I hope [the viewers] feel something. Whatever it is they feel, I hope they’re moved in however the movie speaks to them. That’s what I always want to get out of movies. I want to be moved in some way, whether it’s to laugh or cry or think about things. Hopefully, they’re moved.
A detour that wasn’t really a detour
[My work at] Google kind of came out of nowhere, in a way. They have a one-year residency program called Creative Lab Five.
[Google] came to the USC career fair, where I was going to school. I knew a little bit about [the program] because of this filmmaker Aneesh Chaganty, who also worked at Google. He left because he sold a pitch for his first feature film, Searching, which takes place entirely on screens. I asked him about the Google thing, and he was like, “If you can get it, you should do it because worst-case scenario is [still] pretty good.” You move to New York and get paid to be a filmmaker and make stuff that the world gets to see and you’re 22 years old. He’s become a great friend and mentor figure.
I applied and the Google team saw this random travel video I had made of 10 days I spent in Taiwan, and they were drawn to that. I interviewed over a couple of months, got the job, and I moved from LA to New York.
All the early Google commercials they made—it wasn’t like selling toothpaste. It was very storytelling-driven. It was taking a very human story but telling it in a way that was different and unconventional at the time, and that was interesting to me. It felt like a unique opportunity that, at the time, felt like a detour. But I was like—this one-year detour of working in New York at Google is not the worst detour. But it ended up not being a detour. It ended up being the bedrock of everything I’ve built since then. It was supposed to be a one-year job. I ended up staying in New York for on and off six years.