Roger Deakins’ status as perhaps Hollywood’s leading working cinematographer has been established for years. Hailing from England, the veteran lenser has earned five Oscar nominations in his career, for “The Shawshank Redemption,” “Fargo,” “Kundun,” “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and “The Man Who Wasn’t There.” Other efforts have included “Jarhead,” “The Village,” “A Beautiful Mind,” “Dead Man Walking,” “The Secret Garden” and “Barton Fink,” just to name a few.

His work can be seen on screen this year in three separate efforts: Andrew Dominik’s “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” The Coen brothers’ “No Country for Old Men” and Paul Haggis’ “In the Valley of Elah.” These films have highlighted Deakins’ talents yet again and will most certainly result in his earning more year-end accolades.

I had the opportunity to speak with Deakins on the weekend.

Deakins is in many ways overwhelmed by the amount of success he has had. He says he always loved movies as a kid, but never dreamed he would make it into the industry.

He began in still photography, later turning to documentaries for seven years. Before long, some of the filmmakers he was collaborating with began working on narrative films. One was Michael Radford, who gave Deakins the chance to shoot “Another Time, Another Place,” followed by “1984.” Deakins soon started getting more offers in England and then in America. The rest, as they say, is history, but Deakins notes that the last thing in his mind was getting the opportunities he’s had the last few years.

He has been working with the Coen brothers for many years now, going all the way back to 1991’s “Barton Fink,” for which Deakins won the cinematography award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics. They’ve worked together ever since.

“We’re just good friends,” Deakins states frankly. “The longer it’s been going on, the more we trust each other’s instincts and we can try things with a bit more confidence than if I hadn’t known them.”

At the same time, however, he finds every effort on which he embarks with the famous brothers to be a new opportunity. He notes how unique everyone Coen film tends to be from the last and describes “No Country for Old Men” as unlike any film he’d done with them before. Despite some comparisons to “Blood Simple,” he ultimately considers it akin to a late Peckinpah Western. “It’s nostalgic for the past but with a sense of modernity, especially with respect to the modern violence,” he says.

On “No Country for Old Men,” Deakins says that the most challenging sequence was the drug bust, starting at night and becoming full dawn. “It was particularly hard to make transition between night and dawn,” he recalls. “There were few opportunities we had to do that.”

Andrew Dominik, on the other hand, was only shooting his second film ever and his first with Deakins.

“Working with a new director can vary very much,” Deakins says. “Andrew was so passionate. He’d been working on ‘The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford’ for a long, long time.”

According to Deakins, Dominik had done a massive amount of research and had so many visual ideas and references. “It was a challenge for me living up to expectations of what he wanted and had in his mind’s eye.”

Deakins explicates how every director is very different. Coming from different disciplines and with different ideas of how to realize a film, he says some purely concentrate on scripts and actors and leave the cinematographer to find a way to shoot. But others, like Dominik, have a very visual sense to start with.

“Andrew had a sense of what he wanted to see but didn’t know how to realize these images so I had to translate them into concrete,” Deakins recalls. “He wanted to do a Victorian Western, without a lot of action but about this melancholy feel of the changing West. But everything stems from the script. It’s a kind of joy of my job, being challenged to create a particular look and particular mood.”

Deakins was not expecting to get the chance to shoot “In the Valley of Elah,” only getting the offer after Haggis’s usual lenser wasn’t available. “I loved the script and I’m very much drawn to character-driven scripts,” he says happily. “I was very lucky to get that chance.”

But through all three films, Deakins tried to employ his general approach to the craft. He explains the role of a cinematographer as the “final arbiter of images,” but quickly notes the importance of collaboration in filmmaking. Specifically, Deakins embosses the importance of a location manager in his work.

Given Deakins’ popularity in the industry, it can sometimes be interesting to note that stars like Deakins in the tech ranks don’t achieve much popularity outside of the cinephile circuit. But Deakins is just fine steering clear of too much limelight.

“That’s why I’m behind the camera. Most of my work is creative and atmosphere so the actors can do their job. I like to give them room to do what they do with as little intrusion as possible.”

Deakins considers himself very lucky to have had such great opportunities this year and thinks he was truly stretched, especially on Dominik’s film, where he says he gained the confidence to take certain other risks again in the future.

“Stylistically, these were three incredibly different films,” he says. “That’s why I like getting a new script with a new approach and a totally different atmosphere. Next time, hopefully it will be better.”