The Day Of The Jackal is more of a hybrid mentality, where we’re voyeuristic when we need to feel paranoid. Regardless of the motive behind the assassination, the audience has to side with the Jackal. So, the audience must pull the trigger alongside the Jackal to be motivated to watch episodes two and three.
There’s this cave set on the stage, and it’s quite intricate. It’s cut with foam and then painted. The art department and their creative work is so impressive when you go into the cave you feel claustrophobic… It’s dark and scary. I shot some tests with my iPhone the week before with different colors and lighting effects, just so we could get an approximation of the look. I ran it by the team, and we were all on board. When I saw it all put together, I was impressed. The use of music in this series is incredible.
I’m attracted to films that create the feeling that you don’t know what’s around the corner, whether it’s a different scene, a different shot, or a different person. I was most excited about how to use time and use these elements to create a more kaleidoscopic visceral sensation through it.
It’s all about the light and how you use the camera. We captured the moonlight that cast an interesting shadow of Lily-Rose Depp’s face on the pillow in the last shot. There’s this monstrous sort of distortion on the pillow that was accidental. I sort of engineered that, you know, the shadow being that crisp and that hard, it’s like a convex mirror.
I do prefer shooting film. All three films I’ve done with Brady have been period films, shot on film. We are much more able to create an image that is more pictorial, and more impressionistic rather than the high fidelity and definition of digital cameras. We can explore more and underexpose.
This is a pioneer story, you could call it a western… Trains are coming and nothing can stop them from coming. We know ultimately what happened. I felt the same way I felt when I read Titanic, I felt like, wow, this is a piece of history. This is less about the gunslinger and more about the birth of America and that blew my mind.
June created this atmosphere on set where it completely felt like a family, and we felt so free to do whatever we wanted to do without judgment. She trusted us. I felt completely free to explore. But the thing about her too is her performances don’t seem theatrical. Looking through the viewfinder at her face, and oftentimes I’m this close to her face on a wide lens and the nuances of her performance, it was like I would get shivers.
“We were taking it back to a kind of first principle nature of storytelling, which is what is the pure lived experience of these characters.”
“I always imagined when I read the first scene of Donny in the comedy sequence, I always imagined that he goes on stage and what you see is just pure darkness.”
