The star of the new thriller Searching, along with the film’s writers and director, talk about making a movie that takes place only on computer and phone screens.
The movie Searching is a classic thriller made in the vein of Hitchcock, but told in a decidedly contemporary way. Starring John Cho, it follows a father trying to find his missing daughter. What makes the film inventive is that the it’s told mainly on Cho’s missing daughter’s laptop screen.
CNET’s review of Searching calls it «edge-of-the-seat tense and enormously funny.» The indie film already took home two prizes from this year’s Sundance film festival: the Audience Award, and the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize, for an outstanding feature about science or technology.
Cho visited CNET last week, along with co-writer and director Aneesh Chaganty and co-writer Sev Ohanian. We discussed the insane undertaking of making a movie that takes place solely on screens and how Chaganty convinced Cho to star in it after he initially turned the role down.
Searching opens in limited release Friday. Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation.
Q: How would you describe Searching to people who haven’t seen it yet? Chaganty: Searching is a very classic thriller told in a very unconventional way. The classic part is that it’s about a dad whose daughter goes missing and he tries to find her. The very unconventional part is that the majority of the film takes place on his daughter’s laptop screen that he breaks into to look for clues to find her. When I say the majority, the rest of it takes place on other computers, and laptops and tech devices. It’s all told on screens we use every day to communicate.
John, how did you get involved with this film? Cho: It was sent to me the traditional way, through my agents, and my first impression was that I really loved the story [but] I was very suspicious of telling it via screens, and on that basis ended up saying no. In retrospect, I like to say, I wonder if it was because Aneesh and I spoke via a device, through the telephone, instead of meeting face-to-face. He came back at me, and we eventually sat down. And it was then that I was convinced that it was going to be a movie, not a YouTube video. He explained that his intentions were in the storytelling and also — I just sort of developed a crush Aneesh…
Chaganty: Thick!
On the record.
Cho: …and decided, there’s a path to doing this movie. And if anyone could do it I felt, at the end of the meeting, it was him.
Sev how would you describe it as a co-writer?
Ohanian: How would I describe John’s crush on Aneesh?
Cho: Severe.
Ohanian: It’s first and foremost a thriller. It’s a regular film. It has all the ups and downs and twists and turns and, as you mention, the emotion that you get with any film. We just happened to make it in a really crazy, unconventional way. To be honest with you, Aneesh and I are writing partners, and he directs, and I produce. When we first had the opportunity to make this film, we also said no. Actually, it seems to be a pattern. We pitched it as a short film and the company, who also produced Unfriended, asked if we could make it into a feature. And for the same exact reason as John, I think, we were hesitant. And it wasn’t until we came up with this opening montage — for those of you that saw it — it was an opportunity for us to use this crazy conceit, but tell a really grounded, human, and most of all emotional story in it. We called that opening montage if Pixar’s Up meets a Google commercial montage.
This is your first feature. You have a background in short films, but how do you leap from doing shorts to an indie film? Maybe another way of asking that is, how did you get to Sundance and win?
Chaganty: Before I was making this film, I was at Google in New York City. I was writing, developing and directing commercials. It was there I really learned how to emote on computer screens. My bosses had made some of the best Google commercials — actually commercials, period. There was one called Parisian Love about a kid who goes to Paris and meets the love of his life, and it’s just told through searches on Google. There’s another one that was just on Gmail about a dad writing letters to his kid, called Dear Sophie. It follows the growth of his kid. I remember thinking, «Wow, these are such unconventional ways of telling the story, but the story itself is so universal and something we can all relate to.»
This whole project [Searching] came together after Sev met with this company and they wanted to make movie on a computer screen. He was like, «Hey! My boy works at Google. You should meet with him too.» It felt like this movie was a seamless next step. Although at no point did we ever feel like this was a home run.
Ohanian: What’s funny, is I remember when we got the call about Sundance. It’s a filmmaker’s dream come true. They normally call the director, right? And I’ve be lucky to have a couple of movies in Sundance and it was always the director who would call me and give me the best news of my life. Aneesh was traveling.
Chaganty: Yeah, I was on the jet way from India to Bali.
Ohanian: He was trying to find himself.
Chaganty: I was trying to flush my brain actually of every screen that I had seen for the last two years.
Ohanian: We had strategically planned this out. We were like, «Aneesh, you should change your voicemail message to be like, ‘Hey, I’m out of the country, blah, blah. If you’re Sundance leave a message I’m checking.'» I happened to be at lunch with my producing partner Natalie, our editors and everyone else on the film because we were doing a technical test of the movie a month before in case we got into Sundance. And I got the call from Sundance to my phone. I acted really chill, «Oh cool yeah, we’d love to come. Sure, cool. Thanks.» Then as we hung-up, we started going crazy in this restaurant. We’re like, «Holy shit, Aneesh doesn’t know.» And we called Aneesh and he’s like, «Hey man, I don’t have good service. I’m about to take off on this flight.» [to Anessh} And we told you the news right as you guys are taking off, right?
Chaganty: I turn off my data because my international data plan sucks. So I basically had to time it every 20 minutes to check if I got any messages. And in the 20 minutes, I missed the call from Sundance, and I was like damn!
Ohanian: But I’ll tell you one thing. Sundance tells us the most important thing is you cannot tell anybody your movie’s in Sundance, because they’re gonna announce it 2 or 3 weeks from then. So we told Aneesh, just don’t tell anybody. [to Aneesh} And you were trapped in a plane with how many people?
Chaganty: Well, I was trapped on the jetway and everybody knew that something major had just happened in my life. But I don’t think they knew if it was positive or negative cause my reaction was just like, «Oh. My. God.» So hopefully one day they’ll piece it together, but I doubt it.
John, the voiceover in the Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle trailer describes you as «that Asian guy from American Pie.» ut then last night, I watched Searching, a story about a father searching for his daughter and losing his family who just happens to be Asian American. What are your thoughts on how your career has changed the definition from being «that Asian guy» to now doing leads in movies like this and Columbus ?
Cho: It’s certainly been an interesting journey. For me, this movie is a bit of the future right now. And what I mean by that is the race and ethnicity and culture of the family — and it is a whole family that’s represented in this movie — that those things are specific and germane to who the characters are. And yet, it also doesn’t matter. I’ve been saying for a while that I used to take pride in the fact that I would be cast in white roles, and that was a point of pride because I had resisted what they had written for me… for Asian men. This is an example of the end game which is to get to a place where the character is written on the page Asian, but it’s also not a point in the plot. This is in some ways, a culmination of that journey and of that auspicious start.
How does a movie like Crazy Rich Asians fit into that future and continue to move things forward? Cho: What I’ve been reading kind of in the milieu of the Crazy Rich Asians’ press, and I wholly support this idea, that no one film should have to carry the banner for a culture. It’s absurd because we are diverse. We’re deep, and I think it’s insane for… I mean, that’s the trap of representation is to have to say this person, this story represents all of us. I think, where we all want to go to is moving towards a plurality. And only then can it represent us. Because no one story, no one person, no one narrative, and no one culture can represent us, and really representation starts with being absolutely specific. And when you foist the yolk of representation on any one project or person, you’re going to have to be general. And that is not authentic. It is false and it will not work. IMO.
Going back to the conceit of the film. The screens add this beautiful tension at moments. You wait for that start screen, or to see the lava screensaver, just to release that tension. How was this like to make? Because it’s a great story, but I imagine making this was unusual. Cho: Can I say something? I’m just going to pay these guys a compliment. I think for many years now, storytellers in my business have been struggling with how to dramatize what’s happening in our culture, which is that more and more human beings are having exchanges through technological devices… I think the traditional way has been to film a person typing. And shoot from behind their back. And if you recall Meg Ryan sort of mouthing her instant messages out loud while she typed. It’s been false. We haven’t gotten it right. It [Searching] was the first thing that I read that offered a solution to that problem as a storyteller… which was to go inside the device. And it was quite thrilling. When I saw it one of my impressions was that I was shocked at how much it made sense. We are on seventh and eighth generation of devices and we have nostalgia for devices. And so we have a shared history. And I think it’s the first year that we could have made this film because our collective understanding and history with these devices has arrived.
Ohanian: You mentioned the movie is tense. And part of what makes it tense, for those that saw it, is as you’re watching you’re just waiting for things to happen on the screen. I think that also reflects how we felt making the movie, in post-production specifically. Aneesh mentioned we were working on two computers. Probably the computers you guys use to write articles are stronger than the computers we used to edit. And we all became really religious during the making of this film. We became followers of the «Rainbow God». [to the audience] You guys know the spinning «Rainbow God»? Every time we’d be editing, it would pop up and we’d start praying, «Please, don’t delete everything we just did for the last three hours.» And usually it did. It was crazy, because we were trying to come up with a path that hadn’t really existed before.
Chaganty: Yeah, and speaking of a path that didn’t exist, the first thing that we did with this film… So basically, for those of you guys who don’t know how exactly we shot it, in the film there’s all of the footage that is on a computer screen. There’s the Skype camera. Or there’s YouTube videos. There’s news footage. There’s every website… basically your computer. And there’s the way that we’re seeing it… which is our additional camera that we’re adding to all of that. So, basically, to make this movie, and this was Sev’s idea… 7 weeks before we even shot a frame of the movie after we had written the script. The first group that we hired weren’t the actors or anybody who comes on set… they were the editors who traditionally work after the film is shot.
