How to Utilize Twist and Turns for Emotional Beats: A Conversation with ‘Missing’ Filmmakers Sev Ohanian, Aneesh Chaganty, Will Merrick, Nick Johnson, and Natalie Qasabian
‘Missing’ filmmakers recently spoke with Script about breaking story, utilizing various screens and technology in service of emotional beats, what inspired them to become filmmakers, and more.
From the minds behind Searching comes Missing, a thrilling roller-coaster mystery that makes you wonder how well you know those closest to you. When her mother (Nia Long) disappears while on vacation in Colombia with her new boyfriend, June’s (Storm Reid) search for answers is hindered by international red tape. Stuck thousands of miles away in Los Angeles, June creatively uses all the latest technology at her fingertips to try and find her before it’s too late. Before long, her digital sleuthing leads her down a twisting rabbit hole of secrets and lies.
There are things that go bump in the night. There are scratching noises at your window. There are unexpected inversion twists on a roller coaster that make you feel like your brain just sunk into the pit of your stomach. And then there is the full emotional out-of-body experience watching Missing.
It's very rare when I feel each beating thump as my heart increasingly pounds, or find myself biting my nails on the literal edge of my seat, and feeling completely overwhelmed and anxious by what has played out on screen. And all of those things played out all at once during the wild twists and turns brilliantly conjured by producers Sev Ohanian and Aneesh Chaganty, along with co-writers and co-directors Will Merrick and Nick Johnson and produced by the incomparable Natalie Qasabian.
I had the great pleasure of speaking with this group of filmmakers about diving into this new chapter, breaking the story, utilizing various screens and technology in service of emotional beats, what inspired them to become filmmakers, and more. After speaking with this group, you can tell the tight and incredibly respectful bond they've formed over the years as a creative team and we can only hope we'll be seeing more from them.
We do go into spoiler territory, so readers you've been warned.
This interview has been edited for content and clarity.
Sadie Dean: Did you guys all know that there was going to be more of this kind of storytelling thematically from this team specifically?
Sev Ohanian: I could say this Sadie, we knew for sure that there wouldn't be any more storytelling coming from this team. I mean, really at the time, we really felt like we had kind of given everything we had to that film Searching, both story wise, as well as technically. And it was actually Sony who reached out with the idea to make a sequel. We were a little bit hesitant to begin with, and we ultimately realized, Aneesh, Natalie, and myself that we could do this if we approached it from an entirely new angle and try to tell a different story set in the same world. I think we had some early revelations of if you make it about a child pursuing a parent and really lean into the more technical aspect of it.
The real challenge for us was figuring out who would direct it, because I think Aneesh can speak to the fact that, I don't think any director ever wants to make more than one of these. And lucky for us, we did not have to look too far, because Will and Nick, who obviously had edited Searching, they were the ideal candidates. And it was really down to whether they would say yes or no.
Sadie: And luckily, they said yes. Will and Nick, was it easier for you guys to map out this mystery timeline while incorporating the various screens from laptops to hidden security cameras, but also incorporating character development with your editor’s mind? Or was there a lot of more groundwork for laying that out narratively?
Will Merrick: It was a lot easier because of that. I mean, we joke that editing Searching rewired our brains to think in this computer screen way. [laughs] So, I mean, from a level as basic as just the geography of what's happening on the screen all the way up to just how do you show character and emotion, which is what really matters. I would say, editing this before, it would have been hard to make this movie without having done that.
Nick Johnson: Yeah, absolutely, from an editing perspective. I think it helped us certainly from a screenwriting perspective, in that we knew what sort of beats play on FaceTime, what sort of beats could be entirely just screen beats, but what sorts of scenes, ‘Oh, maybe we don't need to shoot this,’ because we had gone through the whole process on the first movie of trying to work on a scene and then being like, ‘What's a more elegant version of this? It’s actually just telling this with a simple kind of shot across the screen and a mouse move.’ We were starting at a place that was a bit further along, in development in terms of how we tell an emotional story on a screen, I would say, because we had edited the first movie.
Sadie: And then there’s the incredible Storm Reid carrying the whole movie. Her facial expressions, reactions in the moment - she's brilliant in this movie.
Will: She was fantastic. She had to learn a lot of dialogue for a given shoot day and bring really emotional performances for many minutes of screen time, all in one shoot day sometimes.
Sadie: I'm excited to see what she does 10 years from now.
Nick: She's a bonafide movie star. And I think this movie shows that she can really carry a movie for mass audiences. I think we're gonna look back on this as something that was really a cool beginning to her career.
Sadie: Aneesh, when handing over the director gauntlet to these guys, were there any words of wisdom you shared with them coming off of Searching or were you pretty confident they could carry the vision through, because they had lived in your brain previously as editors?
Aneesh Chaganty: Yeah, there was no wisdom between the films, we all learned it together on Searching, but it was so obvious that these are the only two filmmakers who could handle this kind of storytelling. And I think if they ever had any questions they would ask, but they learned everything on Searching and just took it from there.
Nick: Yeah. Yeah. Aneesh is just being humble. Honestly, Aneesh helped us in both very practical ways. He shared his Google Docs with us from Run and Searching. So just as simple as like, how to communicate with department heads, really practical things like that, talking with actors, like how he directed John Cho on set, and to just honestly calling him up as a friend or like a therapist basically. [laughs] And just being like, ‘Dear Lord, everything's terrible. We don't know what we're doing.’ Emotional support as well as practical.
Aneesh: You could argue that I was the most important actually.
[ALL LAUGH]
Natalie Qasabian: And he was there. Sometimes directors put their names on as producers, but Aneesh actually did the work and he was there with us every day on set. It wasn't just slapping his name on it kind of a thing.
Sadie: Yeah, it's a team effort for sure.
Nick: And honestly, also, just to add, Aneesh was there on set, it was great having Aneesh, and Sev and Natalie, our whole team works really well on set together. Will and I always felt like we were at the helm and able to make our decisions, but they were always there at video village remembering all the things we were forgetting. And they'd run in and be like, ‘Hey, make sure you get this one beat that we’re totally missing,’ and they had great ideas. So, it was very collaborative.
Sadie: It’s a wonderful thing when your team is all on the same page, with a great attitude, all in service of telling a great story. With that said, Natalie, you being this super producer, what was the biggest challenge or most rewarding in making sure every creative department head was on the same page, logistically, for the sake of continuity and for the story coming from Searching over to Missing?
Natalie: Yeah, it's a great question. I think the biggest challenge on this one was the sheer volume of things like, like Sev said earlier, we kind of went into this one, I think you said, with the intention of making it bigger. And one of the ways we did that was going global and going to Columbia. But just the sheer number of assets and things that appear on screen, I think it's probably eight times the volume as you see in Searching and if you play them side by side, you really feel the difference in this one. So that was tough, because we didn't have the biggest budget, we didn't shoot for a ton of days, I think we did 20 days of principal and a couple of pickup days. So, really top-down, communication from Will and Nick and being really clear to the department heads.
And then gotta give credit to Congyu E, our co-producer who also worked as our second unit director and really just like wrangled a lot of the second unit assets. We joke that there should be a documentary about the making of the other movie within this movie. Like all the stuff, all the easter eggs and stuff that you see of was Congyu, with our stills photographer, like running off on the side, totally having a blast, because there's incredibly less pressure. But, I would say just the volume of stuff there is in this movie. It's a lot. There's voices, there's pictures, there's obviously the live-action footage - but we got it done.
Sadie: Yeah, you did. This team is a well-oiled filmmaking machine. Let’s talk about the twists and turns that are in this and how you tackled breaking the story from June's point of view and laying that groundwork. Did you know the ending with the dad was going to be this ending?
Will: That came up pretty quickly. Nick and I got an outline written by Sev and Aneesh who both wrote the first movie. And so, I think you feel a lot of like spiritual connection and in the tone and the style of the story from there. And the dad, that idea, was all there from the original outline. And yeah, so I guess we kind of always knew that was going to be the ending. And I think you see it in sort of how the movie explores Kevin, the way the movie explores relationships between men and women, I guess you could say in general, and if you look through the movie, you'll see everywhere just little ways her mom - the dad is the twist - but really what happened to June's mom is the twist.
Sev: If you want to describe the movie, you say it's about somebody desperately searching for a missing family member by using technology to find them and the movie takes place on screens. That actually describes both Searching and Missing entirely. So, for us, with the approach of the story at the very beginning was on one level, we have to kind of remix Searching, it couldn't be the same thing. So, just about every time we went left in Searching, we needed to go right, here.
As an example, in Searching, David Kim, the protagonist's sidekick is a celebrated, experienced detective with all the resources of the police department at her disposal, that's the person who's going to help them find his daughter. In Missing the sidekick is a guy who works as a TaskRabbit, who has no experience and no resources. So, on one level, the fact that Searching opens with this really beautiful opening montage with a tragic ending, with Missing, we wanted to kind of allude to the same thing, but obviously spoilers here, in a lot of ways, we kind of found meta ways to twist upon that. So, you might watch that opening of Missing and feel emotional, because you’re remembering Searching, but at the end of the movie, you find out that even that was a subversion, and not necessarily there. A lot of it was exploring and coming up with what are secrets a mother could have kept from her daughter? And what are the secrets that are going to have the highest impact emotionally for her?
Sadie: And you see all of that play out. Especially, the emotional bond that builds between June and the TaskRabbit guy Javi. I’m so curious, because of the number of twists and turns in this film, how do you know when it's enough? Or there’s too many?
Will : We're just all in with the twists and turns with this movie. [laughs] That's just kind of what the movie is.
Natalie: Yeah, it's a great question, though. I mean, one of the big things we do, this team, as a whole, is doing extensive feedback screenings. Once we have the director's cut, Sev, Aneesh, and myself went in and watched and gave notes. But then pretty quickly after that, we'll bring in an audience of trusted filmmakers, non-filmmakers, and smart friends that care about good storytelling and will really interrogate every single beat and every single twist, to your question. Have we gone too far? Is it too much? Are we spending too much time on this? Is this tracking? And I think yeah, that's where we really fine-tune things. I don't think we really eliminated any twists from the original treatment and script, which Will and Nick turned over, but we really sharpened things.
Will: We massaged some developments so that some things that may have played as twists became sort of gradual realizations that play out, sort of change the shape of each of them, I guess.
Sadie: It seems like the right amount. And then of course there’s that fun callback with her mom always saying like, ‘Hey, Siri,’ and that actually saves the day. It's a nice little button.
Aneesh: That was Will and Nick's idea. When we wrote the outline, we had heard of that idea from Will and Nick and we were like, ‘OK, let's go make an entire movie around that and work backward from ending on that idea.’
Sadie: Oh, I love that. Taking a quick step back, what inspired you all to become filmmakers?
Will: The honest answer is probably Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. [laughs] But no, really, really - I think we kind of grew up or everybody grows up when a new technology for filmmaking is emerging. And I kind of got started around the time you could first shoot with a DV cam and bring it into your computer and edit it and do special effects. And I almost started making them before I even started watching them, and then my parents were like, ‘He's not gonna stop making these movies, let's show him all the good ones.’ So, they downloaded a list of the top 100 movies and made me watch them all and the rest is history. [laughs]
Sev: For me, it was my mother really instilling a lifelong love and appreciation for storytelling. She would take me to the library and kind of forced me to get no less than 10 books and then forced me to read them. And over time it became me begging her to go and go and go, and filmmaking felt like a really good outlet to tell stories.
Natalie: My honest answer is I didn't have a ton of friends growing up. I asked for a camera one year for Christmas and got one at 10 years old and started making stuff and just like never looked back, did it in high school and --
Will: -- you didn't realize you had friends!
Natalie: [laughs] Here they are now.
Nick: I commandeered my parent's family video camera, and made movies with my cousins and friends. And then when they'd go off and do play video games and stuff, I found myself at my computer still on a pirated version of Premiere, still editing. And that's when I was like, ‘Oh, man, I just love making movies more than anything.’ [laughs] So did that from a young age. Also, I was watching Dawson's Creek at the time and Dawson went to USC and I was like, ‘I want to go to USC.’ And that's why - so Dawson.
Aneesh: Same as everyone – I’ve loved movies since I was a kid. Started making it with my home video camera, got enough compliments that made me make another one and then enough validation that made me go, ‘I'm good at this,’ and then kept trying at getting better.
Sadie: Will we be seeing more movies from this filmmaking group? Maybe something different that you haven’t tackled yet as group?
Will: We'll keep playing musical chairs and see what happens. [laughs]
Aneesh: Nat and I will be editing Searching 3. [laughs]
Will: [laughs] Now, how much did you guys learn from directing and producing Missing to help you edit?
[ALL LAUGH]
Will: I think we'll continue to work with each other and others. Sev's got a lot going on with Proximity. We're not all married to one another, [laughs] but we certainly all left this project as much as fans of each other as we went in.
Natalie: I think there's a bond here after three movies that you can't break. It's hard to replicate.
Missing was released on January 20, 2023 and is now playing in theaters.
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Sadie Dean is the Editor of Script Magazine and writes the screenwriting column, Take Two, for Writer’s Digest print magazine. She is also the co-host of the Reckless Creatives podcast. Sadie is a writer and filmmaker based in Los Angeles, and received her Master of Fine Arts in Screenwriting from The American Film Institute. She has been serving the screenwriting community for nearly a decade by providing resources, contests, consulting, events, and education for writers across the globe. Sadie is an accomplished writer herself, in which she has been optioned, written on spec, and has had her work produced. Additionally, she was a 2nd rounder in the Sundance Screenwriting Lab and has been nominated for The Humanitas Prize for a TV spec with her writing partner. Sadie has also served as a Script Supervisor on projects for WB, TBS and AwesomenessTV, as well as many independent productions. She has also produced music videos, short films and a feature documentary. Sadie is also a proud member of Women in Film.
Follow Sadie and her musings on Twitter @SadieKDean
