When going for a color-saturated look in a film, Deakins finds D.I. useful.

This power can be used quite dramatically, observes Deakins. “I was talking to the guy who shot City of God, Cesar Charlone. He said he spent hours and hours manipulating that whole film. He shot it hand-held, dead straight, a mixture of 16 and 35. He knew that he was going to manipulate it and get the image he wanted afterwards. Basically, he was shooting almost a template for what he really wanted.”

But Deakins adds, “It really does depend on the kind of picture you’re doing. I think you’re still going to lose image quality if you’re actually pushing the negative away from what you originally exposed at. The more you push it, the more you lose quality. I would still argue for getting as close as you can on the camera negative. If you don’t know what you’re after before you start shooting, and while you’re shooting, then that’s a bad situation to be in. It’s even worse if you’ve got something that you’ve shot and you don’t really know what you want it to look like. If you go to do a Digital Intermediate not knowing where you want to go with this piece of film, that’s a recipe for chaos. It’s very expensive and very time-consuming. But it is a very powerful tool on particular movies.”

The Test of Appropriateness
Whether a D.I. is appropriate for a given film is a question Deakins considers carefully. On Intolerable Cruelty, the process let him saturate the colors far more than he could have done photochemically to achieve the glossy look that reflected the film’s high-stakes theme. Yet for the Coens’ black-and-white film, The Man Who Wasn’t There, Deakins believes, “We wouldn’t have gotten that look digitally.”

Deakins recalls testing the D.I. technology in preparation for shooting director Ron Howard’s 2001 multi-Oscar-winner, A Beautiful Mind. “I really wanted to do one, but Ron was quite against it. We did do tests for a D.I. and quite honestly, they weren’t as good as we wanted. I don’t think the technology was really quite there then.”

Though at that time O Brother had already broken ground for digital intermediates, Deakins says, “We were going for such a striking look on O Brother. Because it was more painterly, you accepted a sort of ‘texture’ of the grain on a film like that. A Beautiful Mind needed to be as sharp and crisp as possible. I didn’t feel the technology was at the point where I could argue that much for it. But now I would.” Ironically, Deakins recalls talking with Howard after the director did a D.I. on his last film, The Missing. “He said, ‘It was so great! We did all these things digitally!’ I said, ‘I wish I could have convinced you on A Beautiful Mind!’”

Deakins admits that having to wait around in L.A. is a drawback when using D.I. Unlike with film, a color timer can’t come to him on location.

The Tools at Hand
While a cinematographer’s ultimate goal is to produce the best looking images at film-out, they obviously have to rely heavily on digital projection to monitor their work-in-progress during the D.I. process. For Deakins’ recent work at EFILM, the tools at hand included a cinema-size Stewart Filmscreen and a BARCO D-Cine DLP projector. “You’ve got a big screen there and you can quite quickly see if an image is falling apart, and what the noise level is and if there’s too much grain. It is much easier to check the image,” says Deakins,

Compared to the look of film, he thinks, “It’s very, very close now. When we did Intolerable Cruelty, we did have to re-do some sequences. They didn’t come up quite the same (during film-out). And then we re-calibrated the film-out — actually adding some saturation and a little bit of contrast in the highlights to truly reflect what we wanted on film.”