Cinematographer Malik Hassan Sayeed was widely recognized as one of the most innovative directors of photography of the 1990s for his work on films like “Belly” and Spike Lee‘s “Clockers” and “Girl 6.” He stepped away from features for 25 years to work in commercials and on other projects that would keep him close to home, but when director Luca Guadagnino — a vocal “Clockers” disciple — called and asked Sayeed to shoot his academia-set psychodrama “After the Hunt,” Sayeed jumped at the chance.
At IndieWire’s recent craft roundtable discussion, presented by Amazon/MGM, Sayeed explained that one of the draws to working with Guadagnino was a common visual language; the filmmakers bonded over their love of Ingmar Bergman, Gordon Willis, and Alfred Hitchcock and found ways to make those influences inform the imagery of “After the Hunt.” They worked together on a commercial first, on which they forged their collaboration.
“The commercial was specifically Hitchcock-influenced, and I could see how nuanced he was at understanding Hitchcock’s mise en scène,” Sayeed said. “I don’t think that he could function outside of that, Hitchcock is just so important to him that it seeps into the DNA.” That said, the primary acknowledged influence on “After the Hunt” was director Ingmar Bergman and the films he made with cinematographer Sven Nykvist in the 1960s and early 1970s.
“[‘After the Hunt’] is restrained, and I think that the references themselves were restrained,” Sayeed said. “Bergman and Sven Nykvist are a lot about faces and emotional ambiguity, and a kind of emotional voyeurism that’s created as we’re taking a ride with these characters. So it became an exercise in that.” Sayeed then tried to reconcile Bergman and Nykvist’s work with his other key influence, cinematographer Gordon Willis (“The Godfather,” “Annie Hall”).
“Gordon Willis has always been a north star for me,” Sayeed said. “I wanted the film to feel like it came out of that period of Gordon Willis, but with a relationship to the mise en scène of Ingmar Bergman. ‘Silence’ and ‘Persona’ were probably the two seminal pieces. The thing about Luca is that he didn’t go to film school to study filmmaking. He studied film theory and art history, and he was a critic for several years before he became a filmmaker. So he’s a massive cinephile and film student. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to work from him — I knew I could learn from him.”
This conversation is presented in partnership with Amazon/MGM.