Searching

Hello. Welcome to the Blu-Ray slash DVD

slash whatever you're watching on special commentary of Searching .

My name is Aneesh Chaganty. I'm the co-writer and director.

And I'm Sev Ohanian, co-writer and producer.

And hopefully, over the next hour and a half,

we'll tell you a little bit about how we made the movie

and clues and all that Easter egg stuff.

And... yeah.

Most importantly, we hope whoever's listening to this

has seen the movie already without the commentary.

Yeah, we're gonna be spoiling a lot here, so--

Please have seen the film.

If you haven't, switch over the normal movie right now.

It's not too late.

Also, so crazy to have these major company logos behind our movie.

Absolutely. We made this with like five people.

So, this is kind of like a cool way

we wanted to set the tone for the movie right off the bat,

'cause the first couple minutes are not really thrillery.

Yeah.

So, I love this shot because it's such a recognizable shot

that immediately becomes clear where you've seen it before.

And if you actually saw the-- This is not the actual image.

We actually recreated it to look like the XP image.

Literally my friend Lowell Meyer was on vacation,

posting pictures of a field on Instagram,

and I was like, "Dude, can I get the rights to that image?

I'll explain later."

But it worked. Everyone gets it. Right off the bat.

And a new account represents, you know, birth of Margot's digital life.

Oh.

No. Look over there. Look over there. Okay.

There's...

our cast,

the first version of Margot that we're gonna see

over the course of the next four minutes, of five versions of Margot.

-Or four versions of Margot. -Mm-hmm.

So, for us, the big kind of thinking going into this movie

was, you know, no one goes into this movie with like,

"Oh, it takes place in a computer screen. It's gonna be super cinematic."

And for us, from day one, we knew that even as writers and filmmakers,

we were going into it the same way.

So, we knew we had to like beat the concept right off the bat

and kind of show an audience our full potential of what we could do

and almost show in a way every card in our hand,

every trick that we can use, um, in a few minutes

to make, basically, people forget

that what they were watching was on a computer screen.

Absolutely. We wanted to make them realize right off the bat

this is gonna focus on characters,

and more than anything, the emotional journey is going to be key.

Mm-hmm.

We call this sequence " Up meets a Google commercial."

Um...

And it basically is Up meets a Google commercial.

Yeah.

In a lot of ways, this sequence was the reason

we actually chose to take on the project.

We both kind of came up with the idea at the same time.

We pitched it to each other.

We were like, "Great, let's do this. Let's make this movie."

Researching exactly which version of every app to use--

Because every single app, the way it looks right now,

is exactly what it looked like

at the day that the sequence in the film is taking place.

And the Internet research history that we kind of had to do for this

-was like insane. -Mm-hmm.

Like-- Look at that "How to Search" option under eBay.

-That would never exist today. -Yep.

- Faster, faster. - Smile!

That's my voice...

- I mean, what's amazing is... -... of parent number one.

... we shot all of this in basically one or two days

in the same location.

We just kept finding new corners to make the most of it.

Yeah, and then switching out Margots.

This was a fun kind of way to figure out how to convey this information.

"Low platelet count" was like the key words that we figured,

"Okay, let's go with that."

And Sara, who is-- Sara Sohn, who plays the mom,

who is literally in this movie for like the first seven minutes of it,

just has such a massive, lasting impact on it.

She's so amazing.

Next Margot.

You know, little preview of Abby here.

-We're gonna get to meet later also. -Yeah.

And this joke, made by committee--

me, Sev, Natalie, Will Merrick--

Yeah.

We came up with 14 versions of that.

Yeah, it was amazing.

I love this photo for how blurry that is.

That's what Facebook looked like then.

A little foreshadowing of Robbie...

- Robbie! -... Abolt down there.

Vick's kid.

-That's Vyvy Tran's face. -Yep, our makeup artist.

We couldn't use the Exorcist image.

- Of course. -

And some of this footage is actually from the actual actresses' lives.

And some of it is what you shot with them

when we were shooting something else.

You're like, "Quickly, we gotta go shoot other stuff."

I love that last shot of Pam right there.

Yeah, lot of energy.

Little Fins game foreshadowing, piano foreshadowing.

Video log 6.7.

I think we can, I think we can, I think we...

This was great. I remember when we were testing the film,

this was when people just realized it's going south.

Yeah.

This is one of-- There's a few sequences, you know, I feel like--

as a director, as anyone, you always critique,

and you can never see the fault in--

Some sequences sometimes, like my first short film,

and then, this sequence in particular, it's just like, I don't know.

I think it's like... perfect. I don't--

There's so much of this that I love.

Even watching it back, it's hard to not feel emotional.

So, when we first shot this movie, the theme music that we had was different

than the final theme version we ended.

So, Margot was playing...

uh...

Margot was playing the theme music of an early version,

and we kind of matched it to the new version.

These were all Sara's actual pictures.

It is kind of funny that the family's still using Windows XP in 2015,

but, you know, nostalgia. It works.

Of course, we got the "home of the Catfish" in the back.

I was just like, "Yo." I called my friend Isaac,

who is the best Photoshopper I know.

"Make that sign say 'Evercreek High School.'"

Which is a mix of Silver Creek and Evergreen high schools

in San Jose, California, which is where I grew up.

In the neighborhood I grew up in, too.

The little still image on the bottom right

is the still of my first short film that I ever made.

I mean, in fact, pretty much every YouTube clip in the back

-is a still from all of our films. -Yep.

There's a soldering video that's a hint to our next movie.

Correct.

Hey, Dad.

Hey, sweetheart. How's it going?

- The Merricam video. -Mm-hmm.

That little picture in the bottom right is me and Natalie

-at a random-- -In Colombia.

Yeah, we all were on a trip together.

- I took that photo. -You did.

We basically picked photos where the rights

-would be super easy to get. -

I think that photo of the pills

is something we had Natalie take pictures of.

We're like, "We just need some pills."

I'm sorry, Dad. It won't happen again.

Okay. Where are you, by the way?

I think Michelle does such a good job in--

Michelle La, who plays Margot, she does a great job of...

establishing this relationship with her father

that seems okay on the surface,

but if you're really paying attention, you can see there's distance.

She's also acting holding an iPhone that's like

plugged to a bunch of wires.

One hand is holding the wires, and the other hand is holding the phone.

Um-- And there's a whole crew of people just pulling this wire next to an iPhone.

Really weird setup.

... took today.

This was literally the first day of shooting, I think.

Mm-hmm.

One of the things I love about this film is

if you pause or if you pay attention,

all these little text conversations on the left side of the screen,

they completely represent all these various subplots

that we have throughout the entire film.

Oh, yeah. Pay attention to Hannah Couch right now...

- Oh, that's the best one. -... on the left side.

Right now, she's asking David, uh,

she's telling David that she had a good time at drinks recently

and if he would be down to grab another.

We'll be tracking Hannah's storyline throughout the film.

So, that's where she is now.

This is the one shot of our movie that we shot overseas, in Moscow?

Yeah, because of this scene, we have a Russian unit in the credits.

- That one shot. -It's so badass.

Oh, yeah, a Russian unit?

-That we never-- - This is really fun.

We see that massive foreshadowing of the trapped hiker.

This is Will Merrick's high school teacher, I think,

or camping teacher, someone that he knew.

It was so cool.

And for a second, you saw

something about NASA advising about electromagnetic storms.

That might come up again.

I love that first shot. We wanted to immediately establish

why would Peter even be FaceTiming instead of a phone call,

and that just tells you everything.

Uh, yo, what am I looking at?

So much of this movie is just like...

figuring out why somebody,

in addition to pulling the narrative for it,

but why somebody would be using the tech at any given moment.