American Cinematographer - May 2013 - 28

Torn Loyalties
By Jean Oppenheimer

Based on the 2007 bestseller by
Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist concerns a Pakistani-born, Princetoneducated, Wall Street financial analyst,
Changez (Riz Ahmed), who moves back to
Pakistan after his hard-won American
dream crumbles in the wake of the 2001
terrorist attacks on the United States.
Overnight, the color of his skin and his
Muslim faith transform him into a perceived
threat. Back in Lahore, he comes under the
influence of militant Islamists and finds
himself torn between love and hate for
America.
The film is the latest collaboration
between director Mira Nair and cinematographer Declan Quinn, ASC, whose earlier
projects include Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love
(AC Feb. ’97), Monsoon Wedding and
Vanity Fair (AC Sept. ’04). Because filming in
Pakistan was out of the question, they shot
Reluctant Fundamentalist in the Union Territory of Delhi, India, which “isn’t far from the
Pakistani border, so the weather and the
feel of the place are the same,” says Quinn.
“Even the architecture is similar to what you
would find in Pakistan.”
28

May 2013

The story opens in Lahore and travels two related paths. At its core, the movie
is a thriller that revolves around an extended
conversation between Changez and a journalist/covert CIA operative, Bobby (Liev
Schreiber), who suspects Changez was
involved in the recent kidnapping of an
American professor. The flashbacks to
Changez’s life in America constitute the
second story track.
Quinn, who does his own operating,
shot most of the picture on an Arri Alexa
Studio (with a 4x3 sensor), using a lens
package that included Cooke S4 primes, a
set of Zeiss Superspeed primes, an Angenieux Optimo 24-290mm T2.8 zoom, and
his own vintage Cooke 20-60mm T3.1
zoom. He notes that he has used his Cooke
zoom on nearly all of his features. “I like its
quality and range, as well as its coatings.
There’s a different color coating on each
element, and it [produces] a kind of prismatic flare, especially when crossing a
point-light source, like a bare bulb or the
sun.” (Arri CSC provided the rented camera
equipment.)
The digital format was chosen
mainly for budget reasons, according to
Quinn, but the production shot film for a
few Pakistan exteriors that couldn’t be repliAmerican Cinematographer

cated elsewhere, and for scenes shot in
Istanbul, where Changez meets a publisher
who challenges his worldview. A local
cameraman, Saqib Malik, shot the Pakistan
footage on Kodak Vision2 250D 5205, and
Nair, Quinn and producer Lydia Pilcher hired
a small crew in Turkey for the Istanbul
scenes, which Quinn shot on 5205 using an
Arricam Lite. “We didn’t do any lighting in
Turkey,” he notes. “We just found places
that looked good in the existing light.”
The filmmakers built the interior of
the rundown teahouse where Changez and
Bobby converse in a 1920s-era hostel in the
old section of New Delhi. “It was renting
rooms at hourly rates when we got there,”
Quinn notes in a descriptive aside. He used
HMIs to augment the natural light coming
through the location’s two doors, and he
also wanted to create a sense of light leaking in from the roof overhead. “The hostel
was an open room, three stories high, with
balconies on each level and a peaked roof
at the top. We just removed much of the
corrugated-metal roof, erected a simple
truss grid and hung a 60-by-20-foot frame
of bleached muslin.” 6K HMIs were
bounced into the large muslin to create an
ambient-daylight feel. “When we wanted
the ambient light darker, we stretched Half

The Reluctant Fundamentalist photos by Ishaan Nair, courtesy of IFC Films.

Changez (Riz
Ahmed) grapples
with conflicted
feelings about
America in The
Reluctant
Fundamentalist,
directed by Mira
Nair and shot by
Declan Quinn,
ASC.

American Cinematographer - May 2013

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