“This is our last weekend together and we’ve got to make it big,” Ryan (Harrison Xu) says to Danny (Ivan Leung) in “Extremely Unique Dynamic,” planning a move to Vancouver after trying to make it as an actor in Los Angeles. The industry hasn’t been kind to the Asian best friends where routinely the pair has found themselves sitting at the same audition for a token speaking role that neither really wants and they’ve been reduced to making TikToks to gain some tractio, doing their own version of “Hot Ones” and creating their own anthem “Taco Loving Asian Guy” to roll around town, feasting on barbacoa. However, it is a part of what led Xu and Leung to the title of their co-directorial debut that Ryan and Danny have different ideas about what they’d like to do in their final few days together living in the same city when Ryan is eager to pick up a camera and make a full-length movie, promising it’ll be like “50 First Dates” years from now when neither can remember this time in their lives, while Danny would rather chill and savor what time they have together without any stress at all.
As it turns out, “Extremely Unique Dynamic” becomes a way to blow off some steam, perhaps not for Danny, who is ultimately dragged into Ryan’s slightly deranged idea of fun, gallivanting around the city to ride the rollercoaster at Pacific Park and dance around the lampposts in front of the L.A. County Museum of Art, less for their own benefit than for the camera they bring along, but for the pair behind the camera who give themselves an opportunity to be the leads in a breezy adventure that would elude them if left up to the business they’ve long tried to break into. The rash decision to make a movie, without the chance to second-guess themselves or build up concerns that might lead to talking themselves out of seeing it through, turns out to be a good one for both Xu and Leung and their on-screen alter egos as Ryan and Danny fulfill a long-held dream without feeling they’re doing much of anything, returning them to the days of when they were kids just tooling around with their camera phones.
Xu and Leung don’t shy away from blurring the lines between their real and fictional personas as they aren’t completely oblivious to the fact that their film will ultimately enter the marketplace where certain demands must be met and as they consider how best to position what they make for success, the inhibitions of making something for a hypothetical audience that they’ve been told time and again wants something more familiar and anodyne versus something for themselves starts to reveal itself. The filmmakers don’t hold anything back in the exuberant comedy, which may fold in on itself with all of its meta layers, but otherwise leans towards the outrageous and after a fun festival run in the fall, it’s making its way to select theaters before a release on VOD at the end of this month. Recently, Xu and Leung spoke about how they came to collaborate on the project and find a renewed passion for moviemaking.
How did this come together?
Harrison Xu: Like my character, I also work in film marketing and Ivan and I have known each other for like 10-plus years as actors first and friends primarily. A couple years ago, I worked on this movie called “Winnie the Pooh, Blood and Honey,” and I needed help on it, so I asked Ivan because Ivan’s hilarious and we really wanted to create this fun persona for Winnie the Pooh. So Ivan and I were basically the marketing team behind it, running the social accounts and it was our first time working together professionally. We realized we actually work really well together and we’re both workaholics, so then that led into us being on the floor, eating Thai food, [saying to each other] “What if we made a movie?” It’s also because I was about to move from L.A. to Vancouver and it was my last year in LA, so it was the perfect window to shoot something.
Ivan Leung: Yeah, we wanted to create a little time capsule of our friendship and of what Asian-American cinema is right now, so it was a nice accumulation of both worlds colliding.
How meta did you think this would be initially?
Harrison Xu: One of the big inspirations for us was this musical I really love, ”Title of Show,” about two people writing a musical about people writing a musical. I always thought it was so clever and fun and when we’re brainstorming ideas, we wanted to write something that was close to us, but heightened versions of ourselves so that we weren’t 100% just playing ourselves. We had a lot of things we wanted to talk about like Asian-American representation or queer identity and codependency and friendships. And as we started talking about the idea, we [thought] if we do it meta where like our characters are talking about it, so then we can be very on the nose about it, but it doesn’t feel like we’re on the nose about it. We also hadn’t heard of any movies that had gone three layers of meta with moviemaking, but only two, so we thought that would be the perfect vehicle to do something like that.
Ivan Leung: Being an Asian-American actor in the industry, we also really don’t have a lot of opportunities to show our full capabilities. Most of the time, we might have like a walk-on role saying, “Hi, how’s it going?” Or just being an information pusher or doing a character bit as the leads go into the main storyline, so we wanted to be conscious of where our strengths lie and show what we are capable of. Because we didn’t get the opportunity from someone else, we wanted to make our own opportunity.
Harrison Xu: Yeah, I’ve never been a lead in a movie and I’ve always wanted to do more comedy. And I’ve always found Ivan to be like one of the most hilarious people I know, so it felt like a really good opportunity for us to just have fun and be on a project together.
Ivan Leung: We also have been actors for a long time, but it was the first time directing and writing and producing something of this scale, so interacting with the crew, we took it how we would have wanted to do it if we had been on any set as an actor. We wanted to be very collaborative. We want to involve everyone. And without spoiling anything, that last scene in the movie was actually the very first thing that we shot on set, so it was really fun for us to involve the crew right away and build this really great environment. It was so fun because as small as the project was, every crew member was so instrumental and we couldn’t have done it with every single person.
Harrison Xu: One of the biggest things that we wanted to achieve was to make sure that everyone on set and in the post-production was just having fun because one of the things that we wanted to say in the movie was filmmaking should be fun. It doesn’t have to be this strenuous, heart-wrenching torture to create art.
What was it like to film the scenes that weren’t a part of the main shoot, like the TikToks and the scenes with the kids?
Harrison Xu: Those TikTok videos at the very beginning we shot on our own while we were writing the script because we knew they would go in there. We were just messing around, having fun because we wanted them to feel as authentic as possible for these two guys that were just trying to create content. With the kids, that was super fun too because it was one of the only opportunities we had to fully direct people because otherwise we were in the scenes as well.
Ivan Leung: My friend Todd Nguyen is a children’s acting coach and he had a lot of Asian kids, so when we were looking for some kids to cast, I knew exactly who to call. He gave great recommendations.
Harrison Xu: It was so fun working with them. And initially, in our first cut of the movie, we had a good amount of the kids in there, but we [thought] they’re so fun. We want to see them more and develop them more into the overarching story, so we ended up actually going back and shooting a couple more hours with the kids. That was super fun and when we had the final cut, it really felt more whole because we saw more of their story growing up. That’s part of the theme of the movie, too. The idea of filmmaking is really hard, and I feel like when you were a kid, it didn’t really matter. You didn’t think how are you going to shoot it. You just picked up anything you had and started shooting and it was fun. We wanted our film to really inspire others to then just go out there themselves and shoot a movie.
Was there anything that happened that you might not have expected, but could get excited about?
Ivan Leung: For me, it was the music because we had Sum 41’s “Fat Lip” for our main song, but then we realized music licensing is super expensive, but because we’re scrappy young lads, we decided, “What if we just created our own song?” So we decided to make a early 2000s DIY pop punk, Blink-182-esque song in place of it and we got to live out our rock star fantasy. Our music video just released.
What’s it been like getting this out into the world?
Harrison Xu: Initially, it started off as this really small, contained project and then it continued to get bigger and bigger. We’ve been really lucky with how things have transpired and we’ve worked really hard the last year just getting into all these different festivals and traveling everywhere…
Ivan Leung: We knew that making a movie was hard, but oh my god, making a movie is really hard and exhausting. What I got out of it was probably an extra 10, 15 pounds and then probably like 15 new gray hairs on the side of my head.
Harrison Xu: I got out of it a lot of really great new friends. We met a lot of other great, amazing filmmakers and lots of food, lots of great food that made Ivan gain weight. [laughs] But it was our first time really going through the entire festival circuit and I feel like after making a movie and now going through all of it, the industry feels a lot smaller. Like we’re now like one degree, two degrees of separation from a lot of different people.
Ivan Leung: It feels like it’s easier to talk to people. It’s really cool after this whole experience I’m starting to feel like a peer.
“Extremely Unique Dynamic” opens on January 10th in Los Angeles at the Laemmle NoHo 7 and expands on January 17th.