Years ago, the master cinematographer Roger Deakins was scouting locations in Kenya for a 19th-century adventure film. He thought he’d finally found the desert panorama he needed, right near Lake Turkana, complete with villager huts nearby. Then he heard someone talking: “Yes, this was built for Vilmos … ” The authentic-looking housing, it turns out, was a set, constructed for the New Hollywood cinematographer of 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Vilmos Zsigmond—to shoot a car commercial.
The story drives home the challenge for any ambitious cinematographer: how to create spellbinding images that people have never seen before. Nominated for 16 Oscars, and winning 2, Deakins is Hollywood’s cream of the crop, and his résumé is a catalogue of prestige wonders: apocalyptic futures (1984, Blade Runner 2049), epic dramas (The Shawshank Redemption), far-flung lands (Kundun), colorful small towns (Fargo), reimagined war zones (1917), and Western frontiers (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, No Country for Old Men).
