Run, the second feature film from California-based Aneesh Chaganty, director of the 2018 sleeper hit Searching, recently released on Netflix. The Sarah Paulson-Kiera Allen mother-daughter story has been described as “gleefully hammy” (Entertainment Weekly) and a “nifty little thriller” (The New York Times).
Thirty-year-old Chaganty, whose parents are originally from Andhra Pradesh, studied filmmaking at the University of Southern California. He worked at Google’s Creative Lab before writing and directing Searching, a screen-life film about a father trying to find his missing daughter by examining and investigating her digital footprint. Chaganty is currently producing Searching 2. In a video interview from the set of the movie in Los Angeles, Chaganty spoke about the filmmakers he has paid homage to in Run, and his future projects, including working with an Indian lead actor.
Where did you get the idea for the complicated and dark mother-daughter relationship in Run?
The idea for Run ultimately came from reading a true life story about Dee Dee Blanchard, who displayed a tendency for Munchausen syndrome toward her daughter. This was such a cool idea – here’s a story about a family, but in a negative light. But, before we landed on the idea for Run, we had a list of parameters regarding what my next movie would need to accomplish.
After Searching, I didn't want to be put in a box, and I feared that if I made anything in the tech world, I would be put in a box.
So from the beginning, I wanted to do something that was the opposite of Searching as my follow-up film. Searching is super complex, and I wanted to make a film that was simple. Searching is full of characters, and I wanted to make a movie with just two characters. Searching uses the visual gimmick of telling a story on a computer screen, I wanted to use one camera. Instead of setting it in a 1,000 locations and something as vast as the web, Run is set in one house. Both are stories of a parent that will do anything for their kid, but one is too far and one is the right amount. Searching was an $800,000 budget movie. I didn't want to go directly from that to a big studio film. I wanted to go small, and prove to myself that I knew how to make a movie.
There is clearly a hat-tip to both Alfred Hitchcock and M Night Shyamalan.
Totally. In many ways, Run was really an exercise in emulation, more than an exercise in expression. Searching, however, was a little bit of an experiment with some expression. As a filmmaker, I think I am learning to calibrate where I want my films to land. Run is a lot like the films I grew up watching and loving, which were the films of Shyamalan and Hitchcock. Besides the actual frames, another thing I stole from these filmmakers is that they would storyboard every single frame of the movie before they shot. I did that too. I had every single frame of the movie in a storyboard. Those filmmakers make their films feel very much on purpose. Everything feels so intentional. I wanted Run to have that feeling. I love it whenever someone says it reminds them of Hitchcock or Shyamalan. I take that as a compliment because that was the goal. Now I feel like the next film will feel a lot more like me. And that's the recalibration.
What was the challenge of casting the part of Chloe, played by Kiera Allen, who uses a wheelchair for mobility in real life too?
It was very important to us to cast someone who really uses a wheelchair. But it was an uphill battle. From the studio point of view, they wanted to cast the actor best suited to the role, and from an economic standpoint, why would you not cast someone who has been in a film that grossed a $100 million before? Our strategy was the same as in Searching — cast someone who is a draw with the audience, and then slide the other unknown card into the deck. We met Kiera before Sarah Paulson, but she was cast only after Sarah came on board. Because now, we had a face for the poster, and we want people to see the movie. After that, we made the argument for Kiera.
Being a human in 2020/21, you can feel how important these decisions are — to not cast an able bodied person acting as disabled.
These decisions can, and do have a ripple effect. The movie is not a perfect vehicle for pushing the ball forward, but it has pushed it a little bit.
Kiera was very much a part of the process of trying to get it right. I was very aware that here I am, a brown guy writing a story about two white women, one of whom is a teenager who uses a wheelchair, so there is a lot I don’t know here. I told her that if I am doing something that feels false or if she has a better idea, to tell us because we want to make this movie good. So one of things she did was she changed the room. She also wrote a 14-page biography which the costume and art departments used.
The climax is a very twisted, genre ending. It brings up questions of nature and nurture. What was the thought there?
Unlike Hulu, which released Run in the US, Netflix didn't release the deleted scenes. I would say the final movie is two scenes away from being what I really wanted it to be. Frankly, that's a battle you learn when you make a movie at a studio, and until I am Christopher Nolan, Jordan Peele or M Night Shyamalan — where I get to decide how we are doing things — there will be a debate.
This movie is 89 minutes so a couple of scenes make a big difference. Those deleted scenes talk about the family, the bad seed that has been going through the women of this family. Every single person has been abused, and has, in turn, abused the next of kin. Nature or nurture is the constant question we were asking and by the end of the film we wanted to acknowledge that it was because the mom was treated this way, that she acted upon the next person. Therefore, there was no way Chloe would not have been affected by the actions of her mom. But at the same time, we wanted to create our version of a happy ending in that she is not sending that pain down to her daughter, but she's sending it up to her mom. Right now, the ending seems like a ‘gotcha’ revenge moment in a genre way, which we knew was going to be divisive.
What is your involvement with Searching 2, and what are you likely to direct next?
I am not directing Searching 2, but Sev Ohanian, my co-writer on everything, and I have written the story and are producing it along with our producing partner Natalie Qasabian. It’s a totally new story, with new characters, a new mystery and plot. It just takes place in the same world as the first one. Hopefully, this is the beginning of something we take into many instalments. I hope to direct a TV show that’s with HBO Max, which is currently being written by another writer. However, my passion project is a heist movie. When I thought of it some years ago it was too big – in terms of scale and thematically. It’s set against the backdrop of the American immigration industry. It's a really personal, massive puzzle piece of a movie which I hope to shoot next year. It will also be the first movie I make with an Indian lead. This is the one we are building up to, and I am very excited.
Run is streaming in India on Netflix.
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