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.'

Roger Deakins

People confuse 'pretty' with good cinematography.

Roger Deakins

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.

Roger Deakins

I feel every shot, every camera move, every frame, and the way you frame something and the choice of lens, I see all those things are really important on every shot.

Roger Deakins

What's seemingly a simple thing can actually be the hardest to achieve.

Roger Deakins

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.

Roger Deakins

The biggest challenge of any cinematographer is making the imagery fit together of a piece: that the whole film has a unity to it, and actually, that a shot doesn't stand out.

Roger Deakins

There's nothing worse than an ostentatious shot. Or some lighting that draws attention to itself, and you might go, 'Oh, wow, that's spectacular.' Or that spectacular shot, a big crane move, or something.

Roger Deakins

I don't really believe in the mystery of cinematography - what happens in the camera is what the cinematographers create and all that nonsense - I want the director to see what I'm trying to do.

Roger Deakins

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.

Roger Deakins

The little town I was brought up in, I'd go to the film society to these very extreme sorts of films that you wouldn't normally see in the movie houses. But I never dreamed that I would get into the position to be shooting movies equivalent to the ones I loved as a kid.

Roger Deakins

I love the writing of Walter Tevis and what he views as the possibilities of science rather than science fiction.

Roger Deakins

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

Roger Deakins

I think that lens flares can work really well under certain circumstances. Personally, I am trying to get rid of them most of the time. I don't like artifacts that draw attention to the surface of the image.

Roger Deakins

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.

Roger Deakins

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.

Roger Deakins

My dad was a builder, so I didn't have any connection to the arts at all. I never really considered film as a career, but I knew I didn't want to be a builder.

Roger Deakins

I always had an interest in seeing people within their environments.

Roger Deakins

Every scene is a challenge. There are technical challenges, but often it's the simplest challenge where you feel a sense of achievement when you pull it off.

Roger Deakins

I do think observing is important in learning.

Roger Deakins

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

Roger Deakins