- It felt like we were making a movie because another movie was a hit, as opposed to ours having any reason to exist. So he said no, Sev said we'll keep in touch. [laughs] I said no, Sev said I'll keep in touch.

- [laughs] Yes.

- And then we left and we kept talking about it and we knew the opportunity was so intense and so big, so rare, that any first time filmmaker ever gets told that, that we're like, "let's just talk our way into it. If we hit a wall, we hit a wall." And then after talking about it for about a couple months, one day we didn't hit a wall. One day we texted... I texted him being like, "Hey, I have an idea for an opening scene." And he texted me back being like, "Hey I have an idea for an opening scene." And we get on the phone and we pitch each other the exact same opening scene, which ends up--

- [Narrator] Wow.

- being the opening scene in the film. Which is a very stand alone, seven minute montage that takes you through sixteen years of a life. And in talking about that scene, there was like a light bulb that went off, and all of a sudden, we had this massive line that was drawn between all the other films that had been made on screens before and what we felt like suddenly was possible with ours. And it, all of sudden, it felt like ours could be cinematic, engaging, emotional.

- I mean, for us, the goal of this opening scene was after those first five or seven minutes, audiences would just forget that what they're watching is happening on a screen, and be sucked into the story and emotion of the characters.

- [Narrator] I mean, I described it to a friend as... kind of, ugly cry-inducing. Like the first ten minutes of UP, except it involves Window's XP. [laughter]

- [Aneesh] We call it UP meets a Google commercial.

- [Narrator] Yeah, yeah. Yes.

- Visually I was making commercials that took place on screens. I was a filmmaker at Google, so I was writing and developing and directing commercials there, so a lot of our job was to take technology and then give it a larger, emotional narrative for people to understand. From just a pure visual standpoint, where I was literally taught by my bosses how to emote on a computer screen. [Narrator laughs] You know, despite the fact that you don't see someones face, you can still show how they feel. And for me, realizing that that was possible was a sort of like, it felt like I knew a language that I never knew I knew. And I think what I wanted to do with Searching was hopefully make audiences feel that same way of feeling like they know a language they never knew they knew. But I think on a larger thematic level, and maybe this is the ex-Google employee in me speaking, but I think technology as a whole gets such a negative rap in media. Whether it's Facebook PSAs or Black Mirror episodes, or anything in between, it's always about technology as a cause for our downfall as opposed to something optimistic. And working there, at Google, all of the engineers that you work with, they have the best intentions, very altruistic goals when they come to their products, their engineering and, to me I never saw that technology was represented holistically. And for us, in this film, what we wanted to do is say yes, technology can alienate us, can make us addicted to our phones, can make us more obsessed. But at the same time, it has the power to make us love, make us feel, make us connect with one another. And I didn't think that that narrative was particularly talked about a lot in the media, which is one of the reasons we both really, really fell in love with this story. We had hesitations everyday. [Narrator laughs] Every single day, we felt like our task was to beat the things that had been made before it. And I don't think any... In the beginning that's why I said no when the project first came, is because there were these other movies that had existed before that had done similar things, and we felt like, "Why would we make a film that is so concept driven, if we can't be new?" You know? And I think it was that opening scene, coming up with that opening scene all of a sudden felt like, I'm getting chills thinking about it but like-- It felt like we could do something new. And it's weird because we are not the first screen movie to exist, but watching I think what, I mean, I'm very proud of it, but watching what we did now... We took the genre, and moved it a step forward, I think. What we tried to do, we really tried to make it feel like, "Yes, this concept has existed before, but you've never seen it like this. You've never seen this cinematic, you've never seen it this engaging, you've never seen it this thrilling, you've never seen it this emotional." And I think that, to us, is why you go see a movie, and we wanted to make a capital M movie. And so far, none of the screen films that have existed before this, were a capital M movie to us.

- 100 percent. On a technical level, they all kind of resemble the early, early, early attempts at film. Like 100 years ago, where the camera would just be sitting there and we're watching action unfold. Like those films, they don't tend to have editing or camera moves or any kind of sense of cinematic quality. We were, right at the beginning, when we were presented with that version of making the film--

- [Aneesh] No way, yeah.

- We just said why? We'll do it our way. We'll have these cinematic feelings. And on an emotional and thematical level, in writing the movie, we always made sure to keep each other honest. That this is a story that should be... that should work outside of the central conceit of how the movie is put together. Every scene, every reveal, every dialogue, every piece of emotion that comes through the story, works well outside of the screen--

- Yeah, it's a live action counterpart, you know. It needed to work first as a perfect story before it gets translated to a screen.

- And the most, and I love what you're saying, because the most satisfying thing for me, personally, after... You know, we've been able to travel the world with the film so far and share it with so many audiences here and there, is when people come up afterwards and go like, "I literally did not think I was going to like that. I thought it was going to be crazy." [Narrator laughs] And then exactly what you're saying, five minutes later they are like, "I just forgot. I was so sucked in and it was awesome."

- [Aneesh] And we were like, "Same." You know, that's why we did the project, for that feeling.

- [Sev] Exactly.