American Cinematographer - April 2010 - 54

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Weapons of Deception
configuration and use it more like a video camera, with an onboard monitor. That allowed him to throw the camera around a bit more and worked with his use of a fairly wide lens.” In addition to the 24-290mm Optimo, Ackroyd often used a 2876mm Optimo, but the lenses that were on the cameras most frequently were 80-200mm Nikon stills-format zoom lenses that were rehoused by Arri. Ackroyd also carried a set of Zeiss Ultra Primes, but the team “only used them for a few night shots where it was so dark that we needed the extra stop,” he says. “If we did use a prime, it was usually the 135mm so we could keep that compressed, long-lens look.” Becker had a habit of naming various lenses after films he liked, and Ackroyd enjoyed winding him up by encouraging the crew to use completely different movie titles for the same lenses. “That was just part of our strange English humor,” says the cinematographer. “If Klemens called the 28-76mm Ipcress, we’d call it O Lucky Man! or Kes or This Sporting Life — basically going back to English Free Cinema. We saw British social-realist films as more of an influence on us than anything else.” Another reference for the visual approach — especially for tense combat scenes — came from an entirely different source. “YouTube was a massive influence,” reveals Ackroyd. “If you want to know how soldiers move, then you get military advisers, but if you want to see what it actually looks like when they burst into someone’s house, then you look at YouTube. We were trying to get the rawness and energy and truth of what you see in those shots. The soldier with the video camera is usually following the others and actually participating in the action, and that’s what we tried to do with our camera. We want the viewer to feel like an observer who’s inevitably caught up in what’s happening. Our role was to allow the ‘reality’ to happen in front of the camera and give the actors and Paul the freedom to do what they wanted. I

Greengrass and Damon work out the details of an upcoming scene. “Sometimes we shoot pretty much what’s on the page, but other times [the scene] may develop as we shoot,” says Ackroyd. “Paul feels his ideas work best when he’s under pressure.”

kind of telepathy in how we covered scenes, once we had the look right,” says Ackroyd. “We did a lot of handheld, but we were using lightweight zooms so we could move around and change frame sizes. Klemens has his own technique; he tends to do wider shots that are handheld, so that would become a little block about 10 or 15 feet wide, with Klemens, the grip, the focus puller and a boom operator. Then I would sneak my camera in alongside theirs and do the opposite; I’d put on a long zoom and pick off tighter shots. We created almost every scene using a few variations of that strategy.” However the cameras were configured, the priority was to sustain a continuous sense of motion. “We always kept that handheld feel and the ability to move,” says Ackroyd. “Sometimes I used little sliders, variable lengths of steel rods that let me cushion the camera on a base but still keep it quite loose. Having a 4-foot or 6-foot slider means that if you get blocked, you can always create a bit of movement, or if you want to create blocking, you can do that, too.” Ackroyd and Becker’s different operating styles naturally positioned
54 April 2010

them at different ends of the focallength range used to cover each scene. Ackroyd notes, “When I operate, I find myself wrapped around the camera, very close to it, so it’s more connected to

“Our role was to allow the ‘reality’ to happen in front of the camera and give the actors and Paul the freedom to do what they wanted.”
my body motion. I was using a long [Angenieux] Optimo zoom [24290mm], which needs support, so I’d use a Manfrotto monopod to keep that handheld feel. Klemens would strip the camera down to its lightest possible
American Cinematographer

American Cinematographer - April 2010

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