It’s been hard for me to describe Jinho Myung’s debut feature Softshell (2024) ever since it premiered at New/Next Film Festival on the first weekend of October. The logline I’d reach for is too basic: a half-Thai brother and sister navigate early adulthood in New York City in the wake of their mother’s death. That description runs the risk of reducing one of the best films of the year, and possibly the best debut in a number of years, to just another same-y sounding coming-of-age film. What makes Softshell so immediately remarkable is Myung’s intuitive filmmaking — moving with the emotional confidence of an old master by way of the language developed in 2000s American independent cinema, highlighting what’s always between the lines of what people are saying or not saying, how they see an environment, and how we see them.
Through Rhys Scarabosio’s textured 16mm photography, we follow Jamie (Caledonia Abbey) and Narin (Legyaan Thapa) as they navigate quiet familial and romantic woes in the foreground, while the background is made up of their relationship to the broader world around them and the digital landscape which can capture so much attention. Myung often entrances the viewer through conversational rhythms, making it all the more shocking when he breaks out with moments of non-narrative portraiture, or pulls the scene back to place it within a multi-screen diptych. It’s a cinema that strikes the near-impossible balance of feeling emotionally driven by spontaneity, while always being underscored by a careful logic that, if picked apart, would act like a thesis explaining how Myung thinks films should be made, interacted with, and experienced. For any director to make such a work is invigorating. For it to courtesy of a first-time filmmaker is nothing short of extraordinary.
I chatted with Myung over the phone in the days after Softshell’s premier in Baltimore, the interaction being what he told me was the first time he had been interviewed about his work, and what I assured him will likely be the first of many.
Alex Lei: With Softshell, did you come up with the story before you had the lead actors for it, or did you find the actors and they built characters and the story from there?
Jinho Myung: I didn’t write the entire script specifically for two Thai-American siblings. A lot of this film came out as I met people and as I came across things. Originally, Softshell existed as a short film with Korean-American characters and then Chinese-American, sort of in variations. Then I met Legyaan, the lead actor who plays Narin, who is half-Thai and half-Bhutanese. I talked about the idea kind of casually, that I had this idea for the film. At that time I wasn’t really even thinking that he would be a person that I would cast or something, even though I had worked with him in some other stuff. But we met and we’d been friends for a little less than a year, and then I met Callie — Caledonia — who plays Jamie, through my friend Julia. They were living together. We actually formally met only like a month or two before we started shooting the film. It was kind of incredible. We were talking and I found out that she was half-Thai, and I had this idea about this brother and sister relationship — how they kind of have to contend with something after the death of a parent. So once I found out that Callie was half-Thai and I knew that Legyaan wanted to work together with me again, it felt like it was meant to be.
AL: Had either of them acted in anything before?
JM: Callie had never acted in anything before. She had mentioned during Softshell that she offered to act in some short films for friends, but she had a really difficult time. So that felt like a compliment because she enjoyed acting in Softshell. But no, this was her first time acting — her debut role, I guess. And for Legyaan, who plays the brother Narin, he had actually acted in a pretty substantial commercial feature film called The Tiger’s Nest, which is this film by an Italian filmmaker. It’s a children’s film about a young boy who is with this baby tiger, and Legyaan plays the supporting role of a Nepali local who helps this boy. And I believe he came across the role because he lived in Nepal for a bit and his father had heard about them casting for someone. So he kind of did it on a whim. Leg is actually just a film student. Both Legyaan and Callie are both film students. But I think Legyaan had an interest in acting. So he had acted in this commercial feature film, I remember we would talk about it and it was kind of funny because he expressed interest in acting in my low-budget stuff. So after that, I made another long-form project about these college students — which I was at the time — and Legyaan acted in it. And we had a really fun time. I thought he really had an incredible screen presence.
AL: Working with people that have maybe less acting experience is in the nature of working with low budgets, but it seems to me like you’re also drawn to that process.
JM: I think part of low-budget filmmaking and working with non-actors kind of go hand-in-hand. When you’re making a low-budget independent film, it’s so important to filmmaking to build characters who are removed from a world that maybe you’re closer to, there’s a life that needs to be breathed into a character. Oftentimes when you’re making a low-budget film, having someone whose words you’ve heard, these mannerisms that you’re familiar with, it makes sense for that to be what you work with. I really enjoy working with friends and people who I meet, who are willing to embody themselves in a way in a film knowing that it’s fictional, because the idea that you’re playing a version of yourself is maybe not super exciting for some people. But I think it’s just part of the truly independent filmmaking process. That’s why I like a lot of the Mumblecore films, because you watch interviews with the filmmakers who acted in them and they don’t seem very different from the characters they play, even though they are leaning into their mannerisms, they’re leaning into their modes of speech. And I think there’s something to learn from that.
AL: Watching Softshell, I think it reminded me more than anything else of Josh Safdie’s first feature, The Pleasure of Being Robbed (2008), in its texture, and also you have a similar non-sequitur sequence where they just go somewhere else in the middle of the film. But I think that your casting too is similar in the sort of faces that you look for in their realism. Like Johnny Zito is a great character in the movie. He’s done some acting, but he also has the texture of someone you pulled off the street.
JM: That’s funny you mentioned The Pleasure of Being Robbed because I love that movie. Obviously [Softshell] is on 16mm, on the shoulder, shot in New York — but I wasn’t thinking about [The Pleasure of Being Robbed] as a direct inspiration. Then as we were shooting I’m like, oh yeah, there’s some pretty substantial similarities that correlate with Softshell. We shot in a lot of public locations, we shot in the zoo. Actually, there’s a scene in Softshell where they’re watching TV before someone knocks on their door in the hotel room, and I clipped the audio segment from The Pleasures of Being Robbed as what they were watching. Because at that point when we were making the film, I was like, oh yeah, we’re pulling a lot from this. Also Rhys Scarabosio, who shot the film, he’s worked with Sean [Price Williams] a decent amount of times. So there are definitely some elements that overlap, even though Rhys definitely brought his own unique flavor to the film.
But yeah, Johnny Zito. It’s like you said, he’s got such a magnetic personality and face and screen presence that you would think maybe this is someone who was street cast. But he has a pretty rich education in drama and he’s a huge cinephile. The best thing about Johnny — and a lot of the supporting actors in the film, like Cara Ronzetti who plays Jamie’s boss, and Ed Malone, who’s in the film — a lot of these actors have had a history in supporting independent films and being in them and being affiliated with them. So it felt really special to be able to have that part for him.
AL: You’ve worked a lot in digital before, but you made the big jump to 16mm for your debut feature. How important was that?
JM: It was very important. This might sound really stupid — I honestly think that shooting 16 and shooting film now aligns with, not micro-budget, but independent filmmaking. With digital cameras being so maximal these days and you really being able to do anything with them — whether that’s trying to make digital look like film, which sometimes it does, or doing some look that’s completely different. Because film has been around for so long, it’s such an aesthetic choice, and it made sense to me to shoot something on film because I knew I wanted the feeling, the look of the film to be aesthetic. That was the idea, to lean into cinematic tropes that I thought were more popularized with Eastern Asian characters in the world. You know, you might go to someone’s Tumblr page and they have a Wong Kar-wai still or something there. So it was an aesthetic choice. But these days, because it’s an aesthetic choice, when you shoot film — a DP wouldn’t want to hear this — you can get away with more stuff because it’s so beautiful. We didn’t really use any brought-in light sources. We had a small MC that we used as a fill sometimes. But it was really just us figuring out where light was coming from in a given space, whether it was a lamp or a windowsill and trying to make that as beautiful a light source as it could be. So it was an aesthetic choice, and I honestly think to shoot film now is in the spirit of independent filmmaking.
Rhys mentioned it in the Q&A [at New/Next], but up to this point I had shot most of my films on 4K Sony Handycams, I love the ergonomics of the camera because they are so portable and you can bring them into any space and shoot them. So I heard about this camera, the Aaton A-Minima, which was the most recent film camera that Aaton made before they stopped making cameras. It’s built like a prosumer camcorder, but it takes these 200-foot magazines, so it’s not like a Bolex with 100 feet or a standard 16mm production camera, which is 400 feet. It’s in the middle, so you have five-minute rolls. But it seems visually like it’s a pretty portable camera. That’s why I reached out to Rhys, because I thought that he had worked with it before. We didn’t really know each other; kind of through people. “Would you wanna shoot a test scene with this camera? Cause I have this idea for a film, it would involve a lot of run-and-gun kind of situations.” And he was super down. We ended up having so many problems with that camera when it came to that test scene, although it ultimately went well. As we were shooting it, I think we both had this realization like, “We might not need this camera.” We’re just shooting on this old camera anyways. It’s almost less obtrusive than holding your hand out with an iPhone, because everyone knows what’s happening when someone’s holding an iPhone at them. But when you’ve got this camera that’s almost 60 years old on your shoulder, people aren’t as threatened by it as you would think.
AL: Does that make shooting on the street easier or harder?
JM: I think it made it harder as far as carrying it around. But again, we’re shooting on a 50-something-year-old camera: we don’t have a video tap, so it’s just Rhys in the eyepiece; we don’t have any follow-focus devices, so it’s just his hand on the lens. His hand on the lens, his hand on his camera, and just his eye. It kind of goes back to what I was saying about shooting film being in line with independent filmmaking. When you have the nicest Arri — or whatever digital camera — it becomes a matter of scaling it down, because there is so much you can do with it. It was just Rhys with the camera on his shoulder. There were other cases where we did shoot on a Bolex. That’s a much smaller camera, but you can’t really shoot sync-sound dialogue with that. So we used that for some of the more discreet scenes that we wanted to grab in pretty cool public locations.
AL: Sometimes when you’re shooting, too, you lean out of the actual story and fall into this portraiture mode.
JM: I really wanted to make a film about how we look at things — how we look at films, how we look at the characters in films, how we look at living creatures and things. And I kind of saw these portrait sequences as a way to keep whoever’s watching in check.
AL: You also do some picture-in-picture work where you juxtapose images simultaneously.
JM: I like multi-media films. The first time I saw a diptych used on screen, in a way I thought was so compelling — it was an idea I immediately stole for a short film I made — but in my opinion, the most interesting thing about the film Symbopsychotaxiplasm (1968) is not the making of the film, which is equally entertaining, but the scenes that they are shooting on two or three cameras. Despite Softshell being a narrative feature film, I believe in experimenting with the form. I think that can exist in the story you’re telling and offer different perspectives.
AL: It also leans into the digital reality we live in. The texting sequences near the end, we’re seeing basically everything they are not. You get a more intimate perspective than they can get through the technology.
JM: I’ve always had mixed feelings about texting overlays or phone screen overlays in films. That’s something that most filmmakers, when texting happens, it feels so necessary to them to hear the bubbles typing or whatever. And I guess it is, because it’s a pretty big part of how we communicate. But a lot of times it can feel a lot more dramatic than it is.
AL: It seems like you’re interested in investigating those spaces in between people, where people aren’t quite meshing with each other. I think there is a certain sense of estrangement, and a lot of the conversations are people trying to work this out. There’s the scene that you act in, about going on a date with a woman who has all these posters on her wall of Asian stuff, and it feels fetishistic, but it’s almost the conversation that you two can’t have. You investigate this through the form as well.
JM: Even though it’s a fictional narrative, and I don’t know all the rules that structure film, I like flashbacks and I like conversations that you normally wouldn’t hear. I remember showing that scene in a cut of the film, and a number of people said it’s a great, funny scene, but it has really nothing to do with the story. I was like, yeah, you’re probably right, but I like to think it adds another thought piece. Like I see it as a written essay that’s a combination of fictional storytelling and nonfiction investigative stuff. I like the idea — I don’t know if I want to keep doing it — but I think I’ve acted at least in a small role in most of the stuff I’ve made, and I think it’s a cool way to reveal yourself a little bit. Not like in an M. Night Shyamalan way. I think it’s always nice to show your audience that you know that as well. And a lot of the DuBois portable books, they feature a combination of his anthropology work, but also his personal essays and his fictional Afrofuturist short stories he’s written, and I think that can exist in an independent film as well.
AL: The character of the mother, who doesn’t actually exist in the text of the film but is an off-screen presence the whole time — of course, the whole movie is quietly thematically dealing with their whole relationship to her, but that’s how you approach a lot of the relationships in the movie, the sort of off-screen, unspoken things or how people can’t communicate with each other. Jamie’s relationship with Auntie, who insists she speaks to her in her language, and they almost can’t relate to each other because of it.
JM: Eric [Allen Hatch, head programmer and co-founder of New/Next] mentioned [Andrew] Bujalski in the write-up, and obviously with his early work a lot of the Mumblecore stuff is one of the main things that is appreciated, a lot of the unsaid, in-between and being able to see that. That as a narrative quality made a lot of sense to me as far as how I want to explore the underlying Asian-American conversation. I think a lot of times it’s really just not as overt as media, whether it be the most commercial film or an editorial piece, might make it seem. When I think about my experience being Asian-American, a lot of it comes down to the unsaid. It’s more about how we look at things. I’ve learned to look at things, and myself, and how much I’ve thought about it. Much of that really isn’t vocal. I don’t think my arc as an Asian-American has been — my parents speaking a different language when I have friends over or the lunch I had at school — I don’t feel any resonance with that at all, and maybe that’s because I grew up in California. But stylistically, that kind of nonchalance, what’s not being said, what are we kind of looking at, these early 2000s films that I really appreciate felt pretty hand-in-hand with the bigger thing I wanted to consider in the film.
AL: I wanted to ask about Nick McClurg’s score. It’s got that… I don’t want to say timeless synthiness…
JM: Nick really outdid himself. All of that score was done over Facetime calls and emails. Nick helped score the project I was talking about earlier, Personal Documentary (2024). I came across his work in a short film called Sidewalks — I’m 95% sure it’s called that. I thought the score was great and reached out to him and he scored this project I did more on a minor scale. Then I made Softshell, and what I wanted to be the actual score, was all music by Harold Budd—whose music also has this timeless feel to it even though it was ’70s, ’80s ambient with all these analog instruments; I think he’s one of the few composers from that movement whose sound has just aged so nicely over time. As it was becoming more and more of a reality that we were probably not going to be able to use his music, I reached out to Nick and I was pretty blunt with him as far as, “we wanted this Harold Budd music bad but we don’t think we’re gonna get it, what do you think?” Nick works with a lot of analog equipment, and his background is more in experimental music, so he was pretty excited. We kind of scratched all of the Harold Budd music when we were working together. We were able to use a bit of both the digital parts of doing stuff on a computer along with [Nick’s] analog equipment. A lot of this was on a DX7. He really outdid himself and really managed to compose a score that’s on par, if not better in some moments, than what was originally there.
AL: And what was the budget for this film?
JM: This film was made for less than $40,000, all in. It was really just four of us for the majority of the film — actors or whoever else was in the scene, Rhys shooting, me running sound.
AL: Did you just send the movie to [New/Next] cold? Send it on FilmFreeway?
JM: FilmFreeway, yeah. At the Q&A someone asked what my relationship to Baltimore was, and I think a year-and-a-half or two years ago I saw a filmmaker I like post a picture of a film I like in a program, and the post was made by “New/Next Film Festival.” That went on, it was another post of a picture of a filmmaker I like, then another one, another one, another one. I was like, what festival, who was programming these films that I really love, both American and international films? Obviously, it was Eric at Maryland Film Festival — for whatever reason I didn’t know about Maryland Film Festival or Eric’s programming. So I followed [New/Next] and I saw that they had a fest, and I was like, “shit, I didn’t know they had submission.” Maybe I would’ve just sent a short I made or something. But then I saw submissions open, I went on FilmFreeway, I paid my entry fee. It was pretty surreal when Eric got back to me, because, you know, FilmFreeway you don’t normally hear back.
After New/Next I got really in my head, “Eric really loves this film, and I need to get strategic, I need to figure out what to do and how to play it” or whatever. I honestly think when you have a festival like New/Next and a programmer like Eric, it’s all the more hope for that person who’s cold submitting on FilmFreeway that someone will cold watch it and like it and want to program it regardless of any kind of clout it has or whatever. That makes me so excited about those kinds of festivals and those kinds of opportunities in the future.
AL: I’m always of the mind that if you make a movie that resonates with you, or you can’t explain it, that’s all the more reason it might resonate with someone else. I think this is good evidence of that — you made the movie wanted and somebody found.
JM: I was talking to Eric about programming and festival stuff. I’m really new to all of this. He was saying a lot of independent films plan their shoot, and plan their whole thing to festivals and to the market. I think that makes sense, you want your film to be shown, but how much time is that taking away from just making your film?
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