Sometimes the opportunity comes to get inside the head, and the heart, of a cinematographer. With the explosive The Hurt Locker grabbing headlines and awards galore, and Green Zone deploying at a cinema-near-you now, Ron Prince got the chance to find out what makes Barry Ackroyd BSC tick.
It was the world of sculpture that really changed everything for Barry Ackroyd. As a teenager growing up amongst the cotton mills of industrial Oldham, Lancashire, he was urged by his art teacher, rather than take a job in the factory, to attend the local college of art. The whole experience opened his eyes to new worlds of opportunity and fresh horizons.

“I just loved it, fantastic. It gave me a completely different world to live in,” he says. “During the course of my studies I realised that whatever material sculpture is made from, it has to impress from all angles and in different lighting conditions. This is definitely something that has informed my approach to cinematography.”

Another defining moment came as a student at the Fine Art Department of Portsmouth Polytechnic. “We got our hands on all sorts of film kit, like 16mm Éclair NPR cameras, Nagras and Steenbecks, and it was there that I picked up the camera. My first job was filming titles, just white Letraset on a blackboard for a third year student. I remember my heart pounding as the camera started to turn over. It’s that feeling I try to reproduce even today. I was lucky to have found something that really thrilled me. It still does.

“The more I picked up the camera, the more I realised that all the qualities you want in a great sculpture – weight, shape, texture and intimacy – are the same qualities you want on film. Film has a texture, a patina, something that is tangible, that touches us. On every project, I want people to feel engrossed in the picture, it should have qualities that are tactile as well as visual.”

Asked what type of films he’s attracted to, Ackroyd says, “I like a combination of the personal and the political. As a cinematographer you have to play to your own strengths, and that’s what you see in The Hurt Locker and Green Zone, all of my films really. I like to see inside the minds of characters, and to translate that to the frame in a realistic way. I think capturing the moment, capturing some form of realism, stems from my days in documentary, where you had to find the story. Ultimately, it means I’m probably not as right for some films as others.”

Ackroyd has been the DP on some of the most influential and provocative British films, TV dramas and documentaries of the last 15 years, including Hillsborough (1996), the dramatisation of the 1989 football stadium tragedy, and Sunday (2002), the story of the infamous 1972 Bloody Sunday atrocity in Northern Ireland – both directed by Charles McDougall, and written by Jimmy McGovern. He worked with documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield on The Leader, His Driver And The Driver’s Wife (1991), driving the AWB crazy while shooting with Eugene Terreblanche, leader of a white supremacist movement in pre-Apartheid South Africa, and Tacking Down Maggie (1994), when the pair went in fruitless search of an interview with the then PM Margaret Thatcher. He also shot Out Of Control (2002), the powerful drama about three teenage boys sent to a young offenders’ institution, and Love + Hate (2005) a hard-hitting story about interracial relationships, for director Dominic Savage, as well as Karen Adler’s Under The Skin.

Ackroyd has collaborated with director Ken Loach no fewer that 12 times, and won the director/cinematographer duo award at Camerimage in 2002, after the pair completed Sweet Sixteen, the tale of a Scottish teenager’s attempt to rescue himself and his mother from a life of poverty and crime. His other credits with Loach include The Wind That Shakes The Barley, Palme d’Or winner in 2006, for which Ackroyd also won the European cinematography award that year, and Ae Find Kiss, winner at the Berlin Film Festival in 2004. He has completed two films with Paul Greengrass – United 93 (2006) about one of the planes hijacked on 9/11 that crashed in Pennsylvania, and now Green Zone. The film was inspired by roving reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s book Imperial Life In The Emarld City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone, recounting the American Army’s ordeals in Baghdad after the fall of Saddam.

“I have worked with directors who make some very real films,” he says. “Directors find you as much as you find them. I have great admiration for them all, and they get the best out of you by knowing your strengths and getting you to run with it. That’s the best way to make a film – to let people do their work as best as they can.”

Ackroyd shot The Hurt Locker, which follows an elite IED disposal squad in post-Saddam Iraq, his first collaboration with director Kathryn Bigelow, nearly three years ago on location in Jordan, but knew he would start on Green Zone almost immediately afterwards. Green Zone was filmed in Spain and Morocco, as well as locations in London, and at Longcross Studios in Surrey.

When asked about how he treated two films which deal with similar subjects in war-torn Iraq, he responds, “I was prepping for one with the other in the back of my mind. There is a continuum between the two films. Green Zone has some elements from The Hurt Locker, but still they are essentially very different films. Green Zone is more like a regular tale, a political thriller that has a beginning, middle and an end, whereas The Hurt Locker, is a series of episodes that each has a beginning, middle and an end.

“I carry images, visual references, with me from my previous documentary work, and I build on these for the next project. I use styles and techniques, but they are never the same twice. It’s a cumulative progression. If there were any references, I’d say The Hurt Locker was informed to some extent by the immediacy of the imagery of real events, the things you see these days on the Internet and You Tube. It’s observational, but hyper-real, with mutiple points-of-view of dramatic events. I deliberately kept the camera with the characters at street level, to live with them and the adrenaline-fuelled situations they encounter. With Green Zone I see it now as a Western, with the good guy battling for justice against the odds over WMDs. As a 90-minute feature, it’s very tight, fast and has some hectic storytelling. I made the action scenes as frantic as I possibly could, in true Greengrass tradition, with lots of handheld camera, tracking shots and running over ground.”

With a modest £11m budget for The Hurt Locker, Ackroyd chose S16mm Aaton XTRs, cameras, four in total, supplied by ICE Films in London. “It’s a documentary-style camera that I am very familiar with. The great thing about S16 mm is you can put a fantastic range of lenses on the camera. My main lens of choice was a Canon 11.5-165 mm T2.7 zoom that let me crash into huge close-ups or go wide, whilst doing handheld work.”

For Green Zone, which had a much larger budget and was shot on 35mm, he selected ARRICAM Lite (LT)s and ARRIFLEX 2Cs, as part of a camera and lighting package from ARRI. In keeping with the notion of continuum, he opted for the equivalent zoom for 35mm, an Angenieux Optimo 24-290mm. “It’s a phenomenal lens, but it’s 11 kilos in weight. The approach was the same as with the S16mm on The Hurt Locker, but then the challenge is to give the camera the same freedom.”

Ackroyd likes to operate himself. “I like to get into the place where the film is really happening. Operating helps me to light, to picture the edits and the story, to see the coverage and the quality of what’s being captured. Also, I am always looking for the thing that’s not in the script, but will be good for the story, to throw in a trick and create moments that transcend the original idea.”

Although neither of the films was shot in Iraq, Ackroyd believes the natural light of the temperate Mediterranean zone helped in creating the immediate look and feel. As did the film stock. Both The Hurt Locker and Green Zone were shot using a combination of Fuji 250 daylight, and 500 Tungsten and Daylight stocks, pushed on occasion by as many as four stops to give a texture that heightens the tension and realism.

“I have been to the Middle East a lot on documentaries, I know what the light is like, the way people move, and how to capture that on film. I have liked Fuji stocks for quite some time, and they make interesting changes and evolutions to the look of their films,” he explains. “Kodak seems to me to be more realistic, but Fuji has a slightly non-realistic thing about it. The black is strong and sharp, and this can make it feel more like a painting, where the objects seem as though they have been outlined. I am very used to shooting with Fuji stocks, and can put my eye to the camera and know what to expose and with the result will be on the negative. Obviously you can achieve this through a DI of course, when you have the time and money.”

Ackroyd graded both The Hurt Locker and Green Zone with Rob Pizzey at Ascent 142 in London. “DI is now a familiar subject, more affordable, and a great tool. These films would be very different without that grade,” he adds.

Asked about his recent glut of nominations and wins on the awards circuit (he won at the ES and BAFTA awards, and was ASC and Oscar-nominated for The Hurt Locker), his gracious reply is, “Whether I win or not does not matter. I feel like a winner anyway. The film has had lots of attention and publicity, and more people will be aware of my work now.

“But ultimately filmmaking is about collective skills – the director, the actors, the DP and all other departments like design, construction, costume, make-up and sound – all collaborating into making the moment happen.”

When asked about recent films that he finds inspiring, this realist with a penchant for French verité responds, “I am constantly in awe of talented cinematographers. I loved Stéphane Fontaine’s cinematography on Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet. You can see in his work that the best cinematography is the servant of the film.”