Michael Saye

Michael Saye is an American filmmaker and founder of Conquistadore Films, an independent production company based in Kansas City, Missouri. His approach to filmmaking blends scripted narrative with real-world environments, often relying on small crews, practical production methods, and extensive location-based research. In addition to filmmaking, Saye has worked in commercial fishing and pursued expedition travel, experiences that continue to inform the subjects and themes of his work.

Saye founded Conquistadore Films to pursue a model of filmmaking in which the act of production is itself an adventure. Built around small crews, real locations, practical methods, and firsthand experience, the company approaches productions more like expeditions than conventional film sets, with filmmaking combining storytelling, travel, research, technical problem-solving, and collective experience. Conquistadore is intended to grow cumulatively, with each production developing the skills, collaborators, infrastructure, and physical resources necessary to undertake increasingly ambitious films-from location-driven expedition stories to large-scale historical productions.

Saye is also the founder and Editor-in-Chief of New World Journal, a quarterly publication devoted to fiction, nonfiction, photography, and illustration centered on adventure, discovery, place, and serious inquiry into the human relationship with the world. He founded New World as a literary and visual counterpart to his filmmaking, bringing together writers, artists, travelers, and other contributors whose work draws upon firsthand experience, research, and encounters with unfamiliar places and ways of life.