How ‘The Sympathizer’ Crafted a World That Is Both Fascinating and Repulsive
The Captain (Hoa Xuande) is our guide through both Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel and the HBO limited series version of “The Sympathizer,” but he is also a mystery — most especially to himself. A communist spy who is pulled irresistibly towards the height of Western decadence (Los Angeles in the late ’70s) and depravity (a film set in the late ’70s), the goal of the show is to mirror Nguyen’s prose and give the viewer a visceral sense of The Captain’s alienation.
While the flashiest choice “The Sympathizer” makes is Robert Downey Jr. playing all the significant Western figures who attempt to influence The Captain, there are also smaller, subtler tortures within the show’s imagery itself. The cinematography (by “Decision To Leave” maestro Kim Ji-yong and “The Hurt Locker” veteran Barry Ackroyd) continually puts pressure on The Captain through a sense of heat, sickly light, and eyes just beyond the frame. Production designers Donald Graham Burt and Alec Hammond complement that with adjustments to the scale of the show’s locations and sets, making The Captain feel ill-at-ease in the safest-seeming, most banal of places. Costume designer Danny Glicker wanted to get across something of The Captain’s unease, his inability to belong even though he can perfectly blend in, through the clothing choices, too.
“There was a fun tension I was playing with where sometimes his collars would be slightly big, but his pants would still be really classic, sort of a ‘60s pants, in that idea of the ‘60s collegiate preppy college student who was kind of Steve McQueen, Ryan O’Neal,” Glicker told IndieWire. “I really loved the idea of taking this person who was a real, potentially dangerous character and saying, ‘How could I make him appear to be the safest?’”
In the videos below, watch how cinematographer Kim Ji-yong, production designer Alec Hammond, and Glicker all found ways to plant a sense of danger into the world around The Captain, no matter what side of the globe he finds himself on.
The Cinematography of ‘The Sympathizer’
Cinematographer Kim Ji-yong can relate to The Captain in that he also went to college in the U.S. and experienced being a stranger in a strange city. A sense of unfamiliarity is conveyed in Kim’s lighting and how he tries to run as far away from the soft, golden glow of Los Angeles, especially Los Angeles of the ’70s.
Kim creates an L.A. with harsh, bright light and eerily open space, but one that still has the same intensity that The Captain brings to his clandestine work both for and against The General (Toan Le). Kim accomplishes this through a synthesis The Captain himself might be proud of, first with a modern, sharp view of the characters that often goes wide enough to let the characters hang themselves by their own rope, then by bringing a old-school ’70s touches to camera movement and placement.
“I tried to bring some human aspect [to the cinematography] — mostly being on dolly with a zoom lens, not even with motorized zoom control. I just did it with my hands. In that way, I could bring something from the ’70s,” Kim told IndieWire. “The California sun is much stronger. It’s pretty aggressive — maybe that’s how the refugees feel about that city: it’s really strong, but it’s not as welcoming. So I wanted to put that not-so-welcoming feeling in the show.”
In the video above, watch how Kim creates frames that deny the Captain any sense of welcome, no matter where he goes, until he’s able to create it for himself.
The Production Design of ‘The Sympathizer’
For obvious reasons, there are not a ton of visual references for North Vietnamese re-education camps. So, while a lot of work certainly went into recreating one such camp and transforming Thailand into a version of Saigon just before its fall, production designer Alec Hammond was equally guided by the dualities and trinities that echo throughout Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel. Whether it was designing a burger sign design showed different emotions at different points in time or whether it was consciously creating structural similarities between The Captain’s L.A. apartment and the prison camp from which he writes his account, Hammond and fellow production designer Donald Graham Burt wanted to build environments that put pressure on The Captain from all sides of his experience, upbringing, and beliefs.
Sometimes, that pressure came from big architectural choices, but sometimes, it could come out of amplifying the stickiness of the air — specifically in the halls of the secret police headquarters in Saigon. “There’s a lot of colored gel and colored glass on windows,” Hammond told IndieWire. “So when we went into the secret police headquarters, we added green gel on all the windows going around actually looked out over a canal. And so you had this more saturated light that felt steamy. We were able to give some physical things that Ji-Yong was able to jump off of in his lighting.”
In the video above, watch how Hammond, along with Burt, created atmosphere and a sense of scale in both American and Vietnamese environments in which The Captain can’t quite feel at home.
The Costume Design of ‘The Sympathizer’
The Captain’s secret weapon as a spy may be his ability to pretend to be what arrogant Westerners expect him to be. But there are all sorts of ways in which The Captain tells on himself, and costume designer Danny Glicker was interested in giving those cues to the audience, if not to all the many versions of Robert Downey Jr. that he needed to help differentiate.
Glicker creates the sense of someone ill at ease with all the roles he’s playing by showing how The Captain presents himself in contrast to the characters around him, both American and Vietnamese. The fact that The Captain tries so hard to appear harmless is part of what makes the moments where he lashes out that much more impactful.
“Costumes really exist in conversation with one another. I think that one costume only reveals its truth when it’s placed in contrast with another costume, another environment — you see everything only in context,” Glicker said. “And so The Captain was entering this world where the men were sort of playing this game of overt toxic masculinity when his visual weapon was playing the game of refined genteel academic masculinity, right? And so I love the idea that you had these worlds colliding.”
In the video above, watch how costume designer Danny Glicker used contrasts in order to bring out the contradictions of The Captain’s character, and the hypocrisy of all the people that his beliefs have trapped him with.
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