Ask almost any working cinematographer who they’d point to as the best in the world, and a huge number of them say Roger Deakins. Born in 1949 in Torquay, England, Deakins spent nearly 50 years building that reputation before the Academy caught up with him and when it finally did, it did it twice in a row.
Deakins started in documentaries and music videos before moving into low- and mid-budget British features through the 1980s. His real breakthrough came in 1991, when Joel and Ethan Coen hired him to shoot Barton Fink the start of a collaboration that would eventually span about a dozen films, including Fargo, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, No Country for Old Men, and True Grit. He picked up his first Oscar nomination in 1995 for The Shawshank Redemption, and the nominations kept coming Fargo, Skyfall, Sicario, and more fourteen in total, without a single win.
That changed in 2018, when Deakins finally won Best Cinematography for Blade Runner 2049 on his fourteenth nomination. He didn’t have to wait long for the second: the very next year, he won again for 1917, Sam Mendes’s one-shot World War I film his fourth collaboration with Mendes after Jarhead, Revolutionary Road, and Skyfall. Two consecutive Best Cinematography Oscars, on his fourteenth and fifteenth nominations, closing out one of the longest overdue-recognition arcs in Academy history.
The Oscars were never the only thing validating him they were just the last one to catch up. By the time he won in 2018, Deakins already held five BAFTA Awards for Best Cinematography from fifteen nominations, five ASC Awards, and seven BSC (British Society of Cinematographers) Awards for Best Cinematography in a Theatrical Release. In 2011, years before either Oscar, the ASC gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award an acknowledgment from his own peers that the Academy’s recognition was overdue well before it actually arrived.
Deakins is known for naturalistic, meticulously motivated lighting every source in a Deakins frame usually has a reason to be there, rather than being added purely to flatter the shot. His signature technique leans on deep focus, keeping both foreground and background elements legible rather than throwing one out to separate the subject, paired with deliberately simple lighting setups built around one or two real sources and a preference for spherical lenses over anamorphic glass. You can see the same fingerprints across films that look nothing alike on the surface the flat, oppressive daylight of No Country for Old Men, the cold procedural blues of Sicario, the long, unbroken hallway fight in Skyfall lit almost entirely by practical neon. It’s a philosophy built on restraint: do less to the frame, and trust the story to carry it.
He and his wife, camera operator and photographer James Deakins, also run Team Deakins, a long-running podcast and online Q&A where he answers questions from working and aspiring cinematographers directly everything from lens choices on a specific shot to how he handles a difficult producer note. It’s made him as influential as a mentor to the next generation of DPs as he is as a working one himself, which is a genuinely rare combination at his level of the industry.
Deadline. “1917’s Roger Deakins Wins Oscar For Best Cinematography.” https://deadline.com/2020/02/1917-roger-deakins-wins-cinematography-oscar-best-cinematography-1202855113/. Feb. 2020.
Variety. “Oscars: Roger Deakins Wins Cinematography for ‘1917’ for Second Award.” https://variety.com/2020/film/news/oscars-roger-deakins-best-cinematography-1917-1203498543/. Feb. 2020.
IndieWire. “Roger Deakins Wins Best Cinematography Oscar for ‘1917’.” https://www.indiewire.com/awards/industry/roger-deakins-wins-best-cinematography-oscar-1917-1202209232/. 2020.
Gold Derby. “Roger Deakins’ 15 Oscar Nominations.” https://www.goldderby.com/gallery/roger-deakins-oscar-nominations-losses/.