If you missed out on Collider’s early screening and Q&A of the Searching follow-up film Missing starring Storm Reid, no worries! Perri Nemiroff moderated the post-screening interview with directors Will Merrick and Nicholas Johnson, Reid, and producers Natalie Qasabian, Sev Ohanian, and Aneesh Chaganty, and we’ve got the full conversation for you right here.

Missing follows June’s (Reid) frantic search to track down her mother, Grace (Nia Long), when she mysteriously disappears while on vacation in Columbia with her new boyfriend. When June’s attempts to uncover clues from home are thwarted by international regulations and procedures, she opts to turn to her everyday technology and the web-based tools available to her at the click of a button. Collider’s Ross Bonaime calls Missing “clever” and adds, “[it] keeps its cards close to the chest so the audience will be guessing the whole way through.”

Before Missing hits theaters nationwide on January 20th, the team behind the film divulged behind-the-scenes information – no spoilers, of course – for Collider readers and viewers to enjoy. During the Q&A, we learned why Chaganty, Qasabian, and Ohanian opted to hand the directing reins over to Johnson and Merrick, and how the screen thriller filmmaking process has evolved since making Searching. They also walked us through what it was like choosing a title for the new film and teased Easter eggs to look out for including Ohanian’s personal favorite, the alien subplot that now runs through both Searching and Missing. The team also discussed how important test screenings are to their projects, and how any change to iOS would send them back to the editing room. Reid also talks about the new challenges Missing posed for her as an actor, what it was like operating cameras herself, and how she developed the mother-daughter relationship with Nia Long. You can check out all of this and more in the video above or you can read the full transcript down below.

PERRI NEMIROFF: I’m going to our producing trio first to get us started. Was there ever a point, Aneesh, when you considered directing the Searching follow-up yourself, and ultimately, what was it about Will and Nick that made you think, “Yes, we can hand the reins over to them?”

ANEESH CHAGANTY: I’ve known these guys since I was in college. Will Merrick edited some of my earliest work that started my career, and we’ve been working together since then. They edited Searching, they edited Run, and when you’ve seen Searching, you don’t just edit this movie, you are one of the core filmmakers of this movie. And they learned everything, it was no question. After you make a movie like this, you never want to touch computer screens again, which for me, I was like, “Never doing that again.” These guys know everything and more so we went to them easily.

Image via Screen Gems

Will and Nick, you have collaborated before. I’m sure on previous projects you’ve developed some sort of shorthand, but when you jump into a film like this where you’re also the writers and directors I imagine that shorthand has to evolve. So what is the biggest difference in that respect?

WILL MERRICK: Man, I don’t know. It’s really hard to describe the difference in what we do. Natalie, you said in one of those interviews, it’s like a left brain/right brain thing where we both do everything, but in a different way.

NICHOLAS JOHNSON: I think with Will and I, it was a very natural progression of working together. I think one of the cool things about our team, the five of us, is that it’s been such a collaborative team from Searching through Run and this that it just felt like a natural — we all have different roles, but we’re all still there, still the same five people making a movie.

It’s a really special thing to have such a large group of people who are key collaborators on a production like this. When you’re working with a team of five, how do you go about collaborating efficiently, making sure you’re all on the same page, and also giving the production your own personal insight?

NATALIE QASABIAN: The real answer? Google Docs and text chains. [Laughs]

SEV OHANIAN: The thing that I think makes this team work, and I’d like to think it does work and you guys may be the judge of that having watched the movie, is that everyone is fighting for the same thing, and that’s the movie. At all times, ego aside, what’s the best thing for this movie? And yes, sometimes it turns into very passionate debates and arguments, but at the end of the day, as long as we’re making the right movie that tells the emotion and the cinematic journey we want to take the audience on, we know that’s the right answer.

Storm, a movie like this obviously has to be shot in a very unique way. When you first sign on for the role, what are some of your biggest, burning questions in terms of what it takes to make a screen thriller like this?

STORM REID: I read the Missing script and I was totally engaged. I was at the edge of my seat the entire time. When I thought I knew what was going on, I figured out I had nothing and I knew nothing that was happening. [Laughs] I don’t think I asked the question, but repeatedly while we were in pre-production, I was just like, “How are we gonna do this? How are we gonna pull this off?” But I was so comfortable on set. They made me feel so comfortable. It was an easy process. And yes, it was challenging because I had to hold the camera and hold the computers, and it wasn’t like a film that I have ever filmed before, but I think once I got the hang of it and we got a flow, and Will and Nick, we, of course, created a bond, and we worked really well together, I think it turned out well.

Given the challenge of making a movie like this, going into it, what particular part of the process did you think was going to be the toughest thing for you and then ultimately, was that indeed the toughest or did something else catch you by surprise?

REID: I knew going in, because I had watched Searching when the opportunity came about, and I knew that it was going to be really good, but the technical aspect was gonna be challenging, and everything is shot through a computer, shot through a ring camera. It’s not traditional. So I knew that it was gonna be a challenge and it was a challenge, but like I said, once we figured it out, once we got the hang of it, once I figured out how to hold the computer correctly and the eyelines! Eyelines were a big thing! Once I figured out the eyelines, I think it was seamless.

As far as the production process goes, what is something that worked really well on Searching that you knew you had to replicate on Missing, but then also, what’s a part of that production process that you thought could be improved or need some refining and you had the opportunity to do that here?

QASABIAN: One thing we did on Searching was before we actually got to set and before we started even prepping the film, we did a whole pre-vis of the movie. So we had a rough assembly using, on Searching it was Aneesh, on this one it was Will and Nick, acting out all the roles. Basically, that gave us a roadmap. So when we got to set, we had this thing that we were able to pull up as a reference for the actors if they needed it, or for the department heads, to basically say, “This is what your portion that we’re filming today, the live-action, this is how it’s gonna fit into the full frame.” So I think that was really helpful. Not so helpful, or what could we do better? You guys have anything? We’re perfect. [Laughs]

CHAGANTY: I feel like we approached Easter eggs totally differently. With the first film, one of the things we were so excited about was how much excitement there was about all the little words in the back on Google Chrome or when you type in a search bar, all the little drop-downs. And from the beginning, we were like, “Okay, Easter eggs [are] a huge element of this movie.” Sev wrote a whole storyline on his own that is fully in the film, maybe a sequel to the alien storyline that’s in Searching, and [to Merrick and Johnson] these guys did a massive amount.

MERRICK: There are hundreds.

Sev, do you want to talk about the aliens?

OHANIAN: Who here has seen Searching? Okay! Did you guys know with the background — so Searching is about a father searching for his missing daughter. In the background of that movie, on the sides of the screen with the comments and the news articles and the tweets, there’s events happening, and that event is an alien invasion. Did anyone know this? I’m curious. So if you guys ever get a chance to re-watch this movie, which you will on January 20th in theaters everywhere, watch closely because you might find out what happened with those aliens. I’ll just say that.

I like that tease! Will and Nick, I have to go back to you because I want to follow up on the pre-vis thing. Who played who when you were acting it out for the pre-vis? What scene was the most fun?

JOHNSON: Oh, boy. I sincerely hope that never sees the light of day.

QASABIAN: I’ve already given it to Home Video.

MERRICK: I was Javi.

JOHNSON: We were cooped up in our houses at the peak of the pandemic, it’s just cabin fever, and acting out every role. Will went up on his roof to act out the Javi scene.

MERRICK: Yeah, I got a little ladder, went up on the roof.

JOHNSON: Totally unnecessary, by the way. Totally unnecessary. [Laughs]

MERRICK: You’re right, I didn’t need to do that. [Laughs]

Image via Sony

I have a serious question about doing that because it’s not often that the writers and directors get the opportunity to act out their own script.

MERRICK: The actors did not see this.

Is there anything about the script that you discovered that you changed because of having done that?

JOHNSON: Absolutely. I think the pre-vis was, in some ways, the final rewrite of the script. We were assembling the movie, watching the movie back, and realizing, “Oh, that line or that scene isn’t actually working the way we thought it was.” So it was a perfect way to refine the story and the script before we actually sent it out and embarrassed ourselves in front of actors.

How about when it comes to your editing process? I know you two developed a way to do all of this when you worked on Searching, but here you passed those reins over to Arielle [Zakowski] and Austin [Keeling]. I had read somewhere that they added to and evolved that system, so where did you guys start and how did they change it?

MERRICK: The finishing process was about the same, but the editing process got quite a bit faster because of some changes they made that are probably too technical to be worth going into. But basically, we used to have to count frames in an edit. We would say, “I’m gonna shorten this shot by four frames,” and then we would go into a whole other sequence and change that by four frames, and they managed to solve that problem so we didn’t need to do that anymore, which really helped. As well as just being great editors.

Some very good people to team up with there. How long was the script and how long did the script wind up being if you add in all of the things we see on screen in addition to the main action?

JOHNSON: I think the script itself was longer than its run time. Do you guys remember? It was like 129 pages or something.

QASABIAN: 128.

JOHNSON: It was enough to be like, “Eh, this movie might be a little long.” But when we assembled it, it played a lot faster. If we were to include all the copy and everything that we wrote in the background, it’d be like a 500-page epic.

MERRICK: That’d be a good coffee table little thing.

CHAGANTY: Encyclopedia.

And then ultimately how much footage are you in that edit room with?

MERRICK: Probably about on par or less than a normal movie would have. The footage was not that overwhelming. The graphics on the other hand, insane.

I can imagine because we get all of those details and that’s why we have alien invasion subplots in a movie like this. Storm, for you, picking up that script for the very first time, what was it like reading that? Are you fully able to picture what this movie could be, or were you given any supplemental material to help paint a clear picture for you?

REID: No, I think the script did an amazing job of painting the picture that they wanted to create, and I clearly saw their vision when I was reading it. Like I said before, I was on the edge of my seat and I was just so excited to be reading it, and all the twists and turns were really intriguing, but I try to be as intentional as possible when choosing projects, and I felt that even though this was a thriller and, yes, a movie that is made for the big screen, it has intention, it has purpose. I think Missing, at its core, is a movie about family, about love, about unconditional love, about making sacrifices, about growing, about self-discovery. There are so many things and so many themes that I think were touched on, whether they were in a preachy way or not – I don’t think the movie’s preachy at all – but whether the messages that I resonated with were preachy or not, I felt like it had a purpose. It’s not just a film that is entertaining, it’s entertaining and purposeful.

I think it does. We were talking about this earlier, I love the idea of a movie being a slice of someone’s life, but still being able to feel like they lived a full life and have a past that’s informing their present. Speaking of that, you’re working with a great script here, but what kind of backstory details or space between the lines on the page do you have to fill in for yourself that we don’t necessarily see or hear about in the film, but we can feel informing your performance and making June whole?

REID: For me with any character that I embody, I think it is trying to step into my character’s shoes and become them, and really feel how they would feel in their given circumstance. But I’m also a young human that has emotions, that has feelings, and I try not to neglect those feelings while I’m acting because I think my emotions and my feelings and my thoughts are beneficial and can inform my character. So I think it’s more so of an intersection of like, “Yes, I am June, but Storm would feel a type of way in this situation, too.” So how do you marry those two for it to be a good marriage, and it could be grounded, and it could be as beautiful as possible? So it was a little challenging because, again, it’s those technical aspects of like, “Oh, yeah, the stakes are heightened, my emotions are heightened, but you still got to look up because there’s a notification.” [Laughs] That’s a little challenging. But I think with this role, it wasn’t hard to embody June at all.

What is the director-actor collaboration like on a shoot like this? How are you two giving notes, and what is it like receiving technical notes while focusing on the emotional beats of the performance?

REID: These guys are so fun to work with, like the biggest balls of energy. I think it was fun. I mean, I didn’t have any problem working with them.

JOHNSON: Good directing, to me, is good casting, and when you cast an actress like Storm, it makes our jobs much easier. You don’t have to communicate as much. It’s just little tweaks. Sometimes it came down to just technical things, like, “That was amazing, but just remember to look up there next time.”

What are you seeing? Is your cast looking at a close-to-finished pre-vis or some sort of substitute visual reference on set?

MERRICK: Once we had the pre-vis done, we did consult it, but we didn’t really need to look at it that much. We mainly just needed to know what side of the screen is she on. So there wasn’t really too much of that from a technical perspective. Really, a lot of our job was just to see the movie in our head, and then just make sure that you were able to bring, Storm, the authenticity of it, and just make sure that whatever you were doing was gonna fit into that picture.

Image via Sony Pictures Releasing

Storm, when you’re looking at a device, what are you seeing?

REID: Oh, I was seeing a lot of nothing. [Laughs] The computer that we used to shoot most of the scenes was a blank screen with boxes at each corner, or folders in each corner so I would know where to look. Or sometimes I’d get fortunate and it would be a real FaceTime call, and that was really cool. But most of the time, it was just really working with these guys and the team to let me know if I was doing it right, [and] what I needed to do more in a technical aspect because I didn’t really get to share scenes with a lot of people.

If Storm feels the urge to do something differently on set, is there freedom for you to change where things are positioned on a screen in post-production?

JOHNSON: Yeah, certainly there was freedom. And then occasionally, just by chance, if she happened to look over here, we’d be like, “Oh, that’s perfect. We’ll use that little bit.” I think making a movie like this gives you a lot of latitude in post to change it up a little bit. But for the most part, going into it, we knew exactly where she was clicking at that point, so it was really a matter of checking that list and being like, “We got it, move on.”

MERRICK: Usually in those instances it’s not like, “My character would look over here,” it’s like, “Why is my character even at a computer right now?” [Laughs]

REID: I know! Like, “Why is she right here?”

I did have a question about a specific visual technique you guys use, the punch-in shots. How do you do something like that to up the tension, but without ruining the illusion that we’re always looking at someone’s computer screen?

MERRICK: I would argue that when you look at a screen, what that feels like to you is a punch-in. You’re not ever taking in the totality of your whole screen. All we’re doing is up-resing it a little bit.

I want to back up a little bit and go back to the very beginning of the story. I’ll give this one [to] Aneesh and Sev because you guys have story-by credits here. What was idea number one? Was it strictly, “We need to make another Searching?” Was it a specific character? What was the thing that started it all?

OHANIAN: The truth is, when we released Searching a couple of years back, we would often get asked, “Will you guys ever make a sequel?” We always knew for sure …

CHAGANTY: No.

OHANIAN: … no, we will never make a sequel. So the honest-to-god answer is, I got a call from Sony a couple of months after the movie came out, and they were like, “You guys ready? Let’s do Searching 2. John Cho goes after someone else who’s missing.” We were like, “Maybe?” But, I was hesitant. I think for us, we really were proud of that film, and the whole team here had done such a great job on that. I remember I hung up the phone and I happened to be working right next to a good friend of mine who’s a director himself, a guy named Ryan Coogler who directed Black Panther.

This is a 100% true story. I remember I hung up the phone and he saw me laughing and he was like, “What was that?” I was like, “Dude, Sony wants to make a sequel to Searching.” And his reaction was like, “Dude! Hell, yeah!” And I was like, “I don’t know, man. I’ve got to talk to Nat. I got to talk to Aneesh.” I was like, “Maybe we don’t do this.” I remember he looked at me, right in my eyes, and he was like, “If anyone can make a sequel to that film, it’s you guys.” So he was like, “Y’all have to do it.” I called these guys, they had the same initial reaction as me. Then we were like, “Who’s gonna direct it?” And then we realized we have the greatest directors right there. Then we started ideating on what could the sequel be?

CHAGANTY: Yeah, we went through a lot of ideas, but we went back to the first one. Sev came and we pitched this early version of Missing, which was essentially a reversal of Searching. But we explored a thousand different ideas like [a] serial killer, [and] just all these random approaches and realized, “Wow, just simply switching the protagonist keeps what’s the heart of this movie, but it allows a totally different perspective of the internet.” By just making the character a teenager, we’ve now changed the tone and the style of the film.

These guys have brought such — in the editing room early on [we were] basically like, “If Searching was Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, what we’re trying to do, or what these guys are trying to do, is do Into the Spider-Verse.” Make it fresher, fun, more active, more thrilling. So yeah, that was a good idea, and then we landed back on that, and then we just kept developing it and developing it and developing it, and a few months later we turned it into the studio, and these guys got started writing.

OHANIAN: But the real story is, we just wanted a free vacation to Colombia, so we just wrote the Cartagena part. It was a really lovely time. I’m not gonna lie.

CHAGANTY: That’s a great lesson. Anytime we write something, it’ll start “Exterior: London” and then we’ll go there. [Laughs]

So that’s where it all started. Jumping way ahead with the writing process, Will and Nick, do you remember the last story idea you came up with that really felt like it brought everything together?

OHANIAN: When Aneesh and I were writing the story, we wrote ourselves into a corner, and then she has this big realization, this big eureka moment, that was those guys. And I remember when they pitched that to us, we were like [mind blown gesture].

MERRICK: I forgot that, thank you.

CHAGANTY: It’s so good. It was like, “Wow, let’s make a whole movie around that.”

OHANIAN: Exactly.

I’m obsessed with detailed production design. I loved looking around the frame at what’s on the computer screen, but I was also busy looking at the background of June’s room. Storm, is there anything that’s back there that you think really informs who she is that you hope people take notice of?

REID: Oh, wow. I think so. I think June is just so cool as a character. [Laughs] I think she’s just really cool. And her room was really cool, and just the different gadgets and the colors. I think her room really informed her personality. And then even the t-shirt that she wears, everything is intentional, everything is sentimental, everything is down to the small details. I felt it on set, and I appreciated all the details that the team put in.

MERRICK: There was a massive war over what color purple to make the walls of your room. You didn’t know that til now.

REID: Oh, yeah. They were battling about it.

I’m curious now! Why was the color so important, character or visually?

MERRICK: A little bit of both. We were just like, “Do we want to flood everything out on her room with too dark of a purple?” We landed on a good one.

JOHNSON: But I think it goes hand in hand with the fact that we wanted this to feel more youthful, and so we wanted to inject some color into it. Like my room, I have all these flux bulbs in my room. That’s how I live. So we wanted to make something that felt real to how teenagers live these days.

MERRICK: Thanks for bringing that one back around.

Image via Sony

We’ve already talked about the alien invasion subplot Easter egg here. We don’t want to spoil anything, but is there anything else that you hid in this movie that you are especially proud of that you hope people find when they watch this movie over and over and over?

MERRICK: Oh, yeah, but you’ll never find it.

Can you give us a hint on where to look?

QASABIAN: There’s one that, I think credit goes to Sev for this one, but in Searching, David Kim, John Cho’s character, if you guys are paying attention on the sidelines, he’s been dating this woman named Hannah Couch. At the beginning of the movie, he’s kind of answering her, but by the end, he’s obviously looking for his daughter so his priorities have shifted, and he’s kind of ghosting her. Hannah Couch may, or may not, be going after someone in this film, as well.

OHANIAN: Pay attention in the dating montage.

JOHNSON: There are a lot of really great Searching references as well. One of my favorites that Will added, I think it was you, was David Kim’s company, AppEnsure. There’s a little newsletter in there, and at some point, a character in Searching asks if the integrations report in the Bellington System is complete. The email, in fact, confirms that the Bellington System is fully integrated.

QASABIAN: We edit these movies and work on them for so long, we have to find ways to entertain us.

CHAGANTY: Yes, it’s pure cabin fever.

Here’s the most important question I could possibly ask. Who does Quinn the cat belong to?

QASABIAN: That’s Arielle Zakowski, our editor’s, cat, or her sister’s cat.

MERRICK: On the phone, it’s her sister’s cat.

QASABIAN: I think it’s her sister’s cat.

MERRICK: And then the cat that appears in the movie was actually a variety of cats.

JOHNSON: Many, many cats.

MERRICK: Selected based on their mood at the moment.

REID: Those cats were catty.

Another thing that I always find interesting to talk about is selecting the title for your movie. You could have gone Searching 2, you could have used a word that has the same meaning as missing. Why this particular title for this film?

OHANIAN: Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery was taken.

QASABIAN: We spent a ton of time on this, and one of the things we debated was like, how do we bring in the audience that’s seen Searching, but we also don’t want to alienate people that may have not seen the first film, because this does stand on its own. So there was a lot of debates of, do we do something and then A Searching Story? To Sev’s joke earlier.

CHAGANTY: Or like Cloverfield, which would do 10 Cloverfield Lane. Could we use the word Searching in a sentence?

QASABIAN: Integrate it.

CHAGANTY: Like Searching Abroad was an early idea that we threw out because the tone of those two words wasn’t right. But something like that where it sounds like its own title, but it’s actually Searching, another title. But ultimately, we ended up with Missing.

QASABIAN: We threw out a lot of ideas, and at one point we were all campaigning for a different title.

CHAGANTY: Our own ideas. It was war.

QASABIAN: We were hating on each other’s ideas.

OHANIAN: Actually, hold on, hold on. We have a real audience here.

QASABIAN: Take a poll.

OHANIAN: These mofos literally — I love Missing as a title, don’t get me wrong. But I had the greatest title on the planet.

QASABIAN: I can’t wait for this one.

MERRICK: Oh, no, dude. Don’t do it!

OHANIAN: These people had no faith. [To audience] Can you guys, once and for all, settle three years of our text debates? If the title of this film was just – I’m gonna spell it – S-R-C-H, SRCH?

QASABIAN: Raise your hand if you like that, at all.

JOHNSON: Crickets.

OHANIAN: Missing it is. Man, it would’ve been so youthful.

CHAGANTY: We had so many conversations that would end with, “Okay, in one hour we’re ending with a title, guys. We’re not leaving this meeting without a title.” We had that meeting week after week after week after week after week, and eventually, we’re just like, “What do we do?” When the title Missing came up, it was just like, “That makes total sense.”

MERRICK: It came from Sony. It was great.

QASABIAN: Someone pitched it in our team. I don’t think we even remember because we were like, “Eh, maybe.” And then as time went on, it just kept making it into this meeting that Aneesh is alluding to, and it just never got eliminated, so we were like, “That’s the title.”

MERRICK: I became useless pretty quickly because I could only think of titles that rhymed with Searching 2. My brain was just broken.

Image via Screen Gems

I mean this in all seriousness, do you have a thing with one-word film titles? I find them to be very effective and powerful. We have Searching, Run, and now Missing.

QASABIAN: We have a few more.

CHAGANTY: Yeah, a few more single-word titles. I guess we love them. Now it’s a thing. I feel like with all of our styles of writing, it’s just eliminating all the fat a lot of the time in what we write, and it’s so purposeful, and I feel like you can do that with one word. And we definitely all agree.

Before I toss it to the audience, for the five of you at this point, do you have a screen thriller white whale of sorts? Something that you really want to be able to do with this storytelling format that you haven’t been able to because the technology doesn’t exist, or you haven’t quite cracked it?

QASABIAN: No general idea of a story, but all the time things happen, I think just in our daily lives, and we’ll literally write it down and be like, “If we do a third one, this has to go in.” So I think we go through our lives now thinking about good screen beats because it’s been such a commitment.

OHANIAN: I got one, but we need the rights from Warner Brothers if anyone knows anyone there. Imagine, an entire movie that’s set on a computer, but not just any computer, the Bat computer. Just think about it, man! You’re watching Batman and he’s getting hacked by the Riddler, and blah, blah, blah. Yeah, maybe one day.

CHAGANTY: Nobody who works on a movie like this comes out being like, “Yeah, let’s do it again!” It’s so much work that I think there’s a hibernation required from all of us before we start being like, “Yeah, another screen thriller, let’s go do it.” These guys were up till 3:00 AM last night finishing the movie. It’s a very, very intense process. But one day, I’m sure, because the internet is always changing and the internet’s a very big place, there’ll be more stories to tell in four years when they’ve all slept.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: What’s difficult with green screen, and [do] you get camera operator credit because of how much of that you do in this film?

REID: Thank you for your question. I think this was the most challenging thing that I have ever done as an actress. And I have done green screen before, and it is hard because you’re essentially doing the same thing. You are having to imagine the unimaginable sometimes. But I think there is such a physicality that you have with green screen most times. It’s usually stunts and you’re able to move around. We were in a real confined space because we are having to fit in a screen, so I think acting with a computer was a little bit more challenging. I don’t know if I got a DP credit. Maybe I should. [Laughs] Just kidding.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: First part is, did I see a picture of Michael Tucker from Lessons from the Screenplay? And if that’s the case, I’m wondering how the whole online YouTube movie discourse has informed you as filmmakers. How does that educate you as a filmmaker?

JOHNSON: Absolutely, yeah. Love that question, and great eye. They actually came to an early cut of the movie. They gave us notes on the pre-vis, so we love them. They did a great Lessons from the Screenplay on Searching, right? We all consume that stuff, TV tropes and video essays on film. We love that stuff, so it was a fun opportunity to give those things a shout-out.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: First off, great job, everyone. You guys did great work. This is mainly for Sev. What [was] some stuff that you learned from your time as producer on other projects that you carried over into Missing?

OHANIAN: Oh, man, thank you. That’s a great question. I’ve been fortunate to produce a bunch of other movies outside of Searching and Missing. I was a producer on Judas and the Black Messiah. I was producer on Creed III, which is coming out March 3rd, but obviously watch this movie first. This comes out January 20th. I’ve been lucky enough to start working on even bigger projects, like some Marvel stuff I’m working on. I worked on Space Jam. Honestly, the thing that I’ve learned the most is somewhat of the validation, and tying it back to the previous question, it doesn’t matter how big the budget gets or how plentiful the resources get. The most important resource you’re ever gonna have is the right team, and if that team is committed to the same vision and collaborating with each other, and again, trying to tell a cool story that’s interesting, and all the beautiful words that Storm listed, genuinely, I mean this, truly, candidly, that is what matters. So to me, I brought a lot of gratitude to this team on this film.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: My question is mainly to the writers and the directors. When you were editing Searching, was there anything creatively that you thought, “Oh, if I was directing this, I would do this differently,” that you got to do in this film?

CHAGANTY: Careful. [Laughs]

MERRICK: Oh man, I wish I could remember some of them.

JOHNSON: I think we had always wanted to do that Edgar Wright sort of flashy editing, and we just couldn’t find a place for it. First of all, John Cho’s this more cumbersome mouse. It’s a very different style of animation. But I think that’s one thing that we were really excited about, and when we got the treatment we were like, “Yes, it’s a young protagonist,” that we were like, “Yeah, we’re gonna get some Edgar Wright-style stuff in there.” So that was one thing.

MERRICK: I was a ruthless critic as an editor, and then trying directing it by myself …

JOHNSON: Humbling.

MERRICK: … was a humbling experience. I was like, “Aneesh, can’t you just make them do a good take?” Turns out it’s harder than that.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I loved Searching, loved Run, love Missing. The twist is kind of what keeps me coming back. I’m always trying to figure it out, and I never figure it out. So my question was, I like when the twist is happening, you give us time to figure out what it is by zooming in slowly. How do you decide how much time to give? Because obviously you don’t want to undermine us and think that we take too long to do it, but you also want to make sure you give us enough time to figure it out because there’s a lot of things going on, especially in this one.

JOHNSON: That’s a great question. Natalie, do you want to talk about our testing process?

QASABIAN: Yeah, I was gonna say, a big part of our process as a team is getting feedback. So we’ll work on the project for a bit, and then we’ll put it in front of an audience because that’s really the only way to feel it out. Because we’ll sit in the room and beat each other up, take two frames off, “No, it’s too long. It’s too short.” It gets really heated in there. But until we put it in front of an audience you can’t tell, and you can usually feel it in the room if it’s too short or too long. So we rely on you guys.

OHANIAN: There’s this thing that Nat does where she goes, “Who saw that moment? Raise your hands.” Or, “Who didn’t see that moment?” We’re always trying to find that right calibration of just enough people who saw it, and then a couple of people who didn’t, and that’s when you kind of know.

CHAGANTY: For example, when he asked about the title S-R-C-H, that was a perfect example. [Laughs]

OHANIAN: Bro, come on, man.

Image via Screen Gems

AUDIENCE MEMBER: My question is for Storm. What did you and Nia Long do to develop the mother-daughter bond, that strong bond between each other, and portray that on the screen?

REID: It was amazing getting to work with Ms. Nia. And even though we didn’t get to share a lot of scenes together in the film, the time that we did get to spend together, it was just us and we had a lot of time to spend together. I think it’s just really about creating a rapport and a bond as much as possible. I think it helps when you work with like-minded, nice people, and this whole team, I feel like, felt comfortable around each other. It became a little family, so it wasn’t hard to create that rapport on and off camera with Ms. Nia, so I’m grateful for that.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: You guys use a variety of apps like Messenger, Facebook, Instagram. I was wondering if you guys ever considered using other apps, but they didn’t make it into the movie, like BeReal or Twitter?

QASABIAN: We threw out BeReal recently, but I think we were out of time.

MERRICK: It’s barely in there. It’s on her home screen.

JOHNSON: One of the frustrating things about making a movie like this is it’s so slow and the internet and technology changes rapidly out from under you, so you’re constantly chasing things. But just to give you one example, Zoom doesn’t really make an appearance. That was around when we were writing, and what we found was we had a whole scene, if you remember, on Zoom, where June’s hanging out with her friends, and what we found was when we came up on this, it was early on in the movie, it made it feel, just by association, that it was a pandemic movie in some ways. Just because we associate it with that, and it cheapened the movie in some ways. So that’s one example of something that we killed, actually.

CHAGANTY: BeReal — you kind of have to pick a date in the future that this movie takes place in. So if we started working on, hypothetically, Finding, right now, we’d have to be like, “Okay, it’s gonna take place in August of 2025.” And then you design the film and then in August of 2025, you just look at the internet and you’re like, “Oh, shit. Okay, what’s new? What did we not expect?” BeReal was one of those things that just came too late, but technically it would’ve been there.

JOHNSON: We did throw BeReal up on her phone.

CHAGANTY: Okay, thank god. We got BeReal.

MERRICK: Yeah, it’s in there, barely.

JOHNSON: We got it in there, we got it there.

MERRICK: And we’ll make sure for the next one to go ahead and write in the societal collapse in advance. [Laughs]

QASABIAN: We’re basically making a period movie even though it’s very modern because …

CHAGANTY: In advance!

QASABIAN: Yeah, in advance, because everything just goes out of date while we’re working on it.

OHANIAN: I remember there was a day I walked into the edit office and everyone was devastated. It was like the worst thing had ever happened. I was like, “Oh my god, did we delete the movie? What happened?” And the answer was that iOS had updated its software, and they have to go and re-design all the texts and all this stuff, and it was pretty long.

CHAGANTY: Yeah, because if FaceTime changes, and for some reason …

JOHNSON: Which it did.

CHAGANTY: … the way it closes is on a different side of the screen, or it’s showing something else, these guys have designed the entire movie so that the actors are looking and behaving in a certain way. If Apple goes up and just changes something on us, it’s a painful experience.

MERRICK: We had the whole aspect ratio of FaceTime changed, and we’d already shot it in an aspect ratio.

JOHNSON: So it was vertical and then suddenly now it’s horizontal, and now we have lights in the frame. We’re like, “Oh, shit.”

MERRICK: We had to Photoshop out the lights.

OHANIAN: I remember you guys were indignant, and you’re like, “What were they thinking, Apple? What is this?”

MERRICK: This is actually just worse.

JOHNSON: This surely doesn’t look good, right? [Laughs]

Missing is in theaters nationwide on January 20th.