Bay Area-raised filmmaker tells story with digital tools.
Filmmaker with Silicon Valley roots uses tech tools to tell story in debut feature
During the six-minute opening montage of Aneesh Chaganty’s inventive new film “Searching” (opening Aug. 24) — a hypercontemporary thriller that takes place entirely on computer and smartphone screens — we see 15 years of highs and lows in the lives of a San Jose family unfurl in very 21st century fashion.
Through the portal of an initially blank Windows desktop screen, proud father David Kim, played by John Cho (“Harold & Kumar,” “Star Trek”), types, searches and scrolls his way through YouTube videos, email threads and calendar reminders on the family PC. It’s the contemporary analog of flipping through a well-thumbed scrapbook. In just minutes, his teenage daughter Margot (Michelle La) grows up — from first piano recital to first day of high school — and his wife, Pam (Sara Sohn), is diagnosed with and succumbs to lymphoma. The entire Kim family’s backstory comes rapidly to poignant life through nothing more than keystrokes and a hesitantly human flashing cursor.
“What I love is that there’s no part of that opening sequence that’s forced or unfamiliar to people,” said director and cowriter Chaganty, 27, over coffee at an Embarcadero hotel the morning after the film’s SFFilm screening at the Castro. “It’s a nostalgic trip back to the beginning of when we all first started living our lives on screens, and it was key to unlocking how we were going to tell this high-concept story without it feeling like a gimmick. We wanted audiences to become emotionally invested in these characters, and the goal was always that by the end you don’t feel like you’re watching a movie on a computer screen.”
Once the film’s central mystery starts to unfold — 16-year-old Margot goes missing, leaving texts and FaceTime calls from her father unanswered — David uses every digital tool at his fingertips to retrace her virtual footprints and find her. He hires a local police detective (played by Debra Messing) and digs deeper
“Searching” (PG-13) opens on Aug. 24 in Bay Area theaters.
into Margot’s online connections, asking himself the question every parent of a screen-immersed adolescent must at some point: “Do I really know her?”
Chaganty calls his debut feature, which won the Audience Award at Sundance and was co-written with his University of Southern California film school friend Sev Ohanian (who co-produced Ryan Coogler’s “Fruitvale Station”), “a classic thriller told in an unconventional way. It’s classic because a dad is looking for his daughter. Unconventional? He does most of his searching on her laptop.”
Chaganty’s ability to successfully, and efficiently, tell a digital story that still tugs on people’s heartstrings won’t surprise anyone who remembers his 2014 viral sensation “Seeds.”
The sentimental, career-launching 2½-minute short was shot for $2,000 entirely on Google Glass (at a moment when the search giant “was trying to prove Glass was a filmmaking tool,” says Chaganty). Told through fast-cutting visuals, without dialogue, “Seeds” followed Chaganty on a multi-continent journey with a mysterious manila envelope to deliver life-changing news to his mother in Hyderabad, India (where his parents met before emigrating in the 1980s to San Jose, where Chaganty grew up).
“Seeds” went online “May 11, 2014 — the weekend my life changed,” said Chaganty.
The short had more than 2 million views in its first two days online. “I was in Time and interviewed by Bloomberg. I was getting Facebook messages all day, and I just sat there hitting refresh on my phone,” Chaganty said. He recalled the “strange sensation of having your own thing go viral, which you always hear about.
“And then Google reached out about a really cool program,” Chaganty said. He was asked to join the prestigious Google Five, a select group of talented young people who spend two years at the Google Creative Lab in New York developing, writing and directing Google commercials.
“I learned so much at Google that helped me as a filmmaker,” said Chaganty, who now lives in Los Angeles. “I had two bosses there, Jesse Juriga and Josh Rosen, who made two of my favorite commercials of all time.” “Parisian Love,” which ran during the 2010 Super Bowl, was the first ad told through Google searches.
“They taught me what love can look like with the click of a button, how something as simple as a blinking bar or cursor can pack emotion.”
The Russian producer of “Searching,” Timur Bekmambetov, describes this “vocabulary of screen life” as filmmaking’s essential and inevitable next wave. “How can filmmakers not tell the stories of our virtual lives when that is how we’re living so much of the time, and how we’re rewriting the rules of family, friendship, love, even death?”
Prior to “Searching,” Bekmambetov’s production company Bazelevs had already released six films that play out entirely on screens, including “Profile” and the supernatural horror movie “Unfriended,” which takes place on Skype.
Chaganty sees “Searching” as taking the screen-shooting trend in a more “cinematic” and “expressive” direction. He set the film in Silicon Valley. “All the interfaces we’re dealing with that become plot lines, the apps and social networks, they all originated within a 20-mile radius of where this story is set,” Chaganty said. It’s where he first fell in love with both technology and moviemaking. (His parents are “serial entrepreneurs” whose current company, AppEnsure, has a logo cameo in “Searching” as Cho’s employer.)
Interviewed the same week Mark Zuckerberg testified to Congress about Facebook’s privacy safeguards, Chaganty said he knows “Searching” will make people think about the downside of our dependence on Big Tech and screens driving families apart.
“But they shouldn’t assume this is another anti-technology rant. I feel like technology is almost always represented in a negative light. Whether on “Black Mirror” or on a Facebook PSA, it’s always doomsday news about how addicted we are to our phones and to social media. That’s valid. Technology does have the ability to alienate us and make us less emotional, but it also has the potential to help us fall in love, connect and communicate with each other. I wanted to show that, too.”