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Interview with Aneesh Chaganty and Sev Ohanian of SEARCHING

CineVue got the chance to talk with director Aneesh Chaganty and co-writer/producer Sev Ohanian about SEARCHING, AAIFF41’s Opening Night presentation. Starring John Cho and Debra Messing, SEARCHING is a hyper-modern thriller that follows a desperate father who, after his teenage daughter goes missing, breaks into her laptop to look for clues to find her.

Made by a crop of predominantly recent film school grads and young crew members, SEARCHING was picked up by SONY for $5 million just 24 hours after its screening at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the NEXT Audience Award. We got to chat with Aneesh and Sev about how they almost turned down the opportunity to make the movie, how SEARCHING could be the end game for conversations about diversity in media, and advice they would give to other young filmmakers.

Our Opening Night presentation of SEARCHING will include a Q+A with John Cho and Aneesh Chaganty, as well as a reception at Cadillac House on Wednesday, July 25. Tickets and more information are available on our website.

You can also RSVP on Facebook and watch the trailer for SEARCHING.

Left: Aneesh Chaganty | Right: Sev Ohanian

What inspired you to shoot the whole film through various digital interfaces, software, and apps?

Sev Ohanian:

Aneesh and I met at USC Film School and we’ve been partners ever since. He directs, I produce, and we write and develop together. A few years ago we made this great 2-minute short film shot entirely on the Google Glass, which completely blew up and went viral. It led to Google hiring Aneesh to write and direct their commercials for two years in NYC. In the meantime, I was in LA producing indie feature films and I had a general meeting with Timur Bekmambetov’s production company Bazelevs. They had just released UNFRIENDED, which was a movie that takes place entirely on a computer screen, and it did very good business theatrically. They were eager to make more projects like that and invited me to pitch a short film that would take place on a screen. I recruited Aneesh, and together we came up with the idea for SEARCHING… but as an eight minute short film.

Once we submitted our pitch to them, they called us into their offices to discuss. The bad news: they didn’t want to make the film we pitched. The good news: they wanted to turn our concept into a full-length feature film. The crazy news: they wanted to pay Aneesh to direct, me to produce, and both of us to write it.

Aneesh immediately said, “No thanks.”

My heart skipped and I remember kicking him under the table. It was insane that anyone would offer a first time filmmaker money to make a feature, and it was even more insane that the director would turn it down. But at the same time, I understood Aneesh’s hesitation. We both wanted to make films together that would engage audiences, and most importantly move them emotionally. We were doubtful we could achieve that with a film that took place via various digital interfaces, software and apps. Regardless, I told them we’d think about it.

A few weeks later, we both challenged ourselves to come up with an approach to the film that could work and achieve all the things we wanted. And one day we called each other at the exact same time and pitched each other the exact same opening sequence… and we knew then that we could make this film. Our opening would be one that would make audiences emotionally invested in our characters and hopefully if we did our jobs right, make them forget that what they were watching was taking place on all these devices… because they’d be sucked into the story.

So ultimately, we feel that our complete resistance to this idea in the first place is what inspired us to tackle the concept in a way that would hopefully elevate the story past the central conceit. So far it feels like audiences have responded to it… so hopefully we did a good job!

Aneesh, were there any challenges to switching over from the commercial format to the feature-length format? How did it affect the way you made a story engaging?

Aneesh Chaganty:

My experience at Google directly correlated to my time directing SEARCHING. At Google Creative Lab, my job was essentially to take a bunch of tech productseither physical or just an appand frame them as a narrative for general audiences to understand them. It was here where I learned how to make something as seemingly cold and mundane as a screen into an emotional canvas. How you could make someone cry with the flick of a cursor, or scared with the click of a button, or how you didn’t even need to see a human face to understand how someone felt. I applied all of this learning to directing SEARCHING, and for the most part, I think they work. But on the challenging side, every commercial I made was only 60 seconds long. It’s much easier to make 60 seconds told on screens go by quickly than making 90 minutes told on screens feel cinematic, engaging, and emotional to the very end. We’ll see what people think.

There were a lot of twists in the movie, were there any others that didn’t make it into the movie?

Sev Ohanian:

Honestly, no there weren’t.

The major central twists in the film were part of the story from the very beginning for us, and it was important that we avoid any twists that would happen just to have a twist. Without spoiling it here, the big twist in the film I think works so well because it makes you rethink everything you’ve seen up until that point in the movie, but at the same time it is completely in line with what the central theme of the movie is… if you think about it.

Our process of getting script feedback, and later editing feedback, is pretty neurotic. We sent the script out to 5 close friends, and then interrogated them on the phone for an hour each, asking around 100 questions about every page and whether they picked up on certain clues, etc. And we do the same thing with our test screenings. The goal was for us to make sure audiences were following along with the clues and mystery… but not following along too closely.

So rather than twists not making it into the movie, our main focus was on adjusting the prevalence of all the various clues that ultimately add up to the big reveals. We found that sometimes we could be really obvious about clues, and audiences still wouldn’t see what was right in front of them.

Not going to lie thoughat our world premiere, I was completely nervous and ignored our months of testing. Watching the film, I was suddenly concerned that we had made the clues too obvious and that everyone watching knew what the ending would be. Luckily I was completely wrong, and us being able to sneak into screenings of the film to catch the gasps and whispers of people watching the reveals has been one of the most satisfying parts of this journey for us.

Production of SEARCHING must have been a behemoth of a process. What was the workflow like in making all of it stack up as a narrative?

Sev Ohanian:

The post production was where it got really nutty. We had this bright idea to make our film look unlike any other “screen movie” that had come before it. Instead of letting the camera sit and watch the action unfold in real time before us, the idea was that SEARCHING would be no less cinematic than any other movie you could see in theaters.

The camera moves with the action, it cuts, it zooms, it shakes, it blurs, and more. And all of that was technically very difficult to pull off.

We came up with this idea to have our editors begin editing the film seven weeks before we started shooting. I was kind of inspired by the making of a cult film SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW which did something similar. The editors compiled low-res images off the internet and then we shot Aneesh playing the role of every single character, including the 16-year-old teenage girl. By the end of those 7 weeks, we had a full-length version of our movie that just happened to be really ugly.

But using that reference or pre-viz, we were able to screen the film to our entire crew to give them a peek of what we were aiming to make.

When we got into true editing, the biggest challenge for us was simply that our computers kept crashing. We were using two regular iMacs and an editing software that was not designed to do what we were asking it to do. Every time we’d ask our editors to make an edit, they’d say to come back in 20 minutes so that it could render. While filming only took 13 days, the editing and post production took well over 1 year. It was long, slow and sometimes painful work. But our core team of Aneesh, myself, Natalie Qasabian, and our two amazing editors, Will Merrick and Nick Johnson, were there for each other and we put in all the time necessary to make it happen.

By the end of it all, Aneesh got everyone a gift that was a huge framed print out of our Adobe Premiere editing timeline. It’s the only piece of art I have proudly hanging in my apartment right now. My mom thought it was an impressionistic depiction of New York’s skyline.

So many ideas about Asian Americans proliferate through the screens of popular media. What’s so interesting about SEARCHING is that it seems to elude that burden of representation to tell a story about a father who’s lost his daughter. How do you think SEARCHING fits into the ongoing conversation about diversity in media?

Aneesh Chaganty:

As far as American cinema goes, we think SEARCHING represents the end game of where our current media diversity conversation is headed. While we hope stories about race and about culture continue to be made in Hollywoodwe’ve got ideas in the pipeline we can’t wait to write or I can’t wait to directSEARCHING isn’t a movie about race or about culture. It’s a movie about a dad looking for his kid, both of whom just so happen to be Asian American. Growing up, Sev and I never saw ourselves in the stories and movies we wanted to make: the action films, the love stories, the thrillers, the mysteries. These were all movies where race and culture never played a role in the plot. So for us, the most progressive part of SEARCHING is the lack of acknowledgement about race. That it doesn’t have to be addressed or justified to have a reason to exist. This is an American film about an American family and this is what America looks like.

SEARCHING was picked up by SONY just 24 hours after its release at Sundance and there’s a kind of awe around your crew, which is composed of young phenoms and recent film school grads. How does it feel to inspire so many? Do you have any advice for other young filmmakers out there?

Sev Ohanian:

Going into our Sundance premiere, our whole team was very confident that we had made a great film. And thanks to our robust testing we were fairly confident that audiences would like it too. But we were absolutely not ready for the response we had. From the awards, to the sale, and most importantly the response from the Sundance crowds… it was beyond our wildest dreams come true. To hear that our ragtag team of close friends inspires so many people, especially with our crazy film, is a really validating feeling.

And our advice to young filmmakers who want to make a movie that will get them noticed is to try something different. Stray away from making a film that has already been made before. If you want your work to make a splash in our industry in which there is so much noise right now: create something that has never been seen before. Or take a tried-and-true idea, and flip it on its head so that it’s unrecognizable.

That has been the driving philosophy of Aneesh and myself, from our Google Glass short, to SEARCHING, and even to our next film.

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