ABSTRACT
Cinematographer Roger Deakins achieved this unique look by creating a new kind of specialized lenses, nicknamed the “Deakinizers”. The concept behind these specialized lenses was to emulate the look of vintage glass used in early photographs Dominik selected for key visual references. Lenses from this era commonly produced images with overt vignetting, and exhibited a strong field curvature, an inability to focus an image over the entirety of the film plane, producing noticeable blurriness. The Deakinizer shots effectively replicate the look of early archival photography from the Old West, imbuing these moments with a dreamlike, evocative, and historical quality. These choices make the overt stylization produced by the Deakinizer lenses feel organic to the mood, tone, and visual style of the film, helping to create a bold character study in this postmodernist reinterpretation of the classic western.
