What no one tells you about filming your leaders.

From Angela Merkel in Berlin to the minefields of Iraq, we have worked with leaders at the highest levels of power, politics, and public life. What they have in common surprises most people.

Nobody is comfortable in front of a camera.

Not the most media-trained politicians. Not heads of state with decades of press experience. Not generals who have commanded thousands of people. The camera does something that a room full of people does not — it creates a permanent record. And for someone whose authority, reputation, and sense of self is tied to how they are perceived, that is not a neutral thing. It is a genuine threat.

Their performance is usually a defence mechanism.

The polished answer. The considered pause. The expression that’s been worn across a thousand press appearances. This isn’t dishonesty — it’s protection. The public face arrives before the shutter clicks because it has learned to. If I control what you see, you can’t see something I didn’t choose to show you.

Some sabotage it deliberately — without knowing they’re doing it.

Not doing their best work. Slightly disengaging. Going through the motions. This is the most psychologically sophisticated response of all, and it’s more common than people think. If I don’t really try, the result isn’t really me. It preserves the gap between the image and the person — and keeps the real self safely out of reach.

All three are the same person saying the same thing: I am afraid of being seen and found insufficient.

The solution isn’t to make people comfortable. Comfort doesn’t touch this. It’s to make the result genuinely irrelevant to how they are judged — to create a situation where there is no correct version, no wrong answer, nothing at stake. When someone truly believes that, the defence has nothing left to defend against.

That’s when you get the real person. And the real person is always more compelling than the one they came in with.