How ‘The Day of the Jackal' Team Brought a 'Semi-Derelict' Border Building Back to Life: 'This Was a Huge Undertaking'

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The Day of the Jackal cinematographer Christopher Ross started his work on the Peacock series about an assassin named the Jackal (Eddie Redmayne) with a bang — no pun intended.
In episode one, which was nominated for an Emmy for cinematography, the Jackal wounds the son of far-right German politician Manfred Fest — but it's all a ploy to lure Fest to his son's hospital bedside so the Jackal can assassinate him with a record long-distance sniper shot.
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'Trial by fire,' jokes Ross of the assassination scene — 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.
'Eddie and I bonded over a love of meticulous prep,' Ross says of his first day of work. 'We had two suitcases constructed that could be turned into the gun — 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.'
While Redmayne prepped for his role by attending 'sniper school,' Ross had to learn the characteristics of each weapon so he would know how to lens them properly. 'We ended up using a number of different lenses,' he explains. 'The 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 extender, 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.'
Ross took home a unique souvenir: 'There is a medical device known as a laparoscope, which is for looking down your throat at your larynx. It's the only optical device that's narrow enough to fit down the barrel of a gun,' he notes. 'I have one of the world's only motion picture laparoscopes because I bought one specifically for The Day of the Jackal to analyze the rifling of the gun, but we never ended up doing it. I have a memento.'
There 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.
'It was written as a fairly brief scene, where the Jackal goes to the border and there's 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?' he says. 'It 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't 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.'
The crew repowered the buildings and all of its traffic lights: 'Every red cross and green arrow has been designed by the art department and built by practical electricians,' Ross explains. 'All 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.'
But 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 period.
'There 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,' 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. 'Then, on top of that,' he adds, 'we 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's a technique that was brilliantly used by Robert Zemeckis in [1997's] Contact and Mathieu Kassovitz in [1995's] La Haine, and Brian and I thought it would be a fun little trick to play on the audience.'
The scene was meant to be 'unsettlingly playful,' mirroring the show's main character.
'Brian's idea with the show was that it's 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 — that even the camera was an unreliable narrator,' Ross explains. 'You are never quite sure whether what you were seeing was the truth.'
This story first appeared in an August stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
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