Interview: Aneesh Chaganty on ‘Run’
Run, the latest film from Searching director Aneesh Chaganty and co-writer Sev Ohanian, was all but primed and ready for a theatrical release from Lionsgate on May 8, 2020, landing directly on Mother’s Day, the perfect release date for a film about a powerful bond between a mother and her child. The film’s trailer was well-received, amassing over 13 million views when it first debuted eight months ago. The film’s poster, a striking black-and-white shot of star Sarah Paulson contrasted by a haunting photo of breakout star Kiera Allen looking desperate and grief-stricken, managed to conjure up a bevy of buzz from critics and fans alike, who compared it to posters of some of the most iconic thrillers known today, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and North by Northwest. But then a pandemic struck and the film was quietly removed from the release schedule. After months of radio silence from everyone involved, it was finally announced that the film will be hitting Hulu on November 20, over 6 months after its planned release date. With incredible performances from Paulson and Allen, as well as thrilling set-pieces that will leave viewers breathless and firmly on the edge of their seats, Run is all but demanding to be seen with a large audience. But with a number of theaters currently closed and an audience that seems apprehensive towards going to the movies these days (the #1 films in the US box office these past few weeks haven’t been able to surpass the $4 million mark), that unfortunately was not a possibility for the studio or Chaganty, who felt like now was the perfect time to put the movie out. Thankfully, Run has proven to be still incredibly effective, even when viewed at home; the critical response has been almost unanimously positive. We talked to Chaganty last week about everything from the inspiration behind the film to its wild ending to the status of Searching 2. Here is what he had to say:
Film Updates: Hi Aneesh! How have you been holding up these past few months with everything that’s been going on?
Aneesh: Pretty good! I learned early on that I shouldn’t complain. I can’t complain about anything. We’ve still got a movie coming out. It’s all good. We’re adapting significantly and we’re in a better position than a lot of people are, fortunately. It’s just very interesting to watch the entire industry, including our movie, just sort of adapt to the new times, because obviously, we were going to come out in theaters on Mother’s Day and then COVID happened and everything had to change.
Film Updates: Can you tell me a bit about how the Hulu deal came about?
Aneesh: Originally, when we made this movie, it was a Lionsgate film that they were going to release in movie theaters and whatnot. But obviously, as the pandemic stretched on and with nobody, including myself, wanting to go to movie theaters, more and more of these massive movies had to start delaying themselves. You get James Bond, and you get Fast and Furious, you get A Quiet Place and then Top Gun just back to back to back to back to back and some of them are just too big to ever come out on streaming because they’ll fail there. They just need to make such a massive return. So when theaters do return to normal, we’re just going to get hit by this massive influx of tentpole movie after tentpole movie after tentpole movie. Ours was always a small original thriller that happens to have a studio behind it. It’s not like this is a Tom Cruise movie, you know? Obviously, we made this move for theaters. I think it would have done really well in theaters. I’ve seen it [in a theater] with a lot of people. It’s one of those movies that you talk with, talk at and gasp at, and all that stuff. But at the same time, it doesn’t make sense anymore [to hold on to it]. We then looked at the options for streaming and we’re happy to make it with Hulu, which is a platform that isn’t inundated with a thousand things [all at once]. A release from them mean something, you know? From the other flip side, with the Netflix, you get an original thing every Tuesday, every Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, you know? [But with Hulu], it’s like this is a whole new movie and it’s coming out. It’s a big deal and we’re very happy with how Hulu [are handling the release].
Film Updates: The movie has very strong Hitchcock and M. Night Shyamalan vibes to it, particularly with the direction. Can you tell us what films or filmmakers in particular were influences for the project?
Aneesh: Without a doubt, those two people right from the beginning. It was intended to be a movie that felt like those movies that I grew up watching. Like an early Shyamalan movie, or a Hitchcock movie in the way that it was shot, in the way that it feels. It was obviously a response to Searching in that it was intentionally the opposite of Searching, where Searching was complex, crazy and technical. I wanted to make something that was the opposite. Two characters, one house. A very simple story, bare-bones thriller and see if I could tell a story and prove to myself that I was a decent filmmaker. But on a stylistic standpoint, I wanted to tell a story that I would allow me to sort of emulate these filmmakers who I love so much. The entire was entirely storyboarded by hand by me, just like Shyamalan and Hitchcock did. I have like a full book of storyboards [that] we would send out to the crew, and they would study it and ask me what those frames are and how they would work. Some movies, you find the shots on the day. This one was all planned. There was no question about what shot we were doing next. We knew everything. I also wanted to emulate those filmmakers in the way that, like, their shots weren’t meant for one thing to happen; they were meant for five or six things to happen [in them], you know? I think oftentimes modern movies just cut so much. I wanted to design frames where you could have a couple things happen here and then just position the camera and just follow the action in them. That, to me, is much more exciting and involving filmmaking.
Film Updates: It’s funny that you mentioned Run being the opposite of Searching because I felt like that was also the case in terms of the themes of the movie, because they’re both about the love of a parent for a child, but Searching was about how the love of a parent can save a child while this one was about how it can destroy a child. Did you intentionally make two movies about family or was that something that happened coincidentally?
Aneesh: That’s a really good question and a good observation. Yeah, that was the intention. I think every single thing that I’ve made so far in my life, whether it’s a short film or commercial or a feature film, like Searching, has been about the relationship between a parent and a child. I think that’s obviously such a theme in the work that I make just naturally but because I wanted to make the opposite of Searching in every sense, it just felt natural that everything should tip into the other scale. It was interesting to sort of dip our toes into the dark side for one moment and ask the question that was exactly what you phrased: can you love someone so much that it ends up not being a hug but a smother? That, to us, was a really interesting question that we then posed in a very, very pulpy way.
Film Updates: So I’d like to ask about Diane. We don’t get much of a back story in the movie, although we can make some educated guesses based on her scars that we see and some emails that we managed to also catch a glimpse of. Were there any drafts of the screenplay that included more of her backstory in the movie?
Aneesh: Not only were there more drafts of the screenplay, there are scenes fully edited [that we ended up deleting]. I think there’s a part in the film that I think critics are going to very fairly critique the movie for. The “exposition box”, where, in the film, Chloe kind of stumbles on this box and just learns about her life. There were a couple of things in there [that involved Diane’s backstory] and it just sucks [that we had to remove it] because it was my favorite shot in the entire shoot. It showed Chloe crawling and the camera goes above this box and then [the camera] rotates as she opens the box. It was supposed to complete its full rotation and the first article was about the mom’s back story, explaining the scars and all that stuff, but it just felt like we didn’t need it. This was a movie that was really, over the course of the edit, revealing itself to be a movie that, for better or for worse, just didn’t do much talking. There were so many scenes that we cut. If you watch the trailer, you can see all these sort of emotional sequences [but] Lionsgate wanted us early on to make a bare-bones thriller, albeit one that still works. So we took out all of these extraneous elements; if it wasn’t immediately important to tell, it’s gone.
Film Updates: A sequel to Searching was announced last year and I think you said it was going to focus on entirely different characters. Is that still in the cards? Is that still happening?
Aneesh: We’re making it right now. It’s totally new characters. It takes place within the “Searching Universe”, obviously, if you can call it that. I can’t believe Searching now has a universe! (laughs) But it takes place in that universe but with new characters. It’s still a thriller that takes place on screens and whatnot. I’m not directing it. I’m not writing it. I’m producing it. Sev [Ohanian] and I wrote the story for it and Natalie [Qasabian] is producing it along with us. But with Searching, you have to “make the movie” before you make the movie, you know? So right now, we’re in that first part where we’re basically screen grabbing the internet and putting together sequences with our friends and stuff like that. The directing team is off doing it and they’re all putting it together, but it looks pretty good. I’m very excited about it. It’ll be a new story. And yeah, it’s crazy how much of a following that that movie got, you know? We were just doing something on our own but it’s really affirming to hear how much people like that movie.
Film Updates: I want to talk about the Hannah cameo in Run. Can you tell me how that came about?
Aneesh: There’s a moment in the story where Chloe clicks on a University of Washington video and one of us – I don’t even remember who – just said it at one point, was just like, ‘That should be Hannah!’ and we were like, ‘Yeah, that makes perfect sense!’ We wanted the films to take place in the same universe. And that scene is like we are telling you that Searching and Run take place in the same world. The only problem with that is – Does that mean there was an alien invasion in the world of Run too? (laughs)
WARNING: THE BELOW QUESTION CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE ENDING OF RUN
Film Updates: Did you have any other endings in mind or was this always the one conclusion?
Aneesh: It was always going to be that. There were a couple of tiny pathways we found to that ending that have changed over the course of the story. For example, Chloe, in the end of the original script, was walking. The more that I talked to disability studies professors and the more I learned about ableism, the more I realized what we were unintentionally doing in the script was suggesting that her [character] arc was complete because she could walk [now] rather than her arc being complete because of her freedom. Her character didn’t need that. So we decided that she was [still going to be] in a wheelchair at the end of the movie. So that was one of the changes we made, but we knew that it would always end with that ending. I think the best thrillers are the ones that harken back to the beginning. The last frame always reminds you of the movie you just watched. Misery does it. Gone Girl does it with its cut at the end. All of these movies give you that one little reminder of, like, even though the ending is “happy”, this is [the nature of] what you just watched. I also really wanted to portray the nature of parental relationships, like passing these things on [from mother to daughter]. One of the things in the back story that got cut is the relationship that Diane has with her own mom. We wanted to talk about how parents pass things down [to their children] and how all become our parents, in a way, for better or for worse.
Run will be released on Hulu on November 20.