Roger Deakins calls the shots

Jarhead, dir. Sam Mendes, 2005: The brief was for night-time scenes where the platoon was within half a mile of the oil fires in Kuwait during the Gulf war. I wanted to create a dense, smoky atmosphere. We ended up shooting on a sound stage, blacked out the walls and put sand on the floor, then filled it with smoke to create a landscape of endless night Photograph: Kobal

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, dir. Andrew Dominik, 2007: The film opens during the day, with James’s gang staking out a railway track. Then it moves on to a night sequence in which Brad Pitt and the others are waiting for the train, their faces lit only by lanterns, with everything around them in blackness. It’s very expressionistic: there are only really two light sources, the oil lamp that Jesse is holding and the light on the train Photograph: Allstar

The Shawshank Redemption, dir. Frank Darabont, 1994: One of the opening sequences is a helicopter shot that introduces the prison. It starts off on a bus that’s carrying the Tim Robbins character towards the jail. It was a really hard shot to pull off. It was a rainy day, and the rain got on the lens. The pilot had flown in Vietnam: you need a very experienced pilot. You wouldn’t normally fly a helicopter as close as that to the buildings and the people in the yard Photograph: Screengrab

Kundun, dir. Martin Scorsese, 1997: The young Dalai Lama has just got hold of a film projector and he’s watching film of an atom bomb test. It’s an incredibly evocative shot because of the cultural contrast between Tibet and the kind of country that can produce an atomic bomb. It's always a difficult shot when you're doing projection, and you're trying to get the image on a screen and the person watching it, but you need it to look natural as well. I stretched reality a bit Photograph: Screengrab

The Hudsucker Proxy, dir. Joel Coen, 1994: In the opening scene, the camera flies through the city and finds Tim Robbins standing on the roof outside his office window. We built 14ft models of the town and used them for a number of shots. We had to match these with the full-scale window and ledge that Tim was standing on and matte the two scales together with CGI. You have a piece of set that’s real and then you draw in the rest of the building with a computer Photograph: Screengrab