One Shot: ‘The Day of the Jackal’ set its sights on a killer with a special eyepiece

Eddie Redmayne is a sharpshooting assassin in Peacock’s suspense thriller “The Day of the Jackal,” a series whose visual language is as sleek as its chameleon-like protagonist. “He’s an enigmatic man of mystery who tries to do his work with the minimum amount of attention,” says cinematographer Christopher Ross, who lensed the first three episodes with director Brian Kirk. “The camera is almost always moving. It has inertia to it, the idea being that there’s an inevitability to the character’s actions.” Propelling the stirring story is a chilling sequence where the marksman has his sights on a target 3,815 meters (2.37 miles) away, an unprecedented distance for a successful hit. “The philosophy of the sequence is that he needs to prepare himself physically, emotionally and psychologically for this assassination,” notes Ross. In contextualizing the visceral action, the cinematographer isolated the character from the stark environment, illustrating his hyperfocused, meticulous nature as the hair-raising tension builds. The camera slowly pushes down the barrel of the gun like a ticking clock striking zero. Magnifying the Jackal’s unflinching eye is a bespoke telescopic eyepiece that peers into the soul of the killer seconds before he pulls the trigger. And the Jackal doesn’t miss.