Gadgetory

authorities are asking anyone with information please called a hotline for 911 update me whenever you learn something did she mention anything unusual going on you guys are friends I know she has friends right she keeps to herself a lot how would you guys describe this film to people haven't seen it okay uh so um basically the way we like to describe it is that searching is a very very very classic thriller told in a very very unconventional way the classic part about it is that it's about a dad played by this guy whose daughter goes missing and he tries to find her and the very unconventional part about it is that the majority of the film takes place on his daughter's laptop screen as he breaks into her computer 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 so it's all told on the screens we use every day to communicate yeah and I think one a small neat moment at the beginning was just how emotional like deleting a calendar event can be and how they like elicit a like Pixar up like reaction from the crowd last night now how did John how did you get involved in this film it was sent to me the traditional way can I do that can I do the summation of the movie but in a different voice yeah okay it's about this Harold right Harold is his dad and then Harold's daughter goes missing right and then he's like gotta find her on the computer nice it's in luckily maybe there is a freak show at some point so he came to be the traditional way through my agents and I my first impression was that I really loved this the story the genre I wanted to do I was very suspicious of telling it via screens and on that basis ended up saying no you know in retrospect I like to say I wonder if it was because Aneesh and I spoke by a device through the telephone instead of meeting face-to-face and 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 a movie not a YouTube video you know and he explained what he and what his intentions were in the storytelling and also I just sort of developed a crush on an ish and decide on the record and decided we I think there's a path to doing this movie and if anyone could do it I felt at the end of the meeting that it was him and said how would you describe as a co-writer man how would I describe John's crush on an itch or like describing a street here I mean no I think the way in each describes it is exactly how we always talked about it it is first and foremost it's a thriller it's a regular film it has all the ups and downs and twists and turns and as you mentioned like the emotion that you get with any film we just happen to make it in a really crazy unconventional way to be honest with you like when it you know a nation our 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 they you know we depict it as a short film and the company who had also produced unfriended it was like can you guys make that into a feature and for the same exact reason as John I think we were hesitant and it wasn't until we kind of came up with this opening montage for those of you guys who saw it it was it was an opportunity for us to like use this crazy conceit but tell a really grounded human and most of all emotional story in it we kind of call that opening montage like a Pixar's up meets Google commercial montage that's really good and I think it's also because you come this year for your first feature film you have a background in short films and so I'm asking this for a friend a friend who's intelligent handsome maybe a tech writer who also does short films but how do you leap from doing shorts into an indie film and specifically this one maybe nobody asking that how did you get to Sundance and win carefully in over a long period of time no it's a so basically before I had was was making this film I was at Google in New York City at the Google Creative Lab and I was sort of writing and developing and directing commercials which was a gig that I had just kind of found my way and to thank God but you know it was there where I really learned how to sort of a moat on computer screens and you know my bosses had made some of the best Google commercials I you know actual commercials period you know there was one if you guys remember like on the Super Bowl a few years ago 2005 it was one called Parisian love where it's all told on a Google search bar and it's about a kid who goes to Paris and meets the love of his life and it's just told to the searches on Google and then there's another one that was on just on Gmail about a dad writing letters to his kid culty or Sophie and it kind of follows the growth of this kid and I remember thinking like wow these are such unconventional ways of telling this story but the story itself is so universal and something that we can all relate to and so really it was this whole project kind of came together after seven met with this company that wanted to make a movie on a computer screen and so I was like hey my boy works at Google you should meet with him too and so you know it really felt like this movie was sort of like a very very kind of seamless next step in it although at no point did we ever feel like this was a home run you know this was like III quit my job at Google to make this movie and we made this movie with like five people on a very very small editing room with touka my Mac computers that were crashing like every two hours and we would lose like 15 to 20 progress like and we were kind of going from 8 a.m. to 2 a.m. every single day for the court almost two years and you know if this movie had failed if this movie fails but if it had failed you know no one would have batted an eye because like no one believed in this movie from the beginning so to have that you know we just kind of took a crazy leap of faith and sort of trusted that we all had done enough at that point to just figure out how to do something absolutely new and it somehow we applied to Sundance got in and then like 12 hours after our premiere became a worldwide distribution deal so it was funny I remember when we got the call about Sundance if you guys would like to hear about that cuz it's like a filmmakers dream come true they normally call the director right and I've been lucky to have a couple movies and son and it's always a director would call me and give me like the best news of my life and each was I think traveling yeah I was I was I was on the jet way from India to Bali and was trying to find himself I'm sort of flush my brain actually every screen that I had seen for the last and we we had like strategically planned this out we're like a nice you should change your voicemail message to be like hey I'm out of the country blah blah blah if you're Sundance leave a message I'm checking so we did all the steps and then literally like we I happen to be at lunch with like my cruising partner Natalie our editors and everyone else on the film cuz we were like doing a technical test of the movie like a month before in case we got into Sundance and I got the call from Sundance to my phone and I was like Emma look like it and like it was like yeah I'm acting like really chill out cool yeah like we'd love to come sure cool Thanks and then we hung up we just sort of going crazy in this restaurant were like holy shit like Aneesh doesn't know so we like called Aneesh and like he's like hey man like I don't have a good service I'm about to take off on this flight and we told you the news right as you guys are taking off right I turned off my like data because it's like my international data plan sucks so I basically had to time it every 20 minutes to check my like if I got any messages in in the 20 minutes I missed the call from Sundance and I was like damn but I'll tell you one thing Sundance tells us the most important thing is like you cannot tell anybody your movies in Sundance cuz they're gonna announce it you know two or three weeks from then so we told the Nisha like just don't tell anybody and you were trapped in a plane with how many people I was trapped or the jetway and everybody knew that something major had bit that just happened in my life but I don't think they knew he was positive or negative because my reaction was just like oh my god you know so hopefully one day they'll piece it together but I doubt it which is many of you online like what's going I was like okay well I wondered - okay so John I rewatched the hair of an Kumar Go to White Castle trailer and in know no word trailer and the the voiceover in it for the original trailer describes you as that Asian guy from American Pie now watching the film last night I was struck by we were just basically watching a story about a father searching for his daughter and losing his family who just happens to be Asian American and I'm wondering what are your thoughts as an actor and a performer of how like your career has changed that definition of being like that asian guy - now you're doing these leads and like movies like this in Columbus it's certainly an interesting journey you know 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 they're germane to who the characters are and yet it also doesn't matter and I think and I've been saying that for a while I used to take pride in my in the fact that I would be cast in white roles that that was a point of pride because I had resisted what they had written for me well for Asian men and but this is to me where this is an example of the end game which is to get to a place where the character was written on the page Asian but it also is not a point in the plot and so this is I in some ways a culmination of that journey and I of the auspicious start I wonder like to follow that like as we see other movies coming out right now another Asian movie out very it's in the title crazy rich Asians I'm wondering like what does that feature to look like continuing to move forward what I I guess you know some of the what I've been reading the kind of in the Millia of Turan agents press is and and I wholly support the I that this idea that no one film should have to carry the 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 and I think where we want to go to is moving towards plurality and and and only then can it represent us because no one story no one person known one narrative no one culture can represent us and and really representation starts with being absolutely specific and you know when you voiced the the yoke of representation on any one project or person you're gonna have to be general and that is not authentic it is false and it will not work I am oh so going back to the conceit of the film again so the unusualness of the screens I think added like this beautiful like kind of like tension within moments that you waited for that start screen to happen in David's bedroom and deceive the the lava whatever that is a lava screensaver just to release that tension sometimes how is this like to make because it's a great story but I imagine making this seems really unusual I'm just thinking of all the details on the screen the shots how you're acting I say something like I don't know if everyone knows it's it's I'm just gonna pay these guys a compliment which is that we know when I first saw the movie I texted him and said this is contributing to the vocabulary of cinema which is incredibly difficult to do and I think for many years now storytellers in my business have been struggling with how to dramatize what's happening in in our culture which is that we more and more human beings or having exchanges through technological devices scenes that would have happened face to face now we are if if we film them sometimes face to face we're not being authentic because people are texting those those exchanges people are emailing those exchanges they're having those exchanges on facebook or FaceTime and so how do you dramatize that and I think the traditional way has been to film a person typing and and shoot from behind their back and if you recall you know like meg Ryan sort of mouthing her her instant messages out loud while she's typing and it has it's been false we haven't gotten it right and it 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 you know one of my impressions was that I was shocked at how much it made sense you know we are on 7th and 8th 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 you know because our collective understanding and history with these devices has arrived I mean I'll talk a bit about you you know you mentioned the movie is tense and like part of what makes a tense for those that saw it is as you're watching you know you're just waiting for things to happen on the screen I think that also kind of reflects how we felt making the movie and post-production specifically like an itch mentioned we were working on two computers probably like the computers you guys used to write articles are stronger than computers we ended up using to edit and we all became really religious during the making of this film we started we like we became like followers of the rainbow god you guys know the spinning Rainbow God like every time we'd be editing like it would pop up and we just are praying like please like like don't like don't delete everything we just did for the last three hours and it usually did so it was there was kind of like it was it was crazy because we were trying to like come up with a path that hadn't really existed before yeah and speaking of a path that didn't exist one oh the first thing that we did with this film so basically for those of you guys who don't know like how exactly we shot it you know in the film there's all of the footage that is on a computer screen there's a Skype camera or that there's like YouTube videos there's there's news footage there's every website just basically your computer and then there's the way that we're seeing it which is our additional camera that we're adding to all of that so basically in order to make this movie and this was idea seven weeks before we even shot a frame of the movie after we had written the script the first people we hired weren't the actors or anybody who comes on set they were the editors who traditionally work after the film is shot so in this case they came seven weeks before and they just basically opened up these two computers that would be their home for the next two years and basically I started screen capturing the internet and and taking the screen message as photos of text messages and taking a bunch of photos of me and basically what we ended up with in it after the course of seven weeks was an hour and 40 minute cut of the entire film starring me playing every single role like the dad the brother the mother the all of our friends just talking to my specially to daughter as well yeah my best performance but you know and and this was honestly to teach us and teach ourselves how to make the movie but on a very practical level John when he's on set like you're looking at his face the entire time shot on a GoPro so every single tiny eye motion is extremely exaggerated so he needs to know basically where every where the cursor is at every single point where every pop-up window is happening where every webpage is popping up where every like text messages popping up so everything has to be matched perfectly and he needs to know everything that he's always doing so we needed to like make the movie first so we could make the movie so we could take that footage and put it back into the movie that we had made first and then continue to make the movie again got it yeah got it no I'm talking about like YouTube window as a facebook praise of Pomodoro's how did you get like do you need to get permission to use that stuff on screen or how did that go about yeah so I mean for us one of the most important things like I think historically or one of the big kind of ideas that we wanted to do in this movie is get the internet right and I feel like no Hollywood movie or television show or anything for that matter ever does technology right like they always cut to a phone and like the text messages are massive it's just like shows you what you need to see or like you cut to a website and it's just totally made-up and they never show you logos and we were like no no for this movie to work it needs to feel like this is your computer nothing here is made up you know everything is totally real so from day one our biggest kind of like philosophy was and this is something that we backed with basically a legal team that had made unfriended which is another movie that came out before and also represented Family Guy was just basically like if we're showing these applications the way billions of people use every single day in a way that isn't lying or isn't portraying them in an overtly negative light on purpose why not use them you know and we're not doing that this movie isn't a indictment on technology it's just in a weird way showing that we live our lives on screens but a your fact that we're able to tell a story that has about a dad looking for his kid on screens yeah in fact that actually it adds like a layer of comfort to me your first watching the first few minutes you're like oh yeah I get this or like you hear the windows chime and it's like oh yeah but I think also because of that that allows you to get to know the family anthem are the windows but allows you to get to get to know the family and set the plot up so when later things happen or just like losing your mind like don't want to I don't want to see it but I want to see it kind of thing so going back a bit here with there's all these details on the screen it's like all these side details and one that popped up was like a new scroll and it said something like Hollywood producer was suspected in film as Hollywood producer prime suspect in murder of film editors so there could be so many people it could be a lot of people yeah it could be a lot of people it could it could possibly be said the press the editors are fine okay we have not seen alive I'm not seeing them guys so basically you know if this film on the script we're always talking about the plot but if you pause this movie you can always see other things so once you see this film - the majority of you guys like try and like like look at anywhere apart from the main action the second time you see them the second time you see or the first time if you want to pay attention for clues but like this every single line of text in this movie whether it's the side text messages if you open up iMessage or every single email or every single description of every finder file what date that was added the size of the file the type of the file every time every single web site it all was written by us for this movie so like every single line sort of like had to have added significance and there's a lot of clues side stories subplots everything going on so we had a lot of time for fun I mean my favorite one that a nice road was early on when you see you know David texting with his daughter one of the side taxes from a woman named Hannah who I guess he'd gone on like a harmonie date the week before and she's like hey had a great dinner would love to get a drink and then couple days into the movie she follows up no response and then like when his daughter's missing everyone knows about it she's like oh your daughter's missing maybe next weekend like so it's like like we we like we want you know the movie so tense like there's all these really fun subplots and in huge Easter eggs that no one hasn't you know people haven't caught yet so we're gonna be really excited you can use the movie together if you look to the left and right but I don't think like the first time we're trying to kind of distract you it's hard because I mean cuz going back to it like having that camera mostly centered on John's face his reactions his eyes and eyebrows tell so much I'm wondering John as you're filming this how did you link like the emotionality of it but also just the technical hurdle of kind of being between like literally being wedged between two cameras one in front of one kind of behind yeah uh I felt you know kind of a little lost or I was just struggling with my performance of the whole movie it turned out okay but uh he's great he's a phenomenal yeah but yeah this is so unlike anything I've ever done before that it was I just didn't have anything to hold on to and you know and also there were no people on set and so I was doing all of the I was performing alone and that's really unnatural I always try to avoid even blocking scenes sometimes people like blocking is like how you staged a scene and and sometimes directors like people you know that shot of the guy talking gazing out the window and ruminating to a person behind him and sometimes it directors will like that kind of staging and and I don't even like that because I want to if there's a person in the room I want to look at them and talk because it always gets it's the best way to a good performance and so not having a person on set was was strange and difficult so it just really was about being super specific like even some of those like there's cats with other characters they're not even like in like another room or in the part of the studio it sometimes there were Debra Messing was on location she was in another room and we communicated by an earpiece but that's also another weird thing for me just having an earpiece in and she was on the screen but we couldn't do normal-size because this program wouldn't allow us to expand this video of Debra Messing in this other room that's like this size I like we kept trying to open it up but it wouldn't let it to be clear we were using software that you used to set up security systems in your homes yeah there were supposed to be four cameras we only had one yeah so we have a unique thing here we have a gentleman where the first feature film an indie film you've produced several a wonderful independent film trefi Fruitvale station but John you've been in a lot of popular films like the Star Trek series and Harold and Kumar and I'm wondering what you guys think of this proposal for the Academy Awards of having a popular film genre I don't know the details of what those details are gonna be I certainly personally you know appreciate the focus on quality and I hope that that doesn't obscure the overall goal of Academy Awards which is to reward craftsmanship well what do you bet you guys isn't like getting you guys I think we went from having no shot at the Academy Awards like one so it's pretty excited about that no they haven't released any details about how it's gonna work you know what best popular film means like what is the definition of a popular film is its box office is it marketing spend like we don't know any of that so they just sort of announced it and I think it's part of a larger proposal to to kind of bring a viewership and everything which but you know I love the Oscar so I'm sure they're at it I mean I don't like to pass judgment until we have more information but I hate it like I think like I think it's like I feel like it take right now we have a point five I think I think totally about it I mean I just worry him it might it might give films that would otherwise be up for Best Picture nominations like if I'm an academy voter what I want to vote for a black panther for Best Picture if it can get most popular film like that's why I'm not a fan of it perfect Panther Award this year well you know what because you actually you worked with Ryan cooler and so uh if this had been around for say something like Fruitvale station that might be different than the fact that his first major giant film Black Panther has probably got a benefit from this no I don't know I can't speak for Ryan but again in my opinion Black Panthers should be up for Best Picture so pivoting a little bit here so it's not another series associated with you a star track and I noticed that Star Wars has been kind of doing these like b-side movies where it's kind of like off the main plot and there's like there was solo this earlier this year I'm wondering is there room for something like a Sulu movie as well same letters almost [Laughter] so really good character if solo why not Sulu yeah I'll produce yeah I mean he's on he's on like the computer the whole time right he's on the navigator what if yeah what immunised did the screen like the searching version of Star Trek where it's just all the computers I don't know that there is a day on shooting Star Trek that Chris Pine did not call me solo what did he have a retort when he did no no I answered you solo you wouldn't do like a wookie thing you know I'm not walking into that fair enough Jon this is like a really weird question sighs comment I love your over here you have like the most amazing hair and like I'm curious like do you use like pomade you use like gel is it like like egg whites like what it say I wish I had that hair like all my life whale blubber no no like artisanal though probably right yeah so as we move moving away from searching a little bit what are some products you guys are be working on next or hoping to work on next um well you know one at a time I can't really it's hard for me to multitask on two major projects but our next project right now when this has all been like a result of you know our this movie coming out of Sundance and now coming out is that people actually care about what else we want to make which is like I never thought that that's what I wanted but now that's all I want you know and and we basically got a chance to write another film that we've been developing for a long time about a year before in the editing room of search or searching and basically it's another thriller it's still about parents and kids everything that we've made so far has been about parents and kids this one's about a mom and a daughter it's very very very very very dark and twisted it'll probably the only truly dark thing that we make and it definitively does not take place on computer screens and it's called run and we're shooting that hopefully in the fall I'm doing a feature next that that hasn't been announced so I I don't think I should say anything Sulu the Star Trek sorry so the last art direction and I'm with the nation so seven I wrote run together Steph is producing it I'm directing it in the Natalie Kasabian's also produced searching is also gonna be producing that one as well yeah we actually have a shout out to searching and run that we can probably talk about so in in the movie run our next movie that's not on screens at one point a character like desperately goes to a computer and tries to look online for information about something but the Internet's disconnected and that's it so like regular cameras so you've been like oh you're doing a family sticking with a kind of the family genre with the idea of like a father looking for his daughter I'm wondering or any of you guys fathers Here I am and like how does that when you see something like searching like how does that affect the way you look at the way your children interface with the internet or with social media you know my my oldest is 10 and he's not quite there but it's tough that with what the film addresses is you know we used to tell our children be watch out for the the weirdos at the park but now all the weirdos in every Park in the world have access to your child in his or her bedroom and so you know what do you do with that I I don't know because partially because my kid is already more Internet or a computer literate than me and I know that that gap is only going to widen so I think it probably has to do with being an actual good parent but but making sure that your children feel loved and safe so that you know so that they protect themselves I don't know this whole family thing I will say like I'm gonna go back to Sundance which was forgive me but it did remind me of this and one more political point which is that you know when we premiered the movie and I it was so interesting because I we made this movie and it was wonderful to sort of have the the politics of it be absent or the the representation question largely be absent while we were making we were so sort of focused on making a working thriller but it wasn't really it didn't hit me in an emotional way until we were at Sundance and saw a family and that's what really did it for me because I've noticed that some of you are Asian I you know let me know if you agree with this but so much of Asian representation in film has been our families is you know that generational story where an Asian person is running away from their family to find love so which implies that love is excluded from your nuclear family and that culture prohibits Asian culture prohibits love or even lust you know and I always thought that that was bullshit and hated it and it was at Sundance when I saw this complete family you know the the film is premise tap on you know my character is a widower and her shadow the mother shadow is very long through the film because it's really about two people me and my daughter mourning separately for the same person in a different way and so it's a family trying to be united and it's a loving complete Asian American family and it was not until we were at Sundance and I was watching the audience watch our film that it hit me like a ton of bricks because Sundance I guess is to me the most important Film Festival in the world all right makes sense so let's give a big hand to these guys for coming out they're coming out