Roger Deakins, director of cinematography for Jarhead, five-time Oscar nominee and two-time ASC Award winner (The Man Who Wasn’t There, The Shawshank Redemption), had a number of challenges on the Desert Storm film: Giving it a sand-blasted, contrasty look, shooting handheld and anticipating VFX that would seamlessly transform the location.

F&V: Is the camera handheld for the entire film?

Deakins: Just about the whole film. We made that decision quite early on. Sam wanted a sort of immediate feeling to it, of someone being
there, observing it and grabbing it. But it’s steady handheld, not gritty. Some people won’t even know it’s handheld.

F&V: The images are so beautiful, but the content is often horrible.

Deakins: There is something very strange about it, a certain surreality. This is a true story, but the situation is surreal. That’s
the dichotomy.

The thing about the oil fires — we were watching the Werner Herzog documentary [Lessons of Darkness] shot after the Kuwait war. In the Herzog documentary, there were miles of huge fireballs and lakes of black oil reflecting the flames. We only scratched the surface creating what we did. But that’s what we were trying for, this vision of people in a world totally alien, so surreal, so outside normal experience.

In the “Highway of Death” sequence, there are corpses on the road. It was strange shooting it. The bodies are not real, but it’s so realistic, it felt odd being in that situation.

I was a stills photographer for a while and admire war-zone photographers. The photojournalist Don McCullin said he knew it was too much when he found himself rearranging dead bodies to make a more beautiful composition.

It’s interesting that the most ugly things have a certain beauty.

F&V: Why did you do a bleach-bypass on the negative?

Deakins: I wanted a stark, contrasty, grainy look. I did tests, but I didn’t think I could get there in DI. You have to affect the negative to bring in the grain, so I did a partial bleach-bypass on the neg. The DI is not a be-all and end-all; it can help and enhance. What’s on the neg is what’s on the neg.

For Pablo [Helman, ILM VFX supervisor], that was a challenge. We tested and Pablo felt ILM could do it, and they did. We roughly pre-timed the file we sent to Pablo and he matched the texture.

F&V: Did you scan at 4K resolution?

Deakins: We scanned at 2K double-scanned, downresed to 2K and then upresed. I wish everything could have been 4K all the way. The effects are some of the best I’ve seen, but it makes a slight difference, especially on the wide day scenes.

F&V: Why do you think the effects are so good?

Deakins: Pablo was in sync with what we were doing because he was there every day. He used film we shot of the oil fires quite a bit. I think there’s quite a difference between photographing things for real and trying to paint them. That’s what I like about the look of the film. It was a good blend. The visual effects are servicing the story; they aren’t bombs sliding through the air crashing around.

The trick with all the compositing, matching the lighting we did, it works because it’s all inherent within the scene. I think even the hardest scene — bivouacking under the [raining] oil — is quite breathtaking.

For the full interview with Roger Deakins and the story on Jarhead in the December 2005 issue of Film & Video click here.