Hi and welcome to the Team Deakins podcast. This podcast is a dialogue between Roger and James deacons, often joined in the conversation by a guest. It's very informal and we never know where it will go. We're connecting through Zoom so bear that in mind when you hear the audio.

If you'd like to submit a question or topic please do so by emailing pod, POD at Roger Deacons.com.

Today we've got a great guest. He's a well-known cinematographer and he and Roger go back many, many years.

Maybe we'll learn some sins of their youth in this episode.

He's a long-time collaborator with the director Mike Lee and his list of

films is long and includes Secrets and Lies, Topsy-turvy, Vera Drake,

Naked, The Illusionist and Motherless Brooklyn,

were very pleased to have cinematographer Dick Pope with us today.

Thank you, Dick, for joining us.

Pleasure. So Dick, let's start. Thank you when you were a kid?

First of all, it was stills for me. I had a Box Brownie camera like most other kids.

Stills were a big thing in those days obviously. When I was young it was a big big thing and I had a Box Brownie but

then my father gave me a quite a complicated camera when I was about eight or nine and it was a

twin lens reflex camera and he used to kid me that he had taken it off the body of a German soldier, but it was just,

it was just bullshit.

But I don't know how he came about it, it was probably off the back of a lorry.

But he gave me that camera and it kind of changed my life. I became, over a few

years I became a really keen amateur photographer.

I even, I got into my teens, I had a few photographs that were published in local newspaper,

and then I had an uncle who worked in the BBC.

Not big time job but quite lowly but he had also did an apprenticeship and worked at a film laboratory in Wardle Street in London called Pathay Labs.

And he put the idea in my head about becoming a cameraman and using my love of cinema, which I had.

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