Roger Deakins disagreed with how the train sequence “The Murder of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” was going.
The Oscar-winning cinematographer reflected on the iconic scene from the 2007 film starring Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck, particularly noting how “frustrated” he was with the “dirty” train being used for historical purposes on set. The sequence in question involves Jesse James (Pitt) staging an elaborate train robbery during the first act of Andrew Dominik’s film.
“I have to say Andrew and I got a little frustrated because we couldn’t find a train line we liked and we couldn’t find an antique train of the scale Andrew wanted,” Deakins said during a panel discussion. at 92nd Street Y. “We ended up filming in Edmonton (in Alberta, Canada) on a museum line and luckily it goes through this little wooded area, but the train was really nice. Andrew was absolutely frustrated with this.
Deakins admitted that the film’s production design itself “evolved” after the storyboarding process, once the locations were identified.
“A lot of things you do, you sort of make do with what you’ve got,” Deakins said. “Part of the challenge was making that train look like a huge creature coming out of the dark. Darkness hides a lot.
He added: “I would never say I was happy with it after that. I’ve always been quite unhappy as it wasn’t as big as we wanted.
The “1917” cinematographer noted that cinema is all about “compromise” and that sometimes he can’t even watch one of his films until “five years later” if it happens to be shown on TV.
Yet for “The Assassination of Jesse James” there was more than just cinematic language that needed to be translated between him and director Dominik.
“You talk about someone, a director, who is so passionate and has something in mind. To be honest, the difficult thing with Andrew is trying to find what he had in mind and do something in terms of what he was looking for,” Deakins said. ‘It’s so much about the poetry of images and sound.’
Deakins had previously campaigned for the extended version of “Jesse James” to be released. Director Dominik confirmed in April 2022 that there is a “better version” of the film that is approximately 15 minutes longer than the theatrical cut.
IndieWire recently named “The Assassination of Jesse James” the best cinematography of the 21st century, coupled with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki’s vision for Terence Malik’s film “The Tree of Life”. Both films starred Brad Pitt. IndieWire’s Jim Hemphill wrote of “The Assassination of Jesse James” that Deakins commissioned custom lenses to illicit the feel of the era’s portrait photographs. “The combination of these lenses with Deakins’ elegant shooting through doors, windows and other frames within frames gives ‘Jesse James’ an enthralling sense of voyeurism,” wrote Hemphill.
