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| The After |
An exploration of grief in the aftermath of a tragic event, Misan Harriman’s Oscar-shortlisted short film The After centres on an intense close-up performance by David Oyelowo. It’s quite a departure for Misan, who made his name as a photographer, shooting the likes of Angeline Jolie and Meghan Markle, but he feels strongly that it’s a timely story about a subject which people need to talk about a lot more, and once he developed the idea, he told me, it was something he couldn’t let go of – despite the challenges of bringing it to the screen.
“It was a story that was in my head,” he says. “I'm very dyslexic – neurodiverse – and writing in a traditional form is a challenge for me. But I was very lucky to come across JJ Schwabach, a very young writer, who was able to really extract from my voice notes the humanity that we needed to get on the screen.”
It’s an interesting way to create a story. Does it affect his approach to directing?
“Self doubt is a big part of my daily existence,” he says. “I started googling directors that struggle, in the academic sense of the word, with writing. Guy Ritchie came up immediately, and Lock, Stock was just done on tape. In those days, he didn't even have voicemails. He just did it on, I guess, audio tape, the whole thing. And then I started reading about more and more people who would do it. So I'm still finding my process, but I have fully-ish formed stories in my head. It's now figuring out the writers that can help me extract those stories in the ways I conjure them in my own imagination.”
It’s quite a thing to make one’s first film and then find it on the Oscar shortlist.
“It's completely out of my control, the whole awards journey, and it's new to me. What I've really been amazed by is how regular folks have reacted. I've had mums in Tokyo send messages, and young boys that are really struggling, like many young men and women, with post-Covid mental health. And they've seen that it's okay for them to not be okay, to recognise that many of us have open wounds. And for this film to help – you know, it doesn't give you all the answers, but it lets you know that it's alright to try and figure it out. And sometimes it's okay to be on the floor in tears. Certainly that has been my own reality in the last five years. I'm desperate for this film to reach as many people as possible, above and beyond any accolades, so they know that, you know what, life is hard, and let's try and figure it out. Let's try and look towards the horizon together.”
I tell him that I had been intending to ask about Covid because the film seems very much informed by that kind of experience. There are a lot of people dealing with grief at the moment, and it's not something that our society really talks about very much. I guess the important thing for is to get that kind of message to people and start that conversation.
“Yeah. And also children. I'm a father of two little girls, and I genuinely believe children are as close to the celestial as you can possibly get. And sometimes they see what we don't as adults. That's very much as you've seen in the film.”
He apologises as his dog enters the room to see what’s going on. It’s a very friendly looking animal.
“My other kid,” he says as he directs it gently but firmly back out of the door. “Sometimes we need to listen to the little people in our lives as much as the big people. And I really wanted that to be in there as well. There's also an observation of how social media can get into our life in a very dangerous way, with one of the families at the end more interested in likes than their own daughter, who's literally sat next to them. So, yeah, there is a lot taken from the year that I would say all of our lives went a bit upside down. I don't know about you, but 2020 was a bit tricky for me, and I feel that everyone has a story from that period, and I wanted to put snippets of that into this little film.”
A lot of the film is made of little snippets of other people's lives which the protagonist is privy to as he drives a cab.
“I've never been an Uber driver, but I've certainly been in a few cabs,” Misan says. “You can only imagine what these men and women observe and how powerless they can feel or how they can try and do something when they hear what's happening literally less than a metre behind them. They can hear the most incredulous things, and it's also interesting for someone that's going through such grief to be so near human beings every day, but still be completely isolated.”
It's also an interesting device because it means that the camera is right up against David Oyelowo’s face, and we get to see everything happening there whilst other people interact the background. Was that something very conscious in the framing?
“Yeah. I genuinely believe David is one of the great actors of our time, and as you know, the truly great actors can have conversations without words in a way that us mere mortals cannot. And there's so much that is on set in that film that shouts so loudly to many of us. So were lucky enough to shoot that film in large format with big lenses that hopefully made the viewer feel that they were inside the vehicle with this poor man that was going through such unimaginable experiences. And I would say, as a photographer, I try and look for truth with my lens, and hopefully that carries over to the moving image.”
How much did his experience as a photographer influenced the films in general?
“Well, Si Bell, the DoP, is a legend, and I hope he'll still want to work with me in future. I first came across his work in Peaky Blinders, and we were finishing each other's sentences. He completely understands, compositionally, every idea, crazy or otherwise, that I had. So it was a really fluid experience working with a great DoP like him.”
I ask how he got David Oyelowo on board.
“I DM'd him on the grat like a crazy fan.” He laughs. “He never checks his DMs, but as with everything with this film, it was lightning in a bottle, serendipitous, that he thought ‘Oh God, let me just see what's in my inbox.’ And he's like, ‘Oh, it's that guy. I like his pictures.’ And the rest was history. Extraordinary. But, yeah, it was in the DMs, the genesis of getting casting the lead actor who's in every scene in this film.”
Then there’s a whole different casting process when it comes to all those small roles. How did he find the right people to fill them?
“Some of them I was just a huge fan of. Dominique Tipper from the Expanse, Nikesh Patel, and I grew up worshipping Ruth Sheen. As a joke, I said to our casting director ‘What about Ruth Sheen?’ And I just thought she wouldn't even consider us little people. But she did. If you've seen any Mike Leigh films, you will know of her. I was actually in tears when I got the email that she was going to do it. That's the thing about this industry. Real artists love the work. If a script is interesting, small or large, you'd be amazed the calibre of talent that will be up for a day of shooting or two days of shooting. And that's really what happened with this film.”
The one thing that I was really interested in, though, was the way that you've got your before scenes, which we don't want to talk about in too much detail, but you shoot those in quite a different way because we have so much more space and so much more light. So was it important to you to get a contrast and how much did you want to talk about, sort of setting the mood of the film between those two?
He nods. “A lot more wider lenses. I wanted London to be very much a character in that part. Anyone that lives in London will probably feel very familiar very quickly, and I wanted that to happen quickly so you could focus on what was coming. And we were lucky to get some incredible locations that I think represented the London that I know, many of us know, really honestly.
“It's my first time on a film as a filmmaker. Day one of shooting was the beginning of my journey. And if you were to tell me then that this would be shortlisted already and down to the last 15, with the potential of being an Oscar nominated film, I would have thought you were quite drunk. So that's my point of view. It all feels like a dream. I'm thankful to all the people I've collaborated with that we've made something that resonates with so many people.”
Is he planning to make more films now?
He smiles. “If they let me, I certainly will try.”
