“So why do you need me?” James Bond (played by Daniel Craig) asks Q, the inventor of espionage devices, in the movie Skyfall (2012). It’s a question Roger Deakins wondered himself when director Sam Mendes asked him to be the cinematographer on the film. Deakins, despite his lengthy resume, had never shot a spy thriller before. “I must say that action is not so much of a thrill as capturing a performance,” he said about the experience on his popular website.¹

But the director didn’t want a conventional action movie. The James Bond series is the longest-running franchise in movie history. Could Skyfall, its 50th anniversary production, reinvent the main character for a new, global audience?

Deakins, a 10-time Academy Award nominee, came up with a visual answer to this question. He decided to shoot Skyfall like a Western,² where the action plays out in long takes in the frame, rather than the conventional action-movie approach done with multiple cameras, which, in Deakins’s opinion, looks like “an incoherent mess of shots without any particular structure or point of view.”³

The result? Skyfall looks and feels unlike any of its predecessors, and it became the most successful James Bond movie in history, grossing over $1 billion worldwide, with Deakins making a significant visual contribution to that result.

That’s why the movie needed him. Or, as Q responded to James Bond’s question, “Every now and then a trigger has to be pulled.” Indeed, a bit of dialogue fitting for a Western.

In Chapter 6, you learned about the tools for capturing imagery—cameras and lenses—and how they function. In this chapter, you will learn how to use them creatively: how they serve a filmed narrative. As the director of photography, you will work in close collaboration with the director and production designer, or you may be your own director and cinematographer on your class film. The relationship between the cinematographer and the director is the closest of creative marriages—so much so that a few professional directors actually do double duty at times and work as their own DPs, too. Among the well-known directors who have done this for entire movies or sequences within movies are Steven Soderbergh, Stanley Kubrick, James Cameron, Peter Hyams (who began his career as a DP), Ridley Scott, David Fincher, Debra Granik, Chantal Akerman, and Peter Jackson.

When the director and the DP are two different people—which is most often the case in professional productions—they will spend a large part of their time on the set side by side, and the DP’s role involves both diplomacy and organization. The DP not only has to find ways to get the shots the director wants with the time and money at hand, but also needs to find the best way to communicate with the director in any given situation.

As the cinematographer, every choice you make affects the moviegoing experience—how the camera moves (or doesn’t move), where people and objects are placed in the frame, and how much of the scene you let the audience see (or how much you don’t let them see). Even when you are making these choices, you’ll be mindful of limiting factors—such as time, budget, scheduling, and what’s physically possible where you are shooting—and giving the director and editor plenty of choices for shaping the story when they are in the editing room. In this way, visual storytelling is a skill that combines the most theoretical concepts of imagery with the hard-nosed practicality of getting a day’s work done. Few filmmaking tasks combine these realities in as formidable a way, or must balance them so carefully on a minute-by-minute basis.

Although all aspects of filmmaking are related, the interconnection is especially strong between storytelling with images and two other areas: lighting and editorial. Lighting and color determine how we feel about film imagery. To set up your shots effectively, you’ll need to light them well—and you will learn about that in Chapters 8 and 9. Editorial assemblage of individual shots (Chapters 11–12) completes the visual storytelling you begin in this chapter. Taken together, telling the story with the camera, lighting it properly, and editing the shots into sequences form a trio of visual language; you begin your study of it here.