The Sundance Diaries: Christopher Hwisu Kim
Today, we‘re sharring reflections from Christopher Hwisu Kim, the 2023 Cassian Elwes Independent Screenwriting Fellow about his experience at the festival in Park City.
Five Lessons I Learned from the Cassian Elwes Independent Screenwriting Fellowship
Lesson 1: Making a film and getting a film made are two entirely different things.
I’ve spent most of my adult life learning how to do the former, and after spending Sundance with Cassian Elwes I’ve realized how little I know of the latter.
A little about me.
I’m a new father, I just bought a fountain pen that I really enjoy using, and I’ve spent most of my career producing and directing short documentaries. I’d say one of the defining characteristics of my filmmaking career up to this point has been scrappiness — the necessity of doing a lot with a little. (Yes, even at The New Yorker where I’m a video producer and editor we have a relatively small team and budget.) One thing I’ve never learned to do is make a feature length film with a real budget. I, quite wrongly it turns out, assumed it’d be just like any of the short films I’ve made in my life — just scaled up a bit.
What I learned from Cassian is that getting a feature film made is its own distinct craft, and it’s one I’ve never learned. What this fellowship gave me was an immersion in Cassian’s world — seeing firsthand what it looks like when someone is wrestling a troubled production into submission or how he approaches a meeting with a filmmaker he’s never met or how he convinces people he’s got the best idea.
As a matter of fact, even though it’s called a screenwriting fellowship — and it’s your screenwriting that gets you there — in a lot of ways this is very much a producing fellowship. More specifically, it’s a crash course in the sort of high level producing of someone at Cassian’s level. I wouldn’t change a thing about that. As much as I’d value learning more about the craft of screenwriting, the process of getting a film funded is something of which I have no real understanding and I was hungry to learn more.
When I got the call from Cassian that I’d won the fellowship, if I’m being honest, I had forgotten I had even applied. The life of a filmmaker is an endless cycle of submitting your work, getting rejected, occasionally getting a win, rinse, repeat. This fellowship was another in a long line of amazing opportunities I just assumed I’d never win. I dutifully submitted my work then moved on. It was another pull of the lever at the slot machine, one of hundreds, and at this point in my career and level of sleep deprivation (new father, remember?) I don’t remember all the lever pulls. So it took my brain a while to catch up when Cassian — after I’d ignored his call assuming it was spam — texted me, “Please call me back. Cassian.” Why did that name sound so familiar? I searched my email. Then it clicked. I called him back immediately. The first thing he said over the phone was, “Chris, you’ve won.”
My first reaction was a huge rush of adrenalized joy. I finally won something! I knew I was good at this! Then I freaked out about the sudden, huge interruption to our lives, which was eased when my partner Juliet assured me that she’d be okay with our baby. None of this would be possible without her support, and if I have one tip for future fellows it’s this: buy your partner some flowers while you’re at Park City.
Then I wondered how to tell my parents. I mean that literally. How was I literally going to explain this to them? What’s the Korean word for “fellowship?” “Festival?” “Big shot film producer?” I sent them the article from Deadline, and hoped they would run it through Google Translate and get the gist of it. I’m still not sure if they understand the significance of the opportunity.
That tension is at the heart of E.S. L., the script that won me this fellowship. Their English is limited, my Korean is even more limited. Even the happiest news comes with a reminder that there’s a wall between my parents and myself. E.S.L. takes that profound lingual alienation and turns it into a literal demon.
I like to say it’s a cross between THE FAREWELL and THE EXORCIST.
That line, by the way, was something I came up with during this fellowship. It seems dead simple and obvious to compare it to other films, but the power of it hadn’t really occurred to me before this fellowship. As with most things that seem effortless, I had to go through a lot of bad drafts before I forged it into something good. In this case, the former drafts were the times I started launching into an explanation of E.S.L. only to see peoples’ eyes glaze over. I realized I needed a one-sentence teaser that would suck them in right away. Well, I often cited THE FAREWELL as an inspiration — an Asian American, intergenerational, intercultural story centered on themes of mortality and grief — and there’s a bunch of demon possession in the third act, so, you know, THE EXORCIST. Smash them together and you get my movie.
This was the kind of material good that came out of this fellowship. A place to practice. The ability to try things and to then hone them. To feel like even if you gave an unengaging pitch, at least Cassian would be there to affirm you with a quick “It’s a great script.”
Lesson 2: Relationships are the currency of the film business.
That was really the first lesson I learned because as soon as I got into a car with Cassian and his assistant Tom Culliver, the relationship building began. He wanted to know who I was and what I cared about, and he wanted to share who he was and what he cared about.
It didn’t take long before I saw what the fellowship was going to be about: meetings. Lots and lots of meetings. This, to me, provided a wealth of useful real-world data about how this business works. Tom (who pretty much ended up teaching me as much as Cassian) would later tell me that relationships are the currency of the film business.
In those meetings, I got to feel the rhythm of the job of a Cassian Elwes. There’s much less wheeling and dealing than I expected (though there is still plenty of that — I overheard plenty of phone calls where deals were wheeled). Most of these meetings consisted of catching up or getting to know one another in an organic way. The business end of it all never felt particularly forced. “What are you working on?” “I should connect you to so-and-so, that would be right up their alley.” “Send me their script, that sounds interesting.”
This is the kind of networking that even an introvert like myself could accomplish. It made me completely change my perspective on the general usefulness of meetings. I used to hesitate to meet with someone if there wasn’t a concrete topic and goal in mind, but I see now that that isn’t that important.
The relationship is the thing.
When there was time between meetings, I’d try to get as much guidance and intel as possible about what I should be doing next. What became clear to me is that, as confident as I am in my script, it alone is not enough to get funding. Cassian told me that I needed to build a package. I needed concrete information that potential financiers could see and gain a real sense of how much E.S.L. would cost to make — and how much potential it had to earn a profit. And then I needed to keep forging relationships like the ones I was forging with Cassian and Tom and all the folks we met with. Why?
People want to work with the people they know and trust.
I should talk about the capitalism of it all for a bit. The amount of money being moved around in film deals is pretty huge. I come from a world where I make films for next to nothing. Funding comes from crowdfunding, the occasional grant, and your overburdened credit cards, but in Cassian’s world, millions of dollars are at play. This is a Business with a capital B. The “small” budget in this world is more money than I could ever dream of wrangling together myself.
The goal is to make money for the players in this game. I have no illusions about that. Every film they make is like placing a bet in a casino. In fact, the way high-level producers talk about movies reminds me of Texas hold ’em. There are certain hands that give you the greatest probability for profit, and there are some that are generally not worth playing. Any hand can go any way — a shit hand can still win you a huge pot if you get really lucky, a great hand can still — but generally you’re going to have better success playing the best cards like two aces.
(Indulge my metaphor a bit further. E.S.L. isn’t a pair of aces. It’s, maybe, a nice suited connector. A jack-ten suited. It’s neither the safest nor the riskiest hand. A skilled player could make a tidy profit with it. It’s also easy to fold if you don’t hit a good flop. I think in the right hands, E.S.L. can be a huge hit. In the wrong hands, it could safely fade into obscurity forever.)
I’m not saying my work is merely a slice of commerce, but it’s not not that either. I’m making art, I’m expressing the deepest parts of my soul, but the reality is if I want to really make that art, someone has to pay for it — and the person paying for it is going to want to make their money back and then some.
A part of me walked away disappointed to see that truth laid so bare. Another part of me was grateful for the knowledge. Now I understand the machine a bit better, and I have a much greater sense of how to position my films within it.
There were encouraging bits, too. At one point Tom said to me, “You’re not going to have trouble getting actors, you’re going to have trouble getting money.” Well, I had assumed I’d have trouble with both so this was a tremendous win in my book.
Lesson 3: Good stories still matter.
Yes, the goal in the industry is to make money, but at the intersection of art and commerce are good stories. Artists want to tell good stories. The people funding movies know that good stories are generally what sells. That’s where our Venn diagram overlaps.
So, even though it’s easy to get disillusioned by the unabashed capitalism of it all, what I observed by shadowing Cassian is that good stories still win the day more often than not. When someone asks him what he’s working on, he invariably would start with the story of film and only at the end of that story would he mention which stars are attached. Conversely, pitching to Cassian is never just about the talent attached to a project or how much money has been scrounged up already. He always asks to hear the story. As far as I could tell, the baseline of any collaboration is that he has to see a story that he likes. Without it, there’s nothing. With it, there’s something worth building upon.
Lesson 4: But stars definitely matter, too.
In hearing Cassian and Tom talk about what it takes to get funding for a film, it became obvious that, in addition to being a story worth telling, having well-known actors attached matters a lot. I know that’s obvious, but remember I’ve spent my whole career doing a lot with a little. It’s never really felt possible for me to get a known actor to any of my projects
Tom’s words ring in my ear about it being relatively easy to get actors. Suddenly, I realized that not only could I get a known actress for E.S.L., I really should do that because it’ll make the process of getting it made a whole lot easier.
Lesson 4.5: Don’t be afraid to raise your expectations.
Let me cheat and add another lesson that may only apply to me. I have this voice in my head that tells me constantly, “Nobody believes in you. You have to just do it yourself.” Early on in my career, this might’ve been true, but it stopped being true a long time ago. I’ve gotten damn good at doing things on my own. Maybe too good because I often don’t ask for help when I need it.
All this to say: I thought I was going to just make E.S.L. my damn self with some great, unknown actresses, shoot it myself with my camera, and edit it myself on the weekends. But now I was being told by Cassian and Tom that it’s not at all unreasonable to imagine getting funding in the $1–2 million range and that the dream actress for the lead is someone they could send the script to.
For most people, my advice is actually the reverse: keep your expectations in check. Things usually don’t work out exactly the way you envision, and learning to be adaptable is a key survival mechanism in this line of work. Even with an opportunity like this fellowship, I didn’t assume that my life was about to change. I saw it as a door being opened.
But having gone through the door, I realized that there are things in my reach now that hadn’t been before. The ceiling of possibility had been raised significantly. I needed to adapt to that accordingly. I needed to stop thinking so small.
Lesson 5: Celebrate your wins.
It matters that I won this fellowship, not just because I got to learn directly from Cassian, but because I get to say: I won this fellowship. That will open doors for me that were previously closed. A perfect, literal example of this is during the fellowship when we went to a lounge that was closed to the public. We went up to the front, they checked for Cassian’s name on the guest list, and we were let through. A person that Cassian had been chatting with in the line suddenly goes, “Holy shit, that was Cassian Elwes!” as we were escorted in.
That’s a literal door I would not have gotten into without Cassian. Now as I navigate the rest of my career, I can imagine this happening more and more.
I got here with a story that I worked on for years and years and years, a story with a lifetime of experiences and learning packed into it. All of that hard work, all of those late night writing sessions led me to that moment when Cassian stuck his hand out the passenger side window of a car at the Salt Lake City airport and I shook it. That’s a big deal and I need to allow myself to feel good about that.
Perhaps my favorite memory of my time at Sundance came on the final night. Cassian had gone home earlier that day and I essentially had the time to myself. Let me give you some quick backstory: in 2022, I wrote and directed a short film called MISSILE. I poured my heart and soul (and lots of money) into it. It was one of those magical experiences that you sometimes get with a film where everybody’s on the same page, everybody is working towards a vision they believe in, everyone cares about making the best film possible. And it got rejected from Sundance 2023.
That really, really hurt and it took me a few days to get over it. I’m really proud of myself for getting my head back in the game. At the start of 2023, I worked harder than ever to create a concrete gameplan for 2023. I was going to use this disappointment to fuel me to work harder than ever. I’m glad I had the opportunity to prove to myself that I had that ability to bounce back before I got that fateful call from Cassian.
Well, my two primary collaborators on MISSILE did get into Sundance with another short film called WHEN YOU LEFT ME ON THAT BOULEVARD that they worked on. It’s a brilliant, slice-of-life film about a teenage girl who gets high during a big family Thanksgiving. You better believe I had that self-pitying moment of, “All my friends are going to Sundance but me!”
Somehow, though, we all ended up going to Sundance on our own journeys in our own ways. We met up for dinner on my last night there, and it felt like one of those dinners I’ll remember forever. It was a pivot point.
(By the way, WHEN YOU LEFT ME ON THAT BOULEVARD went on to win the Grand Jury Prize for short films. My friends are absurdly talented, what can I say?)
I suppose what I’m getting at is that wins aren’t the norm. Rejection is the norm — and when it’s not outright rejection, it’s a feeling of total invisibility. I still haven’t really developed a thick skin. When I’m rejected, I give it a lot of real estate in my mind — much more than it deserves or needs. I think going forward, when I win, I’ll try to give it at least the same amount of real estate.
Make no mistakes, there’s still lots of work to do. Lots and lots of work. More than ever. Cassian told me on the very first day that this fellowship was not about him producing my movie. That’s not part of the deal. It was about learning from him and applying those lessons and having his guidance, but nothing was being handed to me.
That could’ve been disappointing, but it had the exact opposite effect on me. It was just nice knowing that I was lucky enough to have these new connections and new supporters who could genuinely help me, that I had gained entrance into a new stratosphere of possibility, and that, largely speaking, my success or failure depended on me putting in the work. I can do that. I’m a child of immigrants. I was never scared of the work. And now I can say that making E.S.L. is absolutely possible, maybe even probable, thanks to Cassian’s guidance. After I make it, I’ll need to get lucky again — I’ll need critics to like it, I’ll need to get people excited about it, I’ll need you to go watch it. Then maybe I’ll get to make another one after that. And then another. And another. I can’t think of a better way to make a living.
Thanks to Christopher for sharing his experience with us! And thanks to Cassian Elwes for creating this incredible fellowship a decade ago!
