Katelin Arizmendi on Bringing a New Perspective to Action With ‘Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother’

In Bassam Tariq’s Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, cinematographer Katelin Arizmendi takes on the action genre for the first time, bringing a distinctive visual sensibility to a film that moves between crime thriller, family drama and spiritual meditation. At its center is Latif (Mahershala Ali), a devout Muslim and professional assassin whose world is upended by his wife’s death and the demands of caring for their three children, in particular the search for breast milk to feed his newborn daughter.

The unusual setup gives Tariq and Arizmendi a new way, within the structure of an action film, to tell a story about masculinity, faith and fatherhood, as concerned with emotional vulnerability as it is with physical violence. Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother premiered in Toronto and was released in the U.S. via Amazon MGM Studios on Sept. 25.

Speaking with THR at the TorunCamerimage festival, Arizmendi discussed finding that visual language with Tariq, the practical challenges of shooting the film’s elaborate action sequences and the experience of being a woman cinematographer working in a still very male-dominated field.

What was your first conversation with the director about the film? Was it about the visual design, or did you start with the story?

It’s always about the story and the characters for every project. I like to at least talk about that first before I start bringing up ideas visually. I told him what I was drawn to in the script, which is that it’s a fresh take on a usually more masculine genre of action movies. It’s about something this man is striving for, which is breast milk, which has no material value to it.

But I also had a really strong connection with his daughter, who I pointed out I wanted to share as much weight as him, because she’s sort of the one who always shines a mirror back on him. And then, obviously, there’s the spiritual side of this, his spiritual struggle with his faith. I’m not a Muslim, so I was asking a little bit of questions about his faith. It started to naturally progress into some visual ideas, and then I made a visual deck that I presented, and we went through that. So first conversations are always just about my connection to the project.

When you started talking specifically about the visuals, what were the key points? Were there particular touchstones or references you were looking at?

I tend to always choose projects where there’s much more of a first-person perspective. So we knew that this story needed to be told through Latif, and that would guide how we would frame things, where the camera would be, or even whether we’d be focused on the back of his head during a scene, even if someone’s talking to him out of focus. We knew this would be a very subjective film. But progressively, it also becomes more subjective through his daughter, Fatiha [Adia]. By the end, you feel like you’re more with her during this journey.

I had never done an action movie before, so I had some ideas, and I knew what I didn’t want to do. I didn’t want to have two films: a film that felt very emotional and grounded in the visuals, and then suddenly you go to an action scene and it’s a different movie. I wanted to make sure those married visually and felt cohesive.

But you still have to shoot action in a certain way because you have to cheat some of the punches and the impact of hits and things like that. It’s tricky because I could have done every scene in one shot, like Oldboy or something, and been happy with that. But we also needed to make these action scenes feel very different, so they don’t just end up with the same visual language, and they needed to get more and more elevated, so the end really feels more epic.

We came up with different adjectives to assign to each fight. The first one is really about brutality, precision and calmness. We need to see that he’s a skillful killer. That guided how the camera was locked off and on a long lens, so it felt a little more abstract. I didn’t want to give it all away right away.

The second fight scene is the strip club, where he’s mostly thinking about his baby, Aziza. It’s Aziza, Aziza, Aziza. That fight is messy and it’s always moving. That helped guide the camera, which was constantly panning around the room, shooting through reflections on Steadicam, tracking with him. There’s a messiness to the camera work as well.

The third fight is the fight in his home, so it’s in his sacred space. There’s an awareness of his family and his kids and his wife. He feels remorseful. By thinking of those things, we knew we should be in a wide shot here. When he kills this man, we’re taking in the entire room and we see his kids’ artwork on the wall and the presence of his family around.

The last one was really about being a warrior, revenge and epic scale. We referenced samurai films a little more and wanted that to feel really epic. We tried to do as few shots as possible. We designed a couple of Steadicam shots, and then there’s also what we call the transcendental perspective. Before or after every action scene, there’s a massive high-angle, bird’s-eye shot. It alludes to this higher being that’s watching him and judging him for his actions.

You’ll see that as he goes into the room where he’s going to have that final fight scene at the mansion. We stitched together the Steadicam shot and a crane shot that goes up overhead.

We were also very aware of prayer times because there are very specific times when people pray, and I needed to be very honest about the lighting for that. Even though the apartment was on a stage, I couldn’t just decide that something would look a lot prettier with directional, low golden light coming in if it was really high noon. I had to be very honest about that.

The film has the bones of a professional assassin revenge story, but the family and religious elements are quite different in tone. How did you approach those transitions visually?

There’s a lot more intimacy and longer lenses in the family scenes, especially with the baby, and that was intentional. We wanted this real closeness with the family. But we also had to check ourselves every now and then because even within those scenes, we had to remember to let things breathe and pull out into wides.

At first, we started finding the lenses that we loved, and we found that we were on a really tight shot with a long lens, 100 millimeter. We were like, “Well, the studio is going to say something if we don’t start pulling out into these wides.”

For the fight sequences, by the end we ended up on a pretty wide lens for the Steadicam shots. But I tend to prefer shooting with every lens you have in your set and finding a purpose for it and marrying it together. I don’t really love it when you’re not playing enough or experimenting enough with different ways to move the camera or different lens choices.

I kind of already work that way, being able to marry scenes shot with really wide lenses with other scenes shot very intimately. So that flow was kind of natural to me already.

Ultimately, what grounds each scene, whether we’re shooting an action sequence or an emotional beat, is the emotion of the action sequences. As soon as we grounded it back to that, it felt much more like the same film.

The fight scene in his house, for example, we shot over about two and a half days. It was extremely fast, and we didn’t have time to get a shot that I felt was very important: a moment of breath when he falls into his kid’s room. It’s a high-angle, slow-motion shot that pulls up, and you realize he’s just destroyed his sacred space. I fought for us to get that because if it’s just this fight sequence, you start to lose that emotional connection with the characters. Keeping things like that in made it feel more cohesive.

Can you give me a technical breakdown of what you shot on, in terms of cameras and lenses?

We shot on Alexa 35 with Panavision Variel lenses and Primo zooms, with a little bit of LF (Large Format) sprinkled in for more scale and scope. I had an incredible colorist, Damien Vandercruyssen, who added film texture in post and made it look as close to film as possible.

What was it like doing your first action film? Have you developed a taste for it?

I shot second unit for Dune, so I had done action, but I wasn’t designing those sequences. My job on Dune was mostly to keep the visual language of the second unit cohesive with the first unit.

But I loved it. I love a challenge, and I love trying different genres and different kinds of scripts. I would do it again as long as I felt that, at the core of the story, the script outside of the action was something I cared about. I’ve turned down action movies that just felt like there wasn’t anything there for me to resonate with.

Do you have a personal favorite shot in the film?

I guess it would be the shot that sort of breaks reality and goes underneath into water, when his daughter is praying for him and she brings him back to life.

That shot was actually inspired by a video that our incredible production designer, Akeem McKenzie, sent me. It was of these kids who were shooting with a DSLR through water. We’d been discussing what this moment would look like visually because it needed a really epic moment. Basically, Bassam was like, “The rest of the film’s not going to work unless we can figure out something that’s so exciting for him coming back to life.”

I saw this video, and then I had the idea to start on him and make it look like we’re moving through the ground, then coming up underneath him, and it’s water. There’s significance in Islam for water. It signifies mercy, so that made sense.

I approached the art director, Shawn [D. Bronson] and asked him to come up with a rig that we could do practically because I felt we needed to see the space practically through the water. It would be very hard to do this on a blue screen, or it would feel different.

It’s a platform, and the camera can get below with a Libra head and then end up shooting through the water. The VFX made it look like the platform was still the floor.

Women cinematographers are much more visible in the industry now, including among Oscar winners. But is gender still an issue in the industry?

I would say it’s still a problem. I’ve faced a lot of misogyny, even on this movie. Even when you get the job, sometimes you have to really prove yourself. I was basically treated by somebody who needed someone to blame for us not being able to make the schedule, way before we even started shooting. It was like, “Oh, well, she normally takes two hours to get her first shot up,” because he had talked to other ADs I’d worked with. I was like: “You’re comparing it to a movie that was shot in the desert with animals, where it was the director’s first movie, and we were shooting on film.” It was just so obvious that he looked around a room full of men and said, “Oh, well, look at this young female DP, she doesn’t know what she’s doing.”

I’ve had experiences where I don’t think about it at all, and it’s not like that. And then there are times when I’m reminded, “Oh yeah, I am a woman, and there is still misogyny out there and judgment.”

But I’ve also come up in a time that’s much easier for women than it was even for DPs 10 years older than me, and I’m very grateful for that. In some ways, it’s probably helped my career more than been a hindrance. I’ve come up in a time when people are more excited about hiring a woman.

I also realize that by not wanting to talk about the fact that I’m a woman, I’m not really helping anything. I’ve stopped doing that. I’ve accepted the fact that I’m in a proud place in my career, and I have a lot of eyes on me. If I just don’t talk about the fact that I’m a woman, then I’m not helping any of the women who are aspiring to be where I am.

You need to see more women in these roles. You have to see that you can do it to be able to want to try to do it. Seeing that there are women shooting action movies may mean there will be more women who want to do it because they know it’s possible. And it doesn’t all have to look a certain way, either. You can bring a sensitivity to it.