Cinematographer Christopher Ross On Capturing “The Gray Area Of The Human Condition” In ‘The Day Of The Jackal’

For The Day of the Jackal, cinematographer Christopher Ross says the approach to the job was to capture the “world of lies” that both protagonists live in. Every assassination had moments of misdirection, on both sides, which needed to be captured on camera as small clues for the audience to piece together what is really going on.

The Day of the Jackal follows a professional British assassin called the Jackal (Eddie Redmayne), known only for his ruthless and mysterious methods, and Bianca Pullman (Lashana Lynch), an MI6 agent intent on hunting him down. Since the two protagonists are opposing forces, it was important for Ross that both sides were presented to the audience in a way that allowed them to be both rooted for and against.

DEADLINE: Coming into the project, did you have any ideas of how you wanted to capture that cinematic element of espionage?

CHRISTOPHER ROSS: Well, every project is a little bit different, and even if you’ve worked with the director a number of times, it’s quite good to sort of almost expand the collaboration by trying to be quiet – and it’s hard for cinematographers to not talk, we’re a fairly talkative bunch – and try and listen. 

Brian [Kirk, director] would talk a lot thematically about the world of lies and espionage, and the fact that the Jackal has to lie all of the time. He’s lying to himself, he’s lying to his wife, he’s lying to everyone he ever meets, basically trying to manipulate them to get his way. So, that was a big source of inspiration. And then, tying that in with a kind of multinational, espionage thriller that never really stops moving. So, you start to piece it together, basically the idea being it was an ultramodern, slick investigation of an enigmatic mastermind. 

DEADLINE: It’s not even just the Jackal that’s lying all the time either, I don’t think there’s really anyone on either side telling the truth. Everything is in a sort of gray area.

ROSS: Yeah, the gray area of the human condition. It’s so interesting that Eddie’s essentially propelled by whatever the task at hand is, whether he needs to take the place of the chauffeur, create a diversion, mastermind a double cross or whatever he’s doing. He’s utterly dedicated to that, and everything else is completely secondary. And Lashana’s Bianca ends up being the same, that she’s this character that will stop at nothing to achieve the goal of catching the enigma, so they both leave a terrible wake behind their ships. They’re on a collision course, these two lone boats in the ocean, but behind them is death and destruction. 

DEADLINE: Can you talk about trying to capture that gray area through your approach to filming? 

ROSS: Absolutely. The tricky thing is that the Jackal, across the 10 episodes, does despicable acts of violence and betrayal in order to achieve his goal. However, he’s the protagonist, so our audience has to go along with the protagonist’s story. They might judge the protagonist at times. They might think he’s gone a bit too far, but the idea is that you are swept up in the story. So, the idea behind selling the enigma of the Jackal is that you are in the process. I’ve likened it before to a magic trick, that the whole process of building the gun or creating the plan for the subterfuge that leads to the assassination is like a magician, who will lead you through a magic trick and will be like, look over here rather than over here while I’m doing this other thing. And then finally, the assassination ends up being the prestige of the trick.

The Jackal is our protagonist and our audience want to emulate his gray area, so therefore, our antagonist is Bianca. But really, she’s our force for good in where there is no right or wrong, and there is no truth or fiction. There’s just one enormous gray area loophole where everything and nothing is justified or justifiable, it’s just where your frame of reference sits. So, most of the time we’re trying to shoot Bianca and the Jackal in similar ways so the audiences can be both wanting Bianca to get closer with the chase, whilst also wanting the Jackal to get further away. It’s almost like in a way, everyone loves Tom just as much as they love Jerry. It’s that same kind of idea that even though Tom’s the bad guy, you kind of want to side with him in a way, and you feel sorry when Spike turns up. Not to make an analogy with Tom and Jerry and an espionage thriller, but ultimately, it’s a fairly pure storytelling trope, and that’s the scenario.

DEADLINE: Were there any scenes or sequences that were particularly challenging to get right?

ROSS: Yeah, one of the trickiest ones was the opening scene of the first episode, which is a single shot that lasts for the first two minutes of the episode. We didn’t want it to just be a camera wandering around a space with a character. Brian wanted to be anachronistic. He wanted it to not be obvious that it was Eddie being the character of Ralf Becker, so we broke the sequence down into enigmatic story beats. The shot opens on the Dictaphone, and you hear a voice and you understand that that’s where the voice is coming from, but then you travel up and you realize that this character, Ralf Becker in the mirror is repeating the lines, and then we see the lanyard that he’s putting on because he’s stealing someone’s identity, but we don’t know that yet. We pull out of the bathroom as he moves, and we reveal the fact that he’s got a gun down the waistband of his trousers, and that’s quite a quirky thing for a janitor to have. Then you walk into another room and there’s the dead body, and you revolve around the dead body and you realize it’s the same human being, and that’s pretty confusing but you see that there’s been a scuffle.

So, the idea was with this one shot that none of that information is overt, but it’s just there for an audience to piece together. And so that sequence, it could have been just a series of cuts, but the editorial challenge with a series of cuts is again, to register this heartbeat. So, the piece of music that’s over the top is a piece by Radiohead [“Everything in Its Right Place”], and it has this incredibly low, thrumming heartbeat to it. So, allowing a shot to play in one allows the audience to synchronize heartbeats with the protagonist, and what a perfect way to fall in love is to synchronize your heartbeat. So that’s the idea, you immediately fall in love with the protagonist, even though he’s just murdered himself in this weird, trippy little two-and-a-half-minute scene. Hopefully that scene sort of sets up a little bit of the playfulness and a little bit of the storytelling subversion that Brian wanted to achieve in the show. Then after that, all bets are off and its high octane from there on in.