{"id":8214,"date":"2025-08-19T00:20:09","date_gmt":"2025-08-19T00:20:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/8214\/"},"modified":"2025-08-19T00:20:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-19T00:20:09","slug":"day-of-the-jackal-team-brought-semi-derelict-border-building-to-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/8214\/","title":{"rendered":"Day of the Jackal Team Brought ‘Semi-Derelict’ Border Building to Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThe Day of the <\/strong>Jackal cinematographer Christopher Ross started his work on the Peacock series about an assassin named the Jackal (Eddie Redmayne) with a bang \u2014 no pun intended.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIn episode one, which was nominated for an Emmy for cinematography, the Jackal wounds the son of far-right German politician Manfred Fest \u2014 but it\u2019s all a ploy to lure Fest to his son\u2019s hospital bedside so the Jackal can assassinate him with a record long-distance sniper\u00a0shot.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cTrial by fire,\u201d jokes Ross of the assassination scene \u2014 the first scene he shot. (Last year, he received an Emmy nomination for his work on Shogun.) The sequence was composed of four sections, filmed in Budapest, Hungary, and Vienna, Austria. On the same day, Ross and his team also captured a scene demonstrating how the Jackal turns his suitcase into a sniper rifle.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cEddie and I bonded over a love of meticulous prep,\u201d Ross says of his first day of work. \u201cWe had two suitcases constructed that could be turned into the gun \u2014 Eddie had one in his hotel room for a couple of weeks before we shot, and he would repetitively rebuild this gun, taking out the wheels, finding the bullets, taking out the handles. In reality, the building of the gun took about 15 minutes from an empty suitcase, and the idea was to truncate that period into these elegant nuggets of precision.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile Redmayne prepped for his role by attending \u201csniper school,\u201d Ross had to learn the characteristics of each weapon so he would know how to lens them properly. \u201cWe ended up using a number of different lenses,\u201d he explains. \u201cThe actual Fest killing in episode one was photographed from the roof of the Hungarian National Theatre. It was a building that was 1,640 feet away from the hospital that we were filming at for the assassination, and we placed a 1,200mm lens with a 1.4\u202fextender, so that makes it sort of 1,600mm long, on a stabilized head. I operated the stabilized head remotely to try to smoothly track as a sniper would. It was channeling everything based on the character.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tRoss took home a unique souvenir: \u201cThere is a medical device known as a laparoscope, which is for looking down your throat at your larynx. It\u2019s the only optical device that\u2019s narrow enough to fit down the barrel of a gun,\u201d he notes. \u201cI have one of the world\u2019s only motion picture laparoscopes because I bought one specifically for The Day of the Jackal<\/a> to analyze the rifling of the gun, but we never ended up doing it. I have a memento.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tRedmayne as the Jackal with his suitcase-assembled rifle.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tMarcell Piti\/SKY\/Carnival<\/p>\n

\n\tThere were challenging shots aplenty for Ross, and while he credits the opening scene as the most difficult in terms of camera moves, the border crossing, in which the Jackal is stopped while attempting to enter France after the assassination, was logistically difficult, he says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt was written as a fairly brief scene, where the Jackal goes to the border and there\u2019s a temporary arrangement, but [episode director] Brian Kirk wanted this scene to be sort of an indicator: Is this the first mistake the Jackal has made?\u201d he says. \u201cIt runs about three minutes, and the script was about a page, so it was elongated quite a bit for tension purposes. We filmed it at the Hungarian and Austrian border, both member states of the EU now, but they weren\u2019t previously, and we were at some semi-derelict building at the border crossing that we had to bring to life. It sits on the side of the motorway these days as a completely disused set of buildings.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe crew repowered the buildings and all of its traffic lights: \u201cEvery red cross and green arrow has been designed by the art department and built by practical electricians,\u201d Ross explains. \u201cAll the vehicles are brought in. This was a huge, huge undertaking. There are only six lines of dialogue in the sequence, but the power of the sequence is entirely in the crafts department delivering big.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBut while Ross had to capture big moments, he also had to lens smaller, intimate ones, including one where the Jackal takes off his disguise prosthetics in the mirror, requiring a very tight shot. The scene had to be carefully framed after the team built a mirror image of the bathroom with a body double for Redmayne. It was filmed over a six-hour\u00a0period.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThere are a couple of Probe Lens shots in there for being able to get right up to his contact lens and see the color change in his irises,\u201d Ross explains of the scene in which the Jackal, disguised as an elderly janitor in an office, takes off his prosthetics after completing his mission. \u201cThen, on top of that,\u201d he adds, \u201cwe built a mirror image of the room on the far side of the bathroom and removed the mirror so that the final shot is the camera passing through the mirror and out into the room with him as he returns into the kitchen, as a subliminal trick to fool the audience. It\u2019s a technique that was brilliantly used by Robert Zemeckis in [1997\u2019s] Contact and Mathieu Kassovitz in [1995\u2019s] La Haine, and Brian and I thought it would be a fun little trick to play on the audience.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe scene was meant to be \u201cunsettlingly playful,\u201d mirroring the show\u2019s main character.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cBrian\u2019s idea with the show was that it\u2019s about liars that lie about everything all the time, and so the idea was that we as storytellers would also be lying to the audience \u2014 that even the camera was an unreliable narrator,\u201d Ross explains. \u201cYou are never quite sure whether what you were seeing was the truth.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tThe mirror sequence required a series of technical camera moves.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tMarcell Piti\/SKY\/Carnival<\/p>\n

\n\tThis story first appeared in an August stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine,\u00a0click here to subscribe<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Day of the Jackal cinematographer Christopher Ross started his work on the Peacock series about an assassin…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8215,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[265],"tags":[4648,18,6135,117,19,17,8228,128],"class_list":{"0":"post-8214","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-awards","9":"tag-eire","10":"tag-emmy-awards","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-ireland","14":"tag-the-day-of-the-jackal","15":"tag-tv"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8214"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8214\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8215"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}