In case you’re wondering if the film’s cable origins meant that Deakins phoned this one in, I can safely say that he did not do that, even though the movie itself isn’t great shakes. The one on HBO is the one of the bunch that you’ve almost certainly never heard of, and it’s his second film with The Hurricane‘s director Norman Jewison, Dinner with Friends. Eh, reality’s overrated anyway.ĭeakins had himself a very busy 2001, with three films of his released that year, two into theaters, one on HBO. In addition to the color grading, the lighting adds to the film’s mythic appeal, with shots so beautiful in every way that they could only exist in an artist’s rendering of the period and not in any form of reality. After the (relatively) naturalistic Fargo and Big Lebowksi, this marks a return by the Coens and Deakins to the more heightened lighting of their earlier(, funny) movies. In fact, this could be one of Deakins’ most purely beautiful movies in terms of lighting and composition. But it wouldn’t matter what filter was applied to the image in post if the rest of Deakins’ work wasn’t up-to-snuff. Compared to so many uses of the DI since, the sepia tone here is, while pervasive, never distracting or absurdly overapplied. The look Deakins and the Coens’ were searching for is the look of Old America, not how it existed but how it exists in people’s minds, in sepia tone with wide-open (this would be the first Coen brothers film to be shot in 2.35:1), rustic spaces.
And, whaddya know? They did a bang-up job on it. Sure, partial digital intermediates existed before O Brother, Where Art Thou, but Deakins and the Coen brothers weren’t using it for effects sequences (which early DIs were used for), but to shape the look of the film in ways that photochemical color correction simply couldn’t. Roger Deakins decided to start off the millennium by changing the way people would make movies from then on. If you want to look at him analyzing all of Deakins’ work from 1984 to 1999 that was available to him, part 1 is here. With his newest film, the Coen brothers’ Hail, Caesar!, now out, The Narrator has decided to take a look at almost every film he’s ever shot in the context of his career. Roger Deakins is one of the finest cinematographers currently working, giving his all on almost every film he’s ever worked on, regardless of whether or not the film deserves that kind of work or not.
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