Sicario, Denis Villeneuve’s Mexican drug war thriller, thrives in the gloaming. Neon pops from the dusk, silhouetted soldiers creep across the twilight. It’s a film of smeared morality, starring Emily Blunt as an FBI agent whose ideals are crushed. The daylight scenes are stark, the night-time – including a breath-taking shootout in a smuggling tunnel – frantic. But sunset is when the real menace kicks in.

It’s no surprise that Sicario looks great. Its cinematographer, Roger Deakins, is one of the most lauded film-makers in Hollywood. He’s one of the top three in the business, says director Andrew Dominik (“Roger and two other people and its the two other people that change”), the Coens’ go-to (he’s shot most of their films since Barton Fink), and been Oscar-nominated 12 times for films as diverse as Skyfall and Martin Scorsese’s Dalai Lama biopic, Kundun.

Deakins is, according to Villeneuve, “the opposite of a Hollywood person”. Thoughtful and shy, the only LA thing about him is his tan, which he probably picked up puttering around in his fishing boat near his hometown of Torquay. Today - perched in a Toronto hotel room with his wife, script supervisor James Ellis Deakins, listening in - he amiably bats around theories about his work, tackling the interview much as he deals with inclement weather on a shoot: a problem to be worked around. If something good can be made of it, all the better.

The Guardian’s film critics discuss Sicario Guardian

People tend to load his work with intent, he says, when a lot of it is based on improvisation. In Sicario there’s a scene where a police car is driving into the distance shrouded by a huge black cloud. The scene has been praised for lending the film a doomy portent, but it’s not like Deakins could control the weather. “When we started shooting there was a quite active monsoon season,” he says. “So we got these incredible thunderclouds. You make use of it because it’s there, and because you can’t shoot it another day. So much of it is: you do your best with the schedule and what you’re thrown.

“It wasn’t the sort of film where you want to shoot between three and six because there’s this lovely golden light. I’m not for that anyway – I think that’s all bull. It’s unreal.”

Deakins is a pragmatist. He likes to shoot single camera where possible, doing the operating himself. His best work, he says, isn’t the flashy stuff – the zoom back from the guards’ amazed expressions through the hole in the cell wall in The Shawshank Redemption, the phantasmagoric light show in the background of a Bond Skyfall scrap – but the films that are consistent: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford’s old-world dinge or the black-and-white noir of the Coens’ The Man who Wasn’t There. There he achieves balance.

Sicario’s stars and director talk to Andrew Pulver Guardian

“If somebody says, ‘Oh, I loved the shot with such-and-such’ then you’ve failed, because really you want the whole thing to be of a piece,” he says. “That’s not saying you’re not trying to create something visually interesting, but there’s a balance between being visually interesting and being ostentatious.”

Born in Torquay, Deakins was passionate about painting as a child; at art college in Bath he developed an interest in stills photography and was influenced by the photographer Roger Mayne, whose pictures of postwar kids in London were among the first to capture the new “teenage” generation. Inspired by Mayne’s photojournalism, Deakins went to film school and began shooting documentaries. Left with limited film stock while shooting Around the World With Ridgeway, a film about the tensions between the crew on a round-the-world yacht voyage, he was forced to learn to shoot economically. He’s been into thrift ever since.

“It is about honing it down: taking away the flowery, peripheral stuff and simplifying,” he says. He remembers a shoot in New Mexico where a rival production – a huge-budget blockbuster – hired heavy-duty cranes that sat unused for much of the shoot. “I asked somebody who worked on that film: ‘How many days did you use those?’ And they said: ‘I think we used them once.’ That was over five or six weeks. I find that kind of thing upsetting. I think generally the films I’m working on, you can’t do that. You can’t just throw that kind of money around – you want to put it on the screen.”

Denis Vileneuve (left) and Deakins at work on a previous collaboration, 2013’s Prisoners. Photograph: Everett/Rex Shutterstock

Waste, excess and indulgence don’t play in Deakins’ world. He doesn’t like most follow shots (“A lot of people walking down corridors that have nothing to do with anything”), and isn’t keen on modern big-budget movies. He doesn’t go to the cinema much and tends to watch the Oscar screeners he’s sent at home. “I’m not sure there are many films where you’d say I’m missing anything because I’m not watching it on a big screen,” he says. “There aren’t many Laurence of Arabias any more, are there?

“I’m trying to put it diplomatically … I find most films these days disappointing. Maybe because people don’t have the attention span. Everything has to be quicker: cuts are quicker, you can’t hold a shot. There are a number of shots in Sicario that are held for a long time. People have said: ‘It’s very tense!’ That’s because the shots are held. The audience is having to think: ‘What is going to happen?’ Of course it’s tense.”

People seem to have less time for what Villeneuve calls “the poetry” of Deakins’ work. “Nowadays, people are excited by images that are produced by computers,” says Villeneuve. “But he’s a real artist – creating in the camera using the light.”

Sicario – still, slow, tense – is unusual. It’s a pulpy thriller with a measured pace, an action film with arty influences: the stark photography of photojournalist Alex Webb and the minimalist film noir of Jean-Pierre Melville. Deakins’ and Villeneuve’s next project is the Blade Runner sequel. Villeneuve calls it their “chance to dream together”. Perhaps Deakins can bring old-fashioned pacing back to the modern blockbuster. There’s no other film-maker who has a better shot at hauling our shrinking attention spans into shape.

• Sicario is out in the UK now