Cinematographer Martin Ruhe is Anything But An Amateur

Martin Ruhe’s distinctive visual style has brought nuance and depth to an impressive filmography that includes The Countess, The American, The Keeping Room and The Midnight Sky, earning him a place among the most respected cinematographers of his generation. In The Amateur, directed by James Hawes and starring Rami Malek, Ruhe brings his grounded aesthetic to a modern-day espionage thriller that resists the glossy sheen of many of its genre contemporaries.

A seasoned director of photography known for moody atmosphere, precise framing and depth of field, Ruhe first came into narrative filmmaking through music videos. “I had done one film previously, which was a small German film and was a total disaster,” Ruhe says. It was only after musician Herbert Grönemeyer introduced him to director Anton Corbijn, the filmmaker behind many of U2’s most iconic videos of the ‘80s and ‘90s (and for whom Ruhe lensed videos for Coldplay and Depeche Mode) that Ruhe ventured back into features. Ruhe was persuaded to serve as cinematographer on Corbijn’s film Control in 2007, and had such a good experience that he teamed up with Corbijn again for The American in 2010. 

It was on the latter film that Ruhe met George Clooney, who brought him on board the 2019 miniseries version of Catch-22, and proceeded to make Ruhe his regular cinematographer, shooting The Midnight Sky, The Tender Bar and The Boys in the Boat. The partnership with Corbijn helped shape Ruhe’s approach to cinematography: stylized but never artificial, moody but rooted in realism. Those same instincts are alive in The Amateur, where Malek plays Charlie Heller, a brilliant but socially withdrawn CIA code analyst who takes on the mission of avenging his wife’s death following a terrorist attack in London.

“The film is basically split in half,” Ruhe says. “So our hero loses his wife early on, and there’s a lot of remorse there. Then, until he gets into action, the camera is on controlled movements and the mood is happy in the beginning. But then she dies in an attack, which seems to be a terrorist attack, at a hotel in London. Once she dies, he’s really mourning. He gets over it and starts to think that he needs to get going to action. And he does that by blackmailing his superiors at the CIA — he’s a CIA data nerd, basically.”

Ruhe uses the camera to subtly chart Heller’s internal transformation. The film shifts from precise, controlled compositions to a looser, more kinetic style as Charlie leaves his analytical role behind and steps into the world. “When he takes action, when he gets on the road, we go to handheld cameras,” Ruhe says. “So basically, the film is in these two halves. Everything is more controlled, his life is easy and beautiful, until his wife dies. But when he takes action … we go handheld.”

The locations are as important to the story’s emotional arc as the camerawork. “We have a lot of locations, in the story he goes to London first, then Paris, Marseilles … he goes to Istanbul. He goes to Russia in the end, and is in Romania for a moment,” Ruhe says. “And once it’s on the move, we move with our camera,” Ruhe says. “We are a lot more dynamic, and we’re more intimate.” 

But unlike Jason Bourne or James Bond, Charlie Heller isn’t built for combat. His mind is his greatest weapon. “Our guy is not like a Bourne guy who manages and fights everybody down,” Ruhe says. “So he has to find different ways to get to his targets and get them. He does it in really unusual ways, while being chased by the CIA who, you know, try to find out what he has on them. Then once they know, they want to hunt him down. So he’s chased and he’s chasing at the same time.”

To support the grounded tone, Ruhe pushed back against modern action film polish. “We said from the beginning: We want this to feel real because there’re so many films out there which are so stylized,” Ruhe says, mentioning the superhero genre in particular. “Everything looks perfect; they are so slick that I don’t engage that much,” Ruhe says. “This is more in the terms of old school things, like Three Days of the Condor which is realistic. It can be dark at times, yes, but it should be grounded in reality.”

For the film’s visual palette, Ruhe chose Arri Alexa Minis in large format with Alfa anamorphic lenses. “We went anamorphic … We wanted a big scope,” Ruhe says. “We wanted to see and feel a lot of the places we go to,” he says. “The anamorphic seems to be the best. And then the large format anamorphics are just so involving — I love those and that’s what we use for some minutes, because the second half is mainly handheld. We wanted small, live cameras and we knew also that we would go to places where we didn’t have much control over the size of the space.” 

One of the film’s most ambitious sequences involves a transparent rooftop pool that collapses mid-scene with one of Heller’s targets inside. Ruhe recounts the technical challenges: “It’s a complex sequence because this pool exists in London, and it’s between two buildings, and it’s very restricted. So on top of that terrace, it’s at night. We shot it — I think we had two or three nights there.” Due to the physical limitations at the real location, a water tank was built in the studio. ”For us, it was important to see that this action is grounded,” Ruhe says. The real pool’s blue lighting was also a factor that added to complexity and the meticulous planning of the sequence. “We were not able to change the lighting on that, so we inherited it from the location, and we had to copy that in the studio.”

From the quiet, mournful symmetry of Charlie Heller’s early grief to the kinetic, handheld suspense of his global pursuit, Ruhe crafts a visual language that keeps the viewer inside the character’s shifting mindset. It’s a style built not on spectacle, but on intelligence, restraint and reality — a reflection, perhaps, of the man behind the camera as much as the character on screen.

Read more film interviews here:
Christian Kane Brings His Greatest Hits to Leverage: Redemption Season Three
Dope Thief: Marin Ireland and Amir Arison on Grit, Voice and Ridley Scott