Not The American

1917 is made with a series of long shots, the longest of which was about 8½ minutes, stitched together. Sam Mendes, who worked with Deakins on 2005’s Jarhead, 2008’s Revolutionary Road and 2012’s Skyfall, says that shots averaged 20 takes, with the most difficult needing as many as 50. The experience of working with such meticulous choreography was “exhilarating,” Deakins says. “Everyone’s high-fiving. All the grips I’ve known for, like, 30 years, saying, ‘Oh, my word, that was something. I’ve never done that before.’ It was really great.”

One tricky sequence featured the pair crossing No Man’s Land, which Mendes says involved “constantly changing the actors’ relationship to the camera so you weren’t simply following them from behind." 

Explains Deakins: "When we got on No Man’s Land, it was like, 'OK, well, how do we work with the actors and choreograph the camera movement with the actors so you see details, and then you go from one character’s close-up to another character?’ And then you see them wide, and then you see what they’re looking at. That was really interesting. That informed a lot about what we were going to do with the rest of the film — how we could free the camera at moments where we needed to.”

“We spoke early on about not wanting an audience to think about, 'Oh, that’s interesting, look where they put the camera.’ So the camera doesn’t do anything showy. The goal was to make sure that the camera followed the action but didn’t draw attention to itself. You just wanted it to disappear in the image, and for the most part, I think that’s quite successful,” Deakins says. — [x]

Parasite (2019) dir. Bong Joon-ho

Steven Yeun in Burning (2018) dir. Lee Chang-dong