Interview: ‘Extremely Unique Dynamic’ Directors Harrison Xu and Ivan Leung Go off the Rails in Meta-Tastic Asian Inception Stoner Journey
Harrison Xu and Ivan Leung co-direct, co-write, and co-star in Extremely Unique Dynamic, which just screened at Frameline48 – San Francisco’s iconic LGBTQ+ film festival – on June 22. Harrison and Ivan (who would probably prefer me referencing them by their first names) met 10 years ago as “wannabe actors” in Hollywood, but it wasn’t until they worked together for the first time on last year’s shameless cult-horror romp Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey that they realized their “extremely unique dynamic” as both friends and professional colleagues could translate into a crowd-pleasing indie comedy.
Extremely Unique Dynamic is about as meta a film about two guys making a movie (about two guys making a movie) can get. It centers around two lifelong best friends and struggling actors who impulsively decide to make a movie together during the last weekend before one of them — Ryan, played by Harrison Xu — moves to Canada to live with his fiancé.
While Daniel (Ivan Leung) just wants to get high and spend these precious few days filming incoherent nonsense, the more marketing-minded Ryan wants to use the film as an opportunity to make something halfway decent before leaving his acting career — and Daniel — behind. While Daniel starts to wonder if this might weirdly be his chance to finally tell Ryan that he’s gay, even though he’s afraid it’ll change their dynamic.
During the film’s Q&A, Harrison and Ivan let slip that the comparisons between the film’s real-life events and totally made-up events are mostly up for audience interpretation. But sitting down with them for this interview, the guys were more than willing to share a few morsels of what’s fact and what’s fiction. Just a few, though.
I sat in between Harrison and Ivan outside of a neighborhood wine bar in Pacific Heights. A few beignets later, we got to talking and catching up (I met the two previously, by total chance, at an Illennium concert earlier this year, so naturally I showed up to this interview wearing the merch they watched me purchase).
Jon Negroni: Extremely Unique Dynamic has a ton of improvisational scenes, so to fit the spirit of the movie, I decided to approach this interview the same way. So I only have a list of topics, nothing pre-scripted. Hopefully that’s all right.
(Nervous laughter)
JN: Well, either way, it’s too late! But that is pretty much how you wrote the film, right?
Ivan Leung: All right, let me tell you, Jon to the G to the A to the R to the…
JN: (laughs) Sounds like you’re stalling.
IL: (laughs) Ah, well, we had a very detailed script made where we planned out all the big plot points. When I say we, I say Harrison. And we had a list of points within those points to make sure to hit so it follows a concise story as much as possible.
Harrison Xu: Basically where each scene starts or each scene ends and basically a list of questions that we could pose in the scene. So like talking about our parents, talking about Asian American representation…and then we kind of just riffed, and we shot with two cameras at once and we shot for 10 minutes where we just talked about random stuff. And then our poor editor had to make it work.
JN: Had you ever done something like that before?
IL: No…Okay. I took Improv 101 three times and it never went up. But the funny thing is I suck at classes but…all my jobs outside of that were improv. So the way to make money was with improv for some reason.
JN: I feel like with improv, you have more anxiety, right? Because it’s live and you have to perform and everything. But with acting, it’s like a different kind of anxiety because the cameras are rolling and you have to get it right.
HX: I feel like with improv while on camera, you can fail and fall on your face and just never show people. If you’re improvising on stage and you fail, you fail in front of everyone.
IL: Yeah, when there’s lines and dialogue, I really focus on the moments of discovery. So this is what you’re saying. So I have an opinion and then I give my conclusion. For improv, it kind of just happens automatically, and whatever comes out comes out. And yes, there is a lot of anxiety there, but the cool thing about me is I’m an anxious person. So it really just works for my character rather than for Harrison. Harrison is just cool, calm, collected, and has studied a lot of improv.
HX: I did four levels of improv, I was on the improv team, I did sketches…we did a sketch once. It was not good. We may show you one day, but maybe after the theatrical release.
JN: Sounds like I have to earn your trust first.
HX: Yes! It was a mukbang video that then became a sketch that became about bad roommates and we shot it in like an hour and it was in Ivan’s room. (Laughs) It was not good. I put it online and I think we got like 20 views after my last ones were actually okay…It’s probably my least engaged video of all time.
JN: That makes me think about how this movie, which is obviously super indie and had a tight budget, had to be made quickly and without too many takes and all that. Was that an issue or was the production a little more seamless than you expected?
HX: Well, we did each scene probably like four times and each time we did it for like eight minutes so then we would have like 32 minutes of footage, and then that would be whittled down into like a four minute scene. Because each scene would talk about different things, I guess in that sense it’s hard for the editor because you could take it so many different ways. It’s also great because we have a lot of options, but I don’t think we ever worry about shooting too much.
IL: I wanted to shoot more!
HX: Yeah. Our days were short, I mean it was five principle shoot dates with the two cameras, but they were like eight hour days. We could have shot more.
IL: We should have shot more. We were not good with our time management because this was our first thing that we ever made. Aside from that little sketch thing.
HX: Yeah, and we didn’t have an AD [assistant director], which was a terrible mistake.
IL: Yeah, whose fault was that, Harrison?
HX: It wasn’t mine. You know whose fault it was!
IL: I know, I know, I know, I know..
HX: But it is what it is, so I played AD.
IL: For me, the only time that was hard was probably the first scene. We started our first scene and I realized no words were coming out and I was having an internal panic attack.
JN: The Hot Ones scene?
IL: Yes, I was totally having the hugest internal panic attack. I was like, why aren’t words coming out of my mouth? Did I just use all my life savings for this moment? I had this whole existential crisis. And then after that scene, I was like, f— it, whatever. And then when I went into it, I was like, okay, it was flowing again. After that, everything was just f—ing seamless. And the weed may or may not have… It may have not have even come because hypothetically, I was not, nothing was happening at all. Absolutely not. How I took care of the character was after that moment, I just shut down my brain. I just stopped doing anything. I just became like, tell me what to do, I’ll do it and I’ll deliver it.
JN: Harrison, did you have any moments like that?
HX: I may or may not have…wait, are we talking about the weed or the..
JN: Oh no, I meant the existential crisis (nervous laughter).
HX: Ah, no I don’t think so because I was in AD mode half the time making sure we had all the shots.
JN: I mean, that is very much like your character in the movie, so…
HX: (Laughs) So it kind of works out, yeah.
JN: Well, you did have a third director and co-writer, Katherine Dudas, for this movie. I imagine she was in a unique position where you two obviously have your dynamic and you’re trying to do this movie, but how did she factor in?
HX: The origin story of how Katherine came on was…so we had the idea for the movie and I had actually seen a TikTok that she had posted that a friend sent me about how she was like, we just did an improv movie for a super small budget and we were acquired by Showtime…and Ivan and I hadn’t directed anything before, we hadn’t done anything on that scale before, so we reached out basically being like, hey you know, what you just did seems like something that we want to do, let’s see if we work together. So we basically brought her the outline of the script and we worked with her to craft it almost like a consultant based off of her past experience. She sent us her old script and we modeled it off of that format. And then on set, because we’re in almost every scene together, we wanted to have a third person kind of help carry that vision through. So it was great having a third person to kind of be that objective point of view and keep us on track.
IL: Along with Noel Do-Murakami, another producer as well, who’s also of Asian descent, so he gave a lot of good “how about this” point of view, “how about that” point of view. So basically all four of us had a really good synergy to keep on going.
HX: I mean the whole project is very unconventional, like how quickly we shot it, how quickly from inception to when we finished it…We didn’t know what we were doing for better or for worse, we kind of just did it the way that we felt it would be best.
IL: We wanted to have fun. That was the big thing. I took acting so seriously, so, so, so seriously, I would spend 10 hours on a piece of sides script. And then after doing that for like six, seven years, I just started saying, f— it and started having more fun. And then after that, I started getting more fun parts because I was literally just like letting it go and realizing, whoa.I’m torturing myself on these pieces of sides, but the pieces of sides they’re just basically saying that, hey yo man like you know I wanna see Cindy, like just go see Cindy it’s not a big deal but then I was just overtaking someone and then I realized well why can’t we just have fun?
JN: Yeah, that’s definitely the tension I picked up on in this movie. (Ivan’s) character wants this to be a fun time, while (Harrison’s) character is more serious. So Harrison, Is it that trying to make this weekend movie work is fun for your character? Or are you (sorry, is Ryan) trying to shut down the fun?
HX: I think my character struggles with the idea of having fun, but also success. It’s hard as Asians to differentiate that sometimes, because like everything’s always fun. That goal of success at the end of the day and I think that’s hopefully what we can get out in the movie is that it doesn’t really matter at the end of the day if it’s successful or not, like we made a movie.
IL: Yeah, the worst thing that could happen for us making this movie is that we create a sh— movie. Like if you really think about the stakes, the only thing that would come out of it is we made a sh— movie. But the best case scenario would be we made something special, that we could have a time capsule of our friendship and enjoy ourselves and have our last moments together before (looks at Harrison) you moved away, which you did.
(In real life, Harrison recently moved to Canada)
JN: So you’ve had a chance now to take the film to multiple festivals and see how it works with different audiences. It played at the Sonoma International Film Festival, Inside Out in Toronto, and now twice in San Francisco via CAAMFest and Frameline. I’ve only seen the movie with an audience once, which was at Frameline of course, and I was pleasantly surprised to see the crowd getting into it the way they did. It’s not super common for festival audiences to laugh so much at an indie comedy, at least in my experience. So that’s a long-winded way of me being kind of like, are you happy that this is funny?
IL: You think we’re funny? Jon Garren thinks we’re funny. It’s now on the record.
HX: Holy sh—, you took Negroni and you like mixed it around. Would that be on the record that Ivan can’t spell or remember names?
IL: Why did I say Garren?! What was in my head? My God. Redact. Wow.
HX: So the thing with Ivan is he gets very upset with me when I don’t tell him something’s wrong with him, like he has food in his teeth or a booger. He gets really mad.
IL: Dude, oh my god, stop it.
HX: I usually would have let it go but you know, we’re in an interview. Alright. Let that be in the record.
IL: No, just redact that.
HX: What’s been interesting is like every audience I feel like has 90% for the most part laughed at the same jokes. It’s just more like what people have resonated with. Like with the CAAMFest audience it was like, oh I really resonated with the Asian American stereotypes and other audiences really resonate with the friendship. It’s interesting that each festival audience resonates with different things but the jokes for the most part I feel like universally land.
IL: Yeah, I was so nervous when we first started showing it. I was like, is this gonna be funny to anyone but me and Harrison? And apparently, yeah, people have been really, really loving it. And people were laughing hard and they were crying, which made me really happy because I just love to make people cry. Iin real life.
HX: But I also feel like with film festivals too, it’s very rare to have a comedy indie feature. I feel like it’s mostly like dramatic indie features or a studio comedy that plays opening night.
JN: I’m glad you guys were able to find your footing there because you know full well how festivals can be tricky about that kind of thing and tend to reject things that don’t fit a certain mold. On that topic, I wanted to bring up how your dynamic actually reminds me a lot of Troy and Abed’s from Community. Not exactly like them, but definitely similar. Especially the meta stuff.
IL: I hope I’m Troy.
JN: I mean, you both have elements of both, I think. I also thought of Dawson’s Creek weirdly enough.
IL: You think I’m James Van Der Beek?
JN: Definitely.
IL: I’m totally into that.
HX: He’s blushing.
IL: I’m not blushing. But I’m happy.
HX: I mean in terms of influences, Harold and Kumar of course.
IL: Yeah, I thought about Skeleton Twins a lot.
HX: Buzz and Woody?
IL: Mary Kate and Ashley.
JN: I like that one more.
IL: Oh, Superbad! I really loved looking at all the stories of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg and them deciding to make a movie together. So writing it out and then making kind of a meta movie-ish because their names in the movie are Seth and Evan too. I was like, my god, that sounds so fun just working with friends. Adam Sandler movies, you just keep working with friends and also like, you know, Seth Rogen and stuff, friends and whoever else that works together.
HX: Those are more like professional inspirations, not character inspirations.
IL: Duplass brothers, too.
HX: Yes.
IL: Because they bought tape from the 7-11. Clerks?
JN: Yeah, I would say Clerks is a great comparison. It’s a small movie that made people laugh with very little.
HX: We hadn’t watched Clerks before the movie.
IL: We watched Clerks afterwards.
HX: We watched it afterwards because everyone kept saying it was like Clerks.
JN: Well, Clerks was so influential though, so that makes a lot of sense actually.
HX: So you know how you opened this interview by saying something about the meta-ness of the film? Well, I feel like it’s only fitting if we also do a meta interview where we do an interview about an interview.
JN: So I’m being ambushed, basically.
HX: So how’s the interview going?
IL: Yeah, how’s the interview going?
JN: You know, it’s very much the right amount of chaos that I wanted. That reminds me, actually. I don’t know if anyone’s said this to you already, but I truly believe your movie has “Bay Area energy” which itself can be a little chaotic…like anything can happen.
IL: Funny thing you say that, Jon. When I was young, I did go to the Bay Area, like once or twice.
JN: So you’re an expert.
HX: Well, I did grow up in the back of a Chinese bakery shop by Golden Gate Park. And I lived in Fremont for…seven years. Maybe part of the Bay has always been with me.
IL: Yeah and I always thought Bay Area Asians were super cool so like when I was in high school, I would say hella.
JN: I did want to talk about the movie’s title because I definitely get the feeling that you went through a lot of different titles. What does “Extremely Unique Dynamic” mean to you, then? Because when I’m watching the movie, I felt like there were several things you say in the movie and I’m like, oh what he just said would be a good title too.
IL: Can you give some examples?
JN: “You made it about you.”
IL: I did?
JN: Yeah.
IL: That’s a great title!
JN: But yeah, it was moments like that, where it sounded like you were trying to sprinkle in title ideas as part of your creative process.
HX: Well, I mean, in the lead up to the title reveal, it goes like, every pair of friends think that their dynamic is interesting enough to make a movie. That’s how we originally shot it. The title was going to be “Interesting Enough Dynamic.” And then we shared it with a few marketing people and one of them had a really great idea. Basically they were like, “Your title’s soft. If you only think you’re interesting enough for yourself, how’s everyone else gonna feel about your movie? Like what about like Extremely Unique Dynamic? And that was kind of an interesting almost meta in-world thing where we had just been shooting the movie and were getting our footing and then it’s like wait, we are extremely unique, like we are enough. And so then we had to ADR the Extremely Unique Dynamic stuff into it after, but it ended up being just like the perfect statement for where we were.
IL: And then we made a song about it. An early 2000s punk rock song…
HX: Which has an homage to the original title because it goes, “…because I’m interesting enough.” So it was little homages over homages over homages.
JN: So you didn’t consider Extraordinarily Unique Dynamic? Was that always the joke?
HX: Well, so you know the movie within the movie is Extraordinarily Unique Dynamic.
JN: I’m sorry, yeah, I lost track. But I think when it comes down to it, you made an Asian stoner comedy…
HX: Which also, one of the distributors that we were talking to had one piece of advice and it was to change our title to “Asian Stoner Movie.” So the fact that you just said that was very fitting.
JN: I guess that’s why I’m so curious because you (Harrison) come from the world of film marketing. So I feel like if anybody would really nerd out about movie titles, it would probably be you. And you (Ivan) too, of course.
IL: Yeah, include me! (Laughs)
JN: So in terms of the movie coming out, it’s got a November theatrical release, which by the way congrats on getting acquired by Strand Releasing, that’s super awesome. But as you’re gonna be getting closer to the release, are you thinking at all about awards?
IL: Well if you have any ideas of any awards that we think you think that we could win, like we would totally do it.
HX: (To Ivan) You know, because this is for AwardsWatch…
IL: What if we created an award given out by AwardsWatch to the best Asian stoner comedy of the year? We’d win it every year!
JN: Might be stiff competition, honestly.
HX: We could switch to the Razzie’s. We know the Razzie’s people.
JN: There you go. But I mean, it is a little perfect because your movie is going to be coming out right as award season is heating up, so that’s got to be pretty exciting.
HX: Someone at Sonoma during the world premiere stood up gave us a standing ovation and told us to submit up in the Oscars.
IL: Yeah, those were big words but like we’ll take it.
JN: Was that person me? I don’t remember being there but…
IL: You should have went there, that was a fun party. There’s so many fun parties there. You gotta go to Sonoma.
JN: I’m glad you both have been enjoying the festival experience. Do you have a lot of other festivals you’re going to be doing coming up?
IL: Yeah. (Stares at Harrison)
HX: Are you looking at me?
IL: Yeah. No, we’re not allowed to say the name of the festivals…
HX: So, the next festival will be in September…actually, maybe August. We’re working some other ones out, but between September and November there are a lot of festivals that we’re working on. There like could be upwards of like 10 festivals in between August and November before the end of the year. And then that’s just domestic because we’re still figuring out what we’re doing internationally, so there might be even more international festivals throughout the year next year, but because our partnership with Strand is so new, a lot of it still needs to be figured out because they have a lot of connections with festivals and can play us in certain places.
IL: If you know any good festivals let us know and tell them to hire us. Sorry, I mean program us.
JN: Or just hire you.
IL: Yes, I need a job. I would love a job.
JN: That’s exciting, because I think the most ideal way to watch this movie is with a crowd, a festival crowd especially. Wrapping up, though, I’m a bit curious about how you’re feeling coming out of the craziness of this experience. Between the production and the editing and the marketing and doing so much of this for the first time, when were you most in your element and in the zone?
IL: I think production and post-production for me. I’m very very you know you can’t tell this about me but I’m extremely anal. (Stares at Harrison)
HX: Like the character in the movie the marketing, the marketing is where I feel most in the zone. Just like working on trailers and posters and social strategy and of course actors, as actors, me and Ivan, you know, we thrive being on set.
IL: Because we are such good actors that have such great range with comedy, drama, like it’s just kind of crazy that like… (sarcastically) people are not seeing that and not seeing how talented and hardworking and really great pleasers we are (laughs) on set. I can’t believe it, Jon. I can’t believe we met each other at a rave.
JN: Was it even a rave? I’m pretty sure it was a concert. I don’t remember a rave.
IL: It’s a concert rave. It was a concert rave. We met in a cave. I can’t believe we met at a cave, Jon.
JN: I maybe remember a stadium, but… If I was in a cave, I must have been blacked out or something, but…
IL: Thank you, Jon Garren.
JN: Just to close the loop on the meta-ness of it all, how do you think this interview went?
IL: I don’t know. Did you like it?
JN: Hey..I was already in the hot seat for that.
HX: The interview was great. Alright, so now can we do the interview about the interview about the interview?
This interview is from Frameline: The San Francisco LGBTQ+ Film Festival. Extremely Unique Dynamic will be in theaters this fall from Strand Releasing.
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