that you can approach it as if it were live-action. They program the actors, the characters, within a set, so you can take a virtual camera and walk around the set with the characters doing the action. You figure out where you want to put the camera, and to some extent, figure out how you want to light this virtual 3-D world. It's quite amazing. So the two disciplines of live-action and animation are really crossing over right now.

How much has your work in animation begun to influence your live-action work?

There comes a point, like we were discussing how to do this horse's head as a CG rather than live element. The thing is, I'm a purist in many ways. When I do my own stills, I'm very much a purist. I take pictures and I don't manipulate them, I'm not really interested in making collage images. I take real life as I see it. But in terms of storytelling in a feature film, I think all options are on the table. It's whatever technique you can utilize to tell the story in the way you want to tell it. It's interesting for me how a cinematographer's role is changing so much. It's so many different aspects to the way you visualize a story now, it's not just cinematography in a traditional sense.

You have more tools at your disposal, for starters.

More tools, but I think you also need to be aware of them. I still think there needs to be somebody who coordinates the visual look of the film, so if you have a number of effects houses doing different elements of a film there needs to be one person with visual overview. I love getting involved in animation -- not only because I think they make great films, and the films I'm working on are great stories -- but also it's a great learning experience for things that I might use in live-action.

Your field is in a very transitory stage right now.

Very much so, especially with digital imagery and cameras. The whole way of making movies is changing. Pre-visualization of shots. The amount that you do live and the amount you do as a CG element afterwards is changing enormously.

Are you particularly interested in integrating 3-D or motion-capture technology into your work?

Again, in animation we did 3-D on How to Train Your Dragon, and I was in a motion-capture studio the other day at DreamWorks Animation. I've not done so much in the live-action world, but I'm experiencing quite a lot in animation. I'm not sure about 3-D in the kind of dramatic live-action films that I work on. I can't imagine True Grit in 3-D. I think it would be appalling. You're actually trying to create a different experience for an audience.

Will you continue to shoot features on film, or are you being drawn more to shooting digitally?

You know, I'm not sure. I just finished this film Now, which I shot digitally for the first time, and I was very impressed. Part of it's going to depend on the director's choice, but I'm not sure if I go back to shoot on emulsion again. It depends on the project. If I had a digital option when we started True Grit I'm not sure I would have shot it digitally, just because of the nature of the film. But I don't know, it's a real transition now. I don't personally think film emulsion is going to be used for very much longer at all. I know people have been saying that since -- well, since I started in the business -- but I really think this year and next year will be it, really.

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