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For Unbroken, Roger Deakins and the camera crew shot with a digital camera system partly because of the large number of digital effects shots that were planned for the movie. It’s always much easier to apply digital effects to digital footage rather than actual film footage that would need to be scanned and converted into digital files beforehand. Deakins writes that he “used the Alexa because, when all the aspects of shooting a film are considered, I believe it to be the best system right now. I used the Alexa’s internal NDs but no other filtration.

“I prefer shooting with a single camera simply because I don’t like shooting generic ‘coverage’. I believe in constructing a shot that has a purpose within a scene rather than leaving it to the editor to cut something out of coverage! Of course, there are occasions when I see that using a second camera is the best way to capture a performance that is unscripted or that is simply intense but, for the most part, I see it as more efficient to concentrate on one angle at a time. It is an obvious truth that a second camera will compromise the shot that can be made by the first camera. A third camera will only compromise all three angles, both in terms of lighting and in terms of composition and lens choice. Yes, I like to operate myself and I also like to work with as small a crew as possible. For that reason I don’t shoot projects where I know there will be a regular use of multiple cameras. But I genuinely believe that the intimacy of working with a small crew will allow for both better performances in general as well as more personal imagery. Besides all of this, I can’t honestly think of a film that I really admire which hasn’t been shot with a single camera.”

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Deakins mentioned that “one of [Angelina Jolie]’s chief references was Sidney Lumet’s film The Hill...

“It wasn’t like we were going to copy it, but there was something about the framing, the immediacy of the classic simplicity of the framing — getting right to the point without frivolous camera moves and fancy lighting.”

In terms of specific scenes, Deakins also drew a lot of inspiration from William Brown’s photos of Welsh coal miners, resulting in the monochromatic look of the scenes at the Naoetsu prison camp.

For the plane scene in the beginning, when we see some striking shafts of light coming through the plane’s bullet holes, Deakins used a normal fogger, as well as “T12 Fresnel lamps to create the sunlight effect inside the B24. The lamps were on cranes with remote control units and about 20 feet from the fuselage.”

The night scene where the characters are stuck in a life raft was shot on an interior stage tank. The scene was lit using a large overhead grid cloth into which Deakings bounced 4K HMI Par lamps. “The image was exposed as you see it, though printed down a little in the final timing. The shark was computer generated as were some of the water reflections. To get a soft light on the actors’ faces it was all but impossible to get the right balance with natural reflections on the water surface.”