‘Hunters’: This Marvel Comic By Neil Gaiman & Andy Kubert Informed Look Of The Amazon Series

Despite its rather groovy setting in the late 1970s, Amazon’s Hunters does not attempt to emulate the filmmaking aesthetic of its time period. Zoom lenses need not apply.

While working on the feature-length pilot episode (“In the Belly of the Whale”), director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon (American Horror Story) and cinematographer Frederick Elmes (The Jesus Rolls) decided to root the look of the Nazi-hunting historical-thriller in the world of comic books.

It was a natural extension of the vision shared by the show’s creator David Weil, who, as a kid, would compare his grandmother’s Holocaust survival stories to the grand “good vs. evil” struggle found in the pages of comics. That was key to unlocking the visual language of the entire project, whose central protagonist of Jonah Heidelbaum (Logan Lerman) works at a literal comic book shop.

“[Alfonso and I] both had this idea together ... telling the story of a would-be, young Jewish superhero in the making and to place him in New York at such a rough time as it was,” Elmes, told me during a recent phone interview. “It really had to be Jonah’s story, we had to be moved by his situation and sort of inspired by his want to be part of [the hunt for Nazis]. That seemed key to me, to help visually develop that character and make him the center.”

In the summer of 1977 (the period during which Hunters is set), New York was going bankrupt, beset by astronomical crime rates, covered in graffiti, and scared out its wits by the Son of Sam murders. For Elmes, all of these elements benefitted the origin story as he goes from being a regular Brooklyn kid, to joining a motley squad of extrajudicial Nazi hunters led by the mysterious Meyer Offerman (Al Pacino).

“It brought this whole tone to the era and to the story,” the director of photography said. “I liked very much the idea of bringing a graphic novel feel to it. To not make it naturalistic, to make it be bigger than life.”

During the preparation process, Elmes was determined “to find another way in and not relate it to film. Just relate it more to the city, to make up our own story as we went along, but not tie it to a genre or another person’s approach in any way.”

Instead, he “looked at a lot of graphic novels” and ended up finding the Marvel 1602 comic by writer Neil Gaiman, artist Andy Kubert, and colorist Richard Isanove. Originally published as an 8-issue limited series between 2003 and 2004, the book presented a sort of What If? situation by formatting classic Marvel characters in the context of 16th century England — the famous era of Queen Elizabeth and William Shakespeare.

“I liked it because of the color, it wasn’t relating to the story as much as the color and the drama in the lighting that they chose,” Elmes said. “That was inspiring to me to do what they did with color, just throw it together, clashing colors often in the same frame and to use that as a motif.”

The audacious art style of Marvel 1602 inspired Elmes “to use lighting that was, perhaps, at moments, overly dramatic to make a point. To push the limits of reality and naturalism to tell a story that was bigger.”

This also meant embracing the defining color schemes set up by production designer Curt Beech and costume designer John Dunn. For example, red came to symbolize Nazi characters as well as themes of violence and guilt.

“I layer something on top of that, which has to do, color-wise, with the color of the light I use,” Elmes continued. “And I chose colors that I thought were both complimented and clashed with what they did purposefully in order to help reflect on the drama that was unfolding in any given scene.”

Nevertheless, his commitment to the eye-popping grandeur of comic book storytelling did not blind the cinematographer to the straight-laced seriousness of depicting the Holocaust, which claimed the lives of 6 million Jews and 11 million people in total.

“It needs to be something we don’t forget,” Elmes added. “It’s certainly a fanciful take on Nazi killers in New York in the ‘70s and I tried to keep that in mind in my approach to it. But I didn’t want to betray, in any way, the underlying gravity of the material.”

When it came to the wartime flashbacks in the first episode, the plan was “to take the color away. Just to put the color in a kind of an old photograph, sepia tone,” Elmes explained. “Not at all to romanticize it or glamorize it in any way, but to keep it separate from” the ‘70s-set portions of the story.

When we think of the 1970s, we think of gaudy fashions and hairstyles — two hallmarks best exemplified by characters like Lonny Flash (Josh Radnor) and Roxy Jones (Tiffany Boone). And while neither character has much screen time in the first episode, their garish sensibilities are very much representative of what was considered fashionable and cool at the time. Elmes, however, had no desire to draw attention to the splashy nature of the period.

“I think that the hardest part is to observe it and not poke fun at it. Much of the style of the ‘70s was rather laughable when you look at it through today’s eyes,” he continued. “I think that if you make a joke about it, you really diminish the importance of even being there. The best thing to do is to just portray it as it was and observe it and let the people watching the film today decide what they think of it.”

While looking to movies and shows of the 1970s “didn’t really appeal” to Elmes in terms of inspiration for the pilot, the recognizable tactics of ‘70s filmmaking (e.g. the grainy look and stark coloring of exploitation cinema) still do get a chance to shine in small, fourth wall-breaking moments like the bat mitzvah and movie trailer sequences in Episode 2 (“The Mourner’s Kaddish”).

It should be noted that once he set up the overall look of Hunters with Episode 1, Elmes then handed off photography duties to Tim Norman (Escape at Dannemora) and William Rexer (The Tick). Gomez-Rejoin passed the directing torch to Nelson McCormick, Michael Uppendahl, Wayne Yip, Dennie Gordon, and Millicent Shelton.

“I hope that we managed to visualize David’s story in a way that references the dark comedy and the pulp fiction and graphic novel aspects of the story,” Elmes concluded. “[I hope] that David feels proud of what we’ve done.”

All 10 episodes of the show’s debut season are now streaming on Prime Video. For Weil’s beat-by-beat breakdown of the season finale, click here.