Roger Deakins

“I love reading different scripts and helping create different looks, different environments. Sometimes you go to meet a director over a particular script, and they'll say, 'I want you to do this because I want it to look like Shawshank,' and I'm like, 'Well, I'm not that interested in doing that again.'”

“I came up, I suppose, a fairly traditional way. I went to art college. I always wanted to be a stills photographer, really, when I was younger, and I briefly worked as a stills photographer.”

“I couldn't imagine 'True Grit' in 3D. I think the idea is sort of absurd.”

“I don't do that virtual reality stuff. I'm not even into 3D, actually... I've been offered it. I just don't want to.”

“I'd done a big movie that I wasn't happy with, and I was moving out of London when I got approached about Barton Fink, because my agent said the brothers were in London. We hit it off immediately, and suddenly I found myself on the way to America!”

“People confuse 'pretty' with good cinematography.”

“If you shoot with a billion cameras, then there's no perspective. You want to use one shot at a time, so it's better to discover what that is before you shoot, rather than trying to make something in the cutting room, and then it just becomes generic.”

“There's so many films from around the world, I emphasize, that are so beautifully photographed, but they don't get the recognition.”

“I don't really like watching 3-D.”

“When I left art college, I was a still photographer for a year.”

“I've always painted or drawn pictures or taken still photographs; now I shoot movies. It's just about making images, really.”

“I've always been a fan of Westerns, but my favorite kind of Westerns mostly were Sam Peckinpah's Westerns, and they mainly took place in the West that was changing.”

“I loved movies ever since I was a kid.”

“I think technology has advanced so far now that there are some cameras on the market that give film a run for its money. It's all about flexibility in capturing images, and digital or film, it doesn't matter to me.”

“I do think observing is important in learning.”

“Some of the smallest things on a smaller film, to me, are greater achievements than on a big film when you have the resources and the time and everything else.”

“There are some sequences in films that I think work filmicly, that stand out to me, but that's much more to do with the staging and the cutting and the mood of the thing as a sequence, the way everything comes together.”

“I like simplicity. I like using natural sources. I like images to look natural - as though somebody sitting in a room by a lamp is being lit by that lamp.”