Also starring Debra Messing, Joseph Lee, Michelle La, and Sara Sohn
The official trailer for John Cho’s latest film Searching has just been released.
John Cho’s latest film Searching has just released its first official trailer. In the film, Cho plays young father David Kim who searches for his missing daughter. Kim enlists the help of a detective played by Debra Messing, but realises he is ultimately left to his own devices.
Going through his daughter’s Facebook, emails and text messages, Kim gradually discovers that his daughter was involved in a secret life he was unaware of.
Directed by Aneesh Chaganty, Searching is told entirely through computer and smartphone screens, in a similar fashion to 2014’s Unfriended.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Cho said the film delves into the problem parents face with their children using internet devices.
“I think a perpetual question for parents is, “What are my children doing?”,” Cho said. “I think the scary new wrinkle for parents is that we used to think that if we kept them safe, if we kept them out of the woods and told them not to talk to strangers, they would be okay.”
“The problem now with computers is that the woods are now in the house and the stranger has access to your child’s bedroom and furthermore, you don’t know where the woods are because you don’t know how to get there, and you have no idea how the strangers talk to your child, so you don’t know the language of the computer as well as your kid does,” he continued.
Cho revealed that acting with just a computer screen was quite a challenge for him. “There were some technical difficulties in sense that it was extreme close-ups the whole movie … but that’s kind of a small problem compared to the big problem of never looking into a human being’s face,” he said.
“I’ve acted on green screen before but I’ve never done a movie where I didn’t talk to people face to face, and that is very frustrating and difficult, because you can always rely on the fact that if it feels good talking to somebody, you don’t have to worry about how it came off typically, the performance is between two people.”
“But acting in a vacuum was very disorientating, I just didn’t have anything to grab onto. I felt more dependent on my director than ever before, I just had to trust that he got it — I was very unsure of my performance the whole movie.”
However, Cho said rather unconventional filmmaking style worked well in delivering the script.“There’s a lot of great twists and turns but what I actually liked about the script when I read it was, in light of how un-traditionally we were going to shoot it, how much of a classic whodunit it was,” he said.
“There’s a version of the movie where I’m going around to her friends with a picture in my wallet of my daughter, but that’s not how things are done today and so it’s been updated and now it’s emails and FaceTime calls and web searches, but structurally, the film feels familiar but it looks unfamiliar.”
Searching will hit cinemas on 3 August 2018 and also stars Joseph Lee, Michelle La, and Sara Sohn