Roger Deakins Interview from EW

Must reading:

On The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford:

What about Andrew Dominik's methods on The Assassination of Jesse James?
Some scenes we did were storyboarded in great detail. But other sequences, not at all. We were working with the actors and figuring out how to shoot it on the day, depending on the light and everything else. Just like most films do.

There's a visual motif in Jesse James where you keep fringing out the edges of the frame at the start of a lot of scenes. Is that something you found in old period photographs from the mid-19th Century?
No, there weren't lenses like that in the day. It was much more an expressionistic thing rather than any attempt to copy something specific from the past. My one regret is that we actually didn't do more of that. But at one point, we actually got advice from the studio [Warner Bros.] that they found it distracting.

There's an early sequence with a train robbery that takes place entirely at night and seems to be lit only by lanterns. How did you go about designing that?
Well, the lanterns are dummies. The flames have little electric bulbs behind them, which dim down. When somebody's holding it near their face, it's actually the bulb that's lighting them, but you just see the flame. We had a kitchen scene with just candle light as well. But you've got to make sure you get double or triple wick candles. A little candle you'd put on a Christmas cake isn't going to do much.

On No Country for Old Men:

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: How much room is there for improvisation in what you do?
ROGER DEAKINS: With the Coens, they write the script and everything's worked out. Everything's storyboarded before we start shooting. In No Country, there's maybe only a dozen shots [that were storyboarded and photographed] that are not in the final film. It's that order of planning. And we only shot 250,000 feet, whereas most productions of that size might shoot 700,000 or a million feet of film. It's quite precise, the way they approach everything.

You've got a memorably lit scene in No Country that's set at night, too, where the sheriff played by Tommy Lee Jones goes back to a motel-room crime scene.
I wanted the motel room to be totally black, because [Javier Bardem's character] Chigurh is hiding in the corner. Or is he? So you wanted this kind of mystery. And I thought, well the only thing I can do is play it so the car's headlight is coming in, shining into the empty room. On the night we shot it, I had one headlight at first, and it formed a single silhouette of Tommy Lee as he enters the room. And I thought, That's too much. I wanted something more fractured, I suppose. So I put two headlights there, and moved them around a bit to get two silhouettes, in this sort of odd configuration. I was quite pleased with that one. Sometimes you get lucky.

The scene where Chigurh makes a gas-station clerk toss a coin to decide if he lives or dies is incredibly tense. It took me several viewings to notice that the camera is actually moving forward just a little bit, all through the scene. That's a big part of the scary feeling you get.
It's often more tense when the camera is moving so slowly that the audience isn't even aware of the move. It's kind of unnerving. You don't really notice the move itself while it's happening, but you notice it when you cut back and forth between the two shots.

And it's the camera moving physically forward, not just a zoom lens?
Yeah. We never use a zoom. I don't even carry a zoom lens with me, unless it's for something very specific.

Why? What is it that's different between a dolly move forward and a zoom inward?
When the camera itself moves forward, the audience is moving, too. You're actually getting closer to somebody or something. It has, to me, a much more powerful effect, because it's a three-dimensional move. A zoom is more like a focusing of attention. You're just standing in the same place and concentrating on one smaller element in the frame. Emotionally, that's a very different effect.