UNSEEN: An Interview With Director Yoko Okumura

Introduction

Two women form an unlikely connection when a depressed gas station clerk, Sam (Jolene Purdy, The White Lotus), receives a call from Emily (Midori Francis, Grey’s Anatomy), a nearly blind woman who is running from her murderous ex in the woods. Emily must survive the ordeal with Sam being her eyes from afar using video calls. Director Yoko Okumura sat down with Cinema Scholars’ Glen Dower to discuss her horror/thriller debut, Unseen.

Interview

Glen Dower:

Hi Yoko, how are you this morning?

Yoko Okumura:

I’m good, I’m good. This has been fun. This is my first press tour, so yeah, being on this rollercoaster is new to me.

Glen Dower:

We are in this together! First of all, congratulations on your feature debut.

Yoko Okumura:

Fantastic, thank you.

Glen Dower:

I watched it yesterday as I always like to let a film ‘marinade’ in my mind before I get the opportunity to speak with those involved. I also read your director’s notes, which I really enjoyed, and what drew you to the film was the friendship that was formed between the two female characters across the film. So how did you find your Emily and Sam? What was the casting process?

Yoko Okumura:

We knew from the very beginning that watching two women talk over FaceTime for a whole film could be tedious and boring if those two characters were not cast perfectly to have chemistry, but also conflict and also some warmth behind them. So the casting process really was about matchmaking, who’s going to be the right Emily for whose Sam and how they’re going to have chemistry, are they going to be good together?

And yeah, I just got, again, very lucky to find Midori and Jolene and they were amazing. From the very first Zoom table read, everybody was so impressed that their chemistry was immediately there. And it was a process where I saw Midori’s kind of raw intensity and Jolene’s vulnerability and warmth, but also strength. I could see even from their individual audition videos that they were going to be a good match together. And again, I was right. Yay.

Glen Dower:

Jackpot. So, how was the interaction orchestrated between the leads during filming? So as you say, they had the Zoom chemistry, but during filming, were they on the phone to each other for real a la the Scream movies, or was one off-camera feeding lines? How did you achieve that?

Yoko Okumura:

Yeah, we had a lot of conversations and pre-production about how will we do this, and how will we do that. We definitely talked about them actually being on each other’s phones but realized we don’t want to deal with bad connection issues. We don’t want to deal with the delay. So, what we really did, in the end, was quite simple, and practical. We’d have the other person off-camera performing their side of the scene, which was challenging.

It was really funny to see Jolene kind of realize what the process was going to be. I think she thought that she’d be sitting on a chair and speaking through a microphone and talking to Midori from far away. But no, we were like, no, Jolene, you’re going to behind the camera crew as they’re walking doing us the Steadicam shot, you’re also going to walk next to her and yell your lines at Midori. So she was such a trooper. She was down for it. But yeah, it was really crucial to have them there for each other. Because we got to actually develop the scene together instead of separately.

Glen Dower:

And this being your feature debut, you sort of got to make two separate movies in one…

Yoko Okumura:

Yay!

Glen Dower:

We have a cat-and-mouse/The Fugitive-type thriller, and then boom, we cross over into a broad comedy, My Name is Earl-type scenario. Did you enjoy that too? And how was that scheduled? Do you film ‘one movie’ than the other, or was it shot back and forth?

Yoko Okumura:

Yeah, we shot all of Midori’s side in the forest first, and then went to the gas station and shot Jolene’s side. And tonally it really was like, ‘oh man, one girl is going through some real hardcore stuff and hardcore violence and then we cut to the gas station.’ At least, I think what is helpful is that both of their sides culminate into madness and intensity by the end, even if they kind of start in different places. Jolene really gets wrapped up in the drama of Midori’s situation and it really becomes, hopefully for me, seamless towards the end becoming one movie. But yeah, tonally it really was a challenge in the beginning.

We’re like, oh gosh, how can we go from one to this other thing and not have it be jarring and make sure the audience is not taken out of it? And I think the challenge of that was, or the solution of that was the intercutting between them early, the first thing in the movie, making sure the audience knows the two worlds exist. We’re not going to surprise you. We’re going to let you know from the very beginning, these are two things that coexist and they’re going to collide eventually.

Glen Dower:

Definitely, at the beginning we have Emily’s situation, you felt the cold, stillness of that forest, and then we cut to Sam’s gas station, and the audience felt the humid, putrid air of the gas station, with shrimp on sale for 50 cents. Then as you say, this all came together with the help of your really inventive use of split screen used throughout. While we’re talking about Sam’s situation -Missi Pile. Her IMBD is insane, we have Dodgeball to Y: The Last Man, Two and a Half Men, to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. She is a monster in this film. Did you have to reign her in or do you say, Missi, just go – full-on Cruella De-Vil meets Samantha Jones?

Yoko Okumura:

Oh my goodness, nobody reigns Missi Pile in. You just let Missi Pile go and let her do her Missi Pile Magic! There was so much Missi Pile ad-lib that was gold, that we could not over-indulgently put in. Because it would’ve become the Missi Show. So my editor and I had to exercise a lot of restraint and make sure that we had to kill some Missi Pile ‘ad-lib darlings’. But yeah, she’s a freaking incredible person. So warm, so excitable.

I grew up being a huge fan of her work and just seeing her throughout all of pop culture. So yeah, when I heard that she would do this movie, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, she’s going to do our little movie? That’s amazing!’ And she and Jolene had actually already worked together on a feature before, so they had a previous connection. They had a lot of fun just yelling at each other and calling each other horrible names. It was a blast for them.

Glen Dower:

And the other thing, she didn’t really get a comeuppance, but we can only hope that her husband traded her in for a younger model. That’s all we can hope for, really. One of the moments that has stayed with me, and I remember it being a Fist in the Air Moment upon viewing, was (SPOILER), I just love that moment. The script, by Salvatore Cardoni and Brian Rawlins, has those moments of self-awareness, and the characters know it’s a crazy situation. Is that something you leaned into as the director?

Yoko Okumura:

Oh yeah, absolutely. I think that was a strength of the movie, and again, I just knew that it was a thrill ride that was fun, and these villains are kind of larger than life. So I absolutely embraced that. And I was like, again, if I don’t add to it, I don’t embrace the larger-than-life-ness of this, and fight against it and try to make it too grounded, it won’t work, was what I felt. And I was like embrace what it is and celebrate it. So that particular moment you mentioned, was an adjustment that I made.

I added to their wonderful script and was like, I think as a filmmaker when you’re trying to make the villains logical, right? And as I was kind of doing my director’s draft, I was like, man, I, I’m sick. This guy just, it doesn’t matter what you have to say, we don’t care. We gave a little sprinkle of that in the beginning when he had more of the power and we wanted him to be threatening, but at that point I wanted her to really fight. So I was just like, no, you don’t get to have a stage right now. You don’t get a soapbox right now. Shut up!

Glen Dower:

Finally, I just love in your director’s notes that you describe your color palette for the gas station as…Pepto Bismol Pink and Mountain Dew Green.

Yoko Okumura:

Oh yes!

Glen Dower: