From documentary to genre film: Hagen Sluyterman van Langeweyde’s eye on The Little Girl Eater

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Hagen Sluyterman van Langeweyde, a German cinematographer with a background in television, documentary and fiction, explains how two opposite crafts ended up feeding each other.

An actor underneath part of a wreck, in freezing water, with a two-minute window before he has to come out and warm up. Above him, the camera. And the film being shot was fiction, scripted, planned in advance, with everything that implies.

The Little Girl Eater, the short that won Best Thriller/Horror Short at the Golden Nugget International Film Festival and was nominated for Best Midnight Short at the Nightmares Film Festival, was shot around the ocean. That meant depending on tides, weather, available daylight and the real physical limits of the performers. The cold-water scenes left no room for debate: the actors could hold on for short stretches and then had to be pulled out.

“Even though we were shooting a scripted film, there were moments where I might be standing over an actor with the camera while he was underneath part of the wreck in freezing water, knowing that I effectively had two minutes to create the images we needed.”

There is no spending twenty minutes discussing a frame in that situation. You have to switch into another mode, and that mode is one Hagen Sluyterman van Langeweyde knows from years of international shoots on productions such as Todesrätsel mit Tsokos und Liefers, where he filmed moving through the Old City of Jerusalem and between interviews and locations in Los Angeles. You can prepare extensively, he says, but you can never fully control what is going to happen. You have to recognise a strong image immediately and capture it before the situation changes.

On a fiction set the process can be almost the reverse. A single shot gets discussed, prepared, lit, rehearsed. Lighting, blocking, lenses and camera movement are planned precisely. What interests him is the point where one turns into the other, and on this short that point arrived early.

There is a sequence in which a man is trapped beneath the wreck. For the audience to understand that he was fighting to survive, the film needed enough varied images, but the cold cut every attempt with the actor short.

“I am used to looking at a situation and very quickly asking myself: What do I already have? What image tells the audience where we are? What detail shows the physical struggle? What close-up gives me emotion? What angle will connect these images in the edit?”

Sometimes he created those shots without waiting for anyone to tell him which frame came next. Anticipating what a sequence will need is part of the craft he brought over from the documentary.

He was asked something similar when the film screened at the Nightmares Film Festival in Ohio, where there was discussion about how they had managed such a variety of images given the weather, the tides, the changing light and the limited time the actors could physically spend in the water. His answer then was essentially the one he gives now.

One detail Hagen Sluyterman van Langeweyde finds telling: both Todesrätsel and The Little Girl Eater were shot on the same camera, a RED V-Raptor. Identical tools. And yet the way he had to think behind the viewfinder had almost nothing in common from one project to the other.

When he talks about this he does not argue for one method over the other, which would be the expected move from someone who came from one side and settled on the other. He holds that fiction teaches precision and visual control, and that documentary teaches speed, anticipation and how to react when reality refuses to follow the plan. That is why he values carrying both worlds: Hagen Sluyterman van Langeweyde can build a controlled visual language for a genre film and, when the situation turns unpredictable, move immediately instead of waiting for perfect conditions.

Which is more or less what happens when the tide comes in and the actor has been under the water for ninety seconds.