Roger Deakins up against himself for Oscar

updated 4:03 p.m. ET Jan. 30, 2008

LOS ANGELES - Veteran cinematographer Roger Deakins is competing against himself at the Academy Awards this year, with nominations for “No Country for Old Men” and “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.”

These are his sixth and seventh Oscar nominations — he’s never won. And in his typically self-effacing, dry British manner, he says he truly doesn’t believe he’s going to win this year, either.

Deakins, 58, is probably best known as the longtime director of photography for the Coen brothers. He’s shot all nine of their movies since 1991’s “Barton Fink,” creating the signature imagery for films including “Fargo,” “The Big Lebowski,” “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and their latest, “No Country.”

He grew up in Devon, England, and began as a still photographer before going to film school and making documentaries. Besides his work with the Coens, he’s shot “A Beautiful Mind,” “House of Sand and Fog” and “Jarhead,” to name a few, and received Oscar nominations for “The Shawshank Redemption” and “Kundun.”

(Multiple nominations for one person in the same Oscar category are not unheard of: Steven Soderbergh, for example, got best-director nods for 2000’s “Traffic” and “Erin Brockovich.” This is the first time a cinematographer has been up against himself since Robert Surtees, with the 1971 films “The Last Picture Show” and “Summer of ’42.”)

Later this year, Deakins has Sam Mendes’ “Revolutionary Road,” starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, and he’s currently shooting “Doubt” with Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams.

AP: What was your reaction to the two nominations?

Deakins: It was a real surprise. I thought “No Country” had a chance but, you know, “Jesse James” didn’t really get much of a release. When the nominations came out, the most pleased I was, was for Casey (Affleck, for supporting actor in “Jesse James”) and ... Tommy Lee Jones (for best actor in “In the Valley of Elah,” which Deakins also shot). And I thought he’d been so overlooked.

AP: With the writers strike going on, what’s it like for you to think there may not be any Oscars?

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Deakins: It’s a hard one ’cause, I mean, they’ve got a point. It just seems absurd to me that we can’t all come together and talk about it like adults. But on the other hand, most of it is a business, isn’t it? And people have to work out their contracts. So it’s quite understandable, what’s going on. It’s just a pity.

AP: How did you hook up with Joel and Ethan Coen?

Deakins: I’d done a few pictures by then. I think they’d seen, like, “Sid and Nancy” on the one hand and seen “1984” on the other. It was just, I kind of guess, the range of what I do I suppose that attracted them. I was a bit nervous when I met them ’cause I thought, well, two of them, how do they work together? But we hit it off. We met in London, actually, in Notting Hill. And they’re — well, you know what they’re like — they’re really sort of low-key and matter-of-fact and totally unpretentious and we hit it off straight away, really.

AP: What is it about your working relationship that’s been a good fit?

Deakins: Maybe it’s that we’ve got a similar sense of humor or something. They’ve got this very sort of dry, laconic, almost English sense of humor. We see the world quite similarly, I suppose.

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