Director of photography Roger Deakins achieved the painterly look in The Ladykillers by using the digital intermediates. All photos by Melinda Sue Gordon, SMPSP. © 2004 Buena Vista Pictures Distribution. All rights reserved.

The new Buena Vista release of The Ladykillers (opening March 26) starring Tom Hanks marks the eighth collaboration between cinematographer Roger Deakins and the writing/directing team of Ethan and Joel Coen. The Ladykillers joins a notable list that includes Barton Fink (1991), The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), Fargo (1996), The Big Lebowski (1998), O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), The Man Who Wasn’t There(2001) and Intolerable Cruelty (2003). The unique looks that Deakins has brought to the Coen brothers’ films has earned him multiple honors, including three of his five Oscar nominations for best cinematography.

The collaboration with the Coens has also kept Deakins on the leading edge in the evolution of the digital intermediate. The painterly look achieved with the D.I. for O Brother (which was done at Cinesite) helped put the then-fledgling technology on the Hollywood map. Deakins has subsequently worked with EFILM on the digital intermediates for Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers, and he’s seen first-hand how the technology has progressed and where the challenges still remain.

Then and Now
“It has improved greatly since O Brother,” says Deakins. “There’s no question about that. When we did O Brother, it was before the (Phillips) DataCine was available. We were actually scanning the negative as we were coloring.” While he acknowledges that this seems like a Flinstones-era approach compared to what he now gets from EFILM’s Imagica Imager XE scanner, he also sees some virtues in the “old ways” of just five years ago. “Coming off the original negative, there was less room for a mistake because you weren’t scanning the negative and then altering the files. In fact, that was one way to maintain the quality. The thing is, the more complicated these systems become, the more opportunity there is for something to go wrong.”

In the year between doing the digital intermediates for Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers, Deakins notes that the process has continued to evolve. “There have been changes in the way that you can view small images of each sequence together. You can group shots so that you can time them the same.”

This is useful, because Deakins admits that timing a film digitally can be difficult. “It’s very hard, I find, because I’m still so used to the idea that you go in a lab and see the film all the way through, non-stop. And as you’re watching it, you talk to the timer and say ‘No, that feels a bit red or a bit dark or a bit cold.’ And then a few days later you go back and see it again and the colorist has made the corrections.”

The Ladykillers marks the eighth collaboration between Deakins (above) and the Coen brothers. They’ve used D.I. on their last three projects together.

Contrast that with the digital approach, observes Deakins, “when you’re sitting day after day timing the same scene or the same reel of film. You can get trapped in a scene, and think: ‘I like that color, but maybe we should make it more saturated.’ But you’re not actually watching it in reference to anything. So it’s very easy to go too far in one direction, or not far enough. You get very ‘blinkered.’ We watched The Ladykillers straight through at one point and there were some scenes that I thought didn’t really make sense because I hadn’t seen them in context of the ‘before-and-after’ scenes. When you’ve finally got the rough timing, then you can watch the whole thing as a piece. That’s when you really start doing the work. It’s a very different way of timing a film. I’m really not used to it yet.”

The Art of the Scan
Deakins’ experience on The Ladykillers underscored the crucial role that scanning plays in the D.I. process. He recalls, “We were seeing some film-outs and I wasn’t happy with them, and we found that we had to re-scan some stuff because the scans weren’t quite right. Some of them didn’t seem to be balanced properly. EFILM did a number of tests, and we found that there’s actually very little tolerance in terms of how you scan a negative. If the scan is biased against what that negative is meant to represent, you can bring it back. You’ve got a lot of latitude to bring it back, but it’s not without some loss of quality. You can see a distinct difference in our tests between a final image off a scan that was truly on the negative, and an image from a scan that is slightly biased one way or the other, and not reflective of the negative.