JEFF BRIDGES: Hey there, Roger!

ROGER DEAKINS: Hey! How are you?

BRIDGES: I’m well. I’m here in Santa Barbara, finished working on a movie not too long ago in New Mexico [Comancheria], written by the same guy who wrote Sicario [Taylor Sheridan]. That guy’s a good writer, huh?

DEAKINS: Yeah, he is.

BRIDGES: This is a new turf for me, being an interviewer, so let’s just jump in with how we first met. God, that’s almost 20 years ago, man. That’s hard for me to reel in.

DEAKINS: Yeah, The Big Lebowski, [1998]? Was it that long ago? Time flies. [laughs] I’ve been working with the brothers for, like, 26 years now.

BRIDGES: Jeez, man! I counted the films. A dozen?

DEAKINS: Yeah, around there.

BRIDGES: So when you started out, what was your first memory of saying, “Wow, this is something I can do for the rest of my life as a profession”?

DEAKINS: Well, I suppose everyone gets into it in a different way. I loved film when I was kid because I was in a film society in Torquay, which is near where I am now, down in Devon. And I used to go and watch films. I fell in love with movies. 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. [laughs] So I went to art college, and it just gradually happened. I heard that the National Film School was opening up, so I applied. And when I first started, I saw myself shooting documentaries or making documentaries, which is what I did, mostly, for a number of years. So it was quite a surprise how I found myself shooting features. It was like my wildest dreams as a kid collided, you know?

BRIDGES: Did you start with still camera?

DEAKINS: Yeah. When I left art college, I was a still photographer for a year. I was working for an art center in North Devon that started a record of rural life in North Devon before it disappeared all together. Because at that point, it was the early ’70s, and the rural way of life was changing quite quickly.

BRIDGES: You directed documentaries as well.

DEAKINS: I directed some. Sometimes I was what they called an assignment cameraman—I’d go off with a sound recordist, so there was no director. So I would shoot, basically, a documentary, and the editor would be named the director. [Bridges laughs] And it was produced for television. At the time, I didn’t mind. I suppose I do mind a bit now. I didn’t mind back then because I was getting the work and the experience. And, as far as I was concerned, I was more or less making the films.