A young man (played by Raymond Lee) struggles to say goodbye to his father for the last time in Raspberry, from writer/director Julian Doan and producers Brianna Murphy and Turner Munch. As they prepare for their film’s world premiere at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, my conversation with Julian and Brianna revealed how their observations on relationships between the living and dead influenced the making of this short, and what it offers to audiences as a way to reflect on the grieving process.
Julian: It was a Monday at like, 3 PM. I was in the middle of working and I looked at my phone and had a missed call from a 310 number that was maybe ten to fifteen minutes ago. But there’s no voicemail or anything, so I thought maybe it was someone at work or someone asking about a job, so I called them back. A woman answered and she went, “Hello?” And I’m like, “Hi. I got a missed call from this number.” And she was like, “Who is this?” And in my head, I’m like, “You called me. You probably know who this is.” So I told her my name and she said, “Oh, it’s Heidi from Sundance.” Immediately I was really excited but also really on guard. For some reason, I don’t know, I was expecting they were calling us to tell us “It was great, but…”
Brianna: They don’t call you. (Laughs)
Julian: (Laughs) I know.
Brianna: They don’t call you for that.
Julian: So anyway, she was like, “We watched Raspberry, we thought it was great, and we’d like to invite it to Sundance 2021.” I tried very hard not to lose my cool. So I went, “Yeah. Oh, that’s great. That’s really awesome,” but inside I was freaking out. I kinda wish I’d let myself freak out a bit.
Brianna: Well, you told them maybe. (Laughs)
Julian: Yeah, so pretty much we didn’t know. We didn’t know what to do with this festival season with COVID and everything. Things were so uncertain. I sort of asked her whether or not the invitation still stands if we wait a year. And she said, “No you’d have to re-apply.” I don’t know what I was thinking, but I asked, “When do you need to know by?” She was like, “I mean, as soon as possible. Preferably by the end of the week.”
Brianna: (Laughs) Oh man.
Julian: “Okay. I’m like 90% sure it’s a yes,” I said. I think I needed to call someone. I needed to call you, at least. It didn’t feel real. I texted you, right?
Brianna: No, you called me, but I didn’t answer because I was in the middle of working. Then he texted me and said: “It’s not an emergency but call me when you get a chance.” I texted back: “Maybe six o’clock when I get off.” This was three hours away. (Laughs)
Writer/Director, Julian Doan
Brianna: So he called his friend Bernard, whom he shares good work news with.
Julian: Yeah, I just needed someone to freak out with. So, I’m telling him everything and he goes, “Have you told Brianna yet?” And I was like, “I tried calling her and she told me she’d call back tonight.” And he was like, “No, you need to tell her to call you back now.”
Brianna: (Laughs)
Julian: It was like I hadn’t thought of it. (Laughs) So then I hung up the phone and I texted her again, “But like seriously if you get like five minutes just give me a call.”
Brianna: So, I call him back and he says, “I just got some amazing news, do you wanna guess what it is?” I have no idea. “Really?” he says, “you have no idea, what that news could be?” He said, “We’re gonna be Sundance filmmakers.” In my head, I imagined this is what people who want to have children feel like when they find out they’re pregnant for the first time. It was pretty unreal.
Julian: I heard some sort of whimper on the other end of the phone. Are you crying, are you laughing? What’s going on?
Brianna: I was crying. Laugh-crying. I felt like I smiled the whole rest of the day. Maybe they couldn’t tell because I was wearing a mask.
Julian: I had been writing a lot of this stuff over the past two years, when my dad passed away, and honestly a lot of that is just literally what happened, so it didn’t take a lot of creative extrapolation to put it down into a scene. I guess what it was is when I’m going through all of that, it’s just a lot of observations, like watching my brother and how he’s grieving and watching my mom and thinking about how I’m grieving. So, the first step is you need to attach it to a character. There needs to be a character who’s experiencing these things. That’s probably the easiest way in for someone to watch it. It’s essentially combining all those emotions into one person.
Brianna: In discussing making it and discussing the script, it is a very personal experience for you, but at some point in their lives – everyone deals with somebody dying. I remember when my grandma died, she wanted to have her memorial service in her home. When they brought her casket in, it was very solemn and they put her in the parlor…and then when they opened the casket it was sorta like, “ta-da!” It felt like a magic trick, like a reveal, the way the guy did it. Like, “here she is!” It was so weird.
(From left to right) Raspberry crew Jiyoung Park (2nd AC), Eddy Scully (gaffer), John Mattingly (1st AD) and Litong Zhen (1st AC) set up the next shot as director of photography Geoff George sits with writer/director Julian Doan to preview the framing. Production designer Jake Woodham looks on.
Brianna: I think there is something universal in this story. I think people don’t necessarily know how to put a description or word on it, especially in Western culture. We go to great extents not to deal with it. In other cultures, people spend a lot of time mourning a body…literally touching a dead body. We’re like, “we’ll ship it off to the morgue,” somebody else dresses them, somebody else buries them. Not to say that everyone does that, but I think there’s a universal quality to some of the emotions in this story, that I’ve experienced and other people related to, in reading the script.
Julian: Whenever I’ve talked about my dad dying, Brianna talks about that story with her grandma, and then I’m like, okay—it’s not just me. Someone else saw that this is awkward. When you’re watching someone die, people do weird things. And then once we started getting the actors on and other crew members, and you start talking to everyone about it…everyone’s got that story. Then you go, “okay, it’s not just for me.” As you talk to more people in the creative process, then you start to realize, through them, that it works.
Brianna: What happened was he (Julian) wrote this script and uploaded it to a Dropbox that is shared with Ray, one of the actors. He read the script and said, “Oh, this is really good. Did you mean to share this with me?” Julian forgot he had saved it to a shared drive, but after Ray said he liked it, the script started getting shared around a little bit more within the friend group – among people that are filmmakers as well. We’d been talking about “maybe there’s a chance to make it,” sometime in the future, as this nebulous sort of thing.
(Center, from left to right) Actors Gihee Hong, Alexis Rhee and Raymond Lee prepare for their next scene.
Brianna: In February, my best friend’s father, Michael, died suddenly from cancer. He very swiftly declined, and in the span of a couple days from going to the hospital—died, very unexpectedly. We got the call that he had died at three o’clock in the morning, and then later that day we were doing errands and Julian’s friend called and said, “Hey remember that script you wrote?” He works at a soundstage up in the valley, and he said, “We have a free weekend. If you want to shoot it, you can come up here and shoot it for free.” It was this day we had just gotten this really horrible news, and then found out we had this opportunity to make this. For me, it felt very cosmic. We knew we’d be flying to a funeral in the next couple of weeks as well, so there were a lot of reasons not to do it, you know? For me, it was more of a motivating reason. This feels right. For whatever reason this feels like a gift we’ve been given right now.
Julian: We had just heard the news not even twelve hours before that call. It almost felt like, if we don’t do this now, what did he die for? It felt like that, like when someone dies—there’s a goodbye you have to prepare, like writing a eulogy. “I don’t know if we can do it in two weeks,” I said. And Brianna said, “Let’s just start trying.”
Brianna: I told my friend, “Hey, we got an opportunity to make the film. We found out the day your dad died.” And she was like, “He’d totally want you to do it.” (Laughs) Which, he really would’ve.
“I think there is something universal in this story. At some point in their lives – everyone deals with somebody dying.” - Producer, Brianna Murphy (pictured above)
Julian: There’s an energy on-set shooting it. Obviously, it exists in your head for a while. We cast people, some of which I’d worked with before, some I hadn’t – so there’s always some trepidation. We didn’t have time for rehearsal.
Brianna: We had a one-day shoot.
Julian: We didn’t know how this was all gonna shake out. Who knows? But the moment we knew we had something was right when Raymond Lee, the lead actor, does that emotional turn with his father.
Brianna: Ray had talked about “wanting people to kinda be afraid” of what is going to happen when he moves over to that bed.
Julian: We planned to have that shot later in the day, for him to work up to it…but he did it, and we were just staring at the monitor like, “Oh my God.”
Brianna: It was all in one shot. It was the first take.
Julian: My jaw was on the floor. I was stunned. I can’t believe he made that so real.
Brianna: And then we cut, and Julian was like, “Alright, let’s do it again.” (Laughs) Our 1st AD was like, “Can he do that again?”
(From left to right) Writer/Director Julian Doan and director of photography Geoff George.
Julian: We felt really good after we shot it. Ray and the rest of our cast—Alexis, Joe, Gihee, Molly, Matt, Harry—these actors were so generous and gave these unexpectedly grounded, raw performances. It was even better than what I imagined going in.
Brianna: What’s special is people noticing all of the little details that are in the movie that the entire crew thought about. Little touches that highlight the absurdity. One friend noticed the detail of this Asian family having all of their shoes by the door, and the undertakers come in and do not remove their shoes. The pamphlet that the son flips through, with the image of a covered wagon, is a play on a pamphlet called “Gone from my Sight". It is commonly given out in hospices with instructions on navigating the end-of-life process, like a "how-to" manual on grieving. It’s a very similar style picture of a tall ship sailing off onto the horizon, or whatever, but it’s this metaphor of death using a very white and Eurocentric image that’s not something this Asian family would relate to. People picked up on that. It was special knowing that the edit and direction gave people the space to notice that.
Julian: For me, I actually felt a little disconnected from the emotion of it, working on it, because my dad passed away two years ago—so I’ve had a couple years to deal with that grief. I felt a bit more activated, in terms of creative engagement, even though we shot it in the house and the room that my dad died in.
Brianna: It’s not a soundstage. We actually found out on the day of Michael’s funeral—that we lost the location, so Julian spent most of the funeral seeing if he could permit his stepmom’s house.
Julian: I wanted to be present for the funeral. Emotionally, mentally present—but I was on my phone a lot.
Brianna: It was horrible. But we had to keep this train moving. We had to figure this out.
Julian: Which was always how I’d imagined it, of course—when I wrote it, it takes place at my dad’s house. So, when I visited the soundstage I was thinking, how do we make this look lived-in? How do we make this work in a very short amount of time?
Brianna: It was totally a blessing in disguise.
Julian: We wouldn’t have been able to pull it off at all. There’s a lot that could’ve been very hard to deal with emotionally, shooting in such a personal space. It felt kind of weird, to be honest, but I felt very excited to do it—which at some level maybe felt wrong inside me, but I didn’t let that stop me too much. My stepmom was so gracious with us shooting this film in the house, and she was even excited to watch the process. She kept taking behind-the-scenes photos and wanted pictures with the cast! (Laughs)
Writer/Director Julian Doan prepares actors Gihee Hong and Raymond Lee (seated, left to right) for their next scene.
Julian: I always knew my dad would appreciate it. I think after talking to actors and other people it gets a little bit distanced. They become different people—and it’s not me. None of the characters I even necessarily think is me. I don’t think of that character as my dad, it’s just the scenario. It wasn’t too hard, but of course there’s times when I just wish my dad was still around to share it with. Actually, the morning we were shooting, it was five in the morning—I was picking up coffee and Brianna texted me and said, “I’m super excited we’re doing this together. I’m really proud. I wish your dad was still here and we were making this film about someone else.” I wish he was at the house and we were like, “Hey, we’re shooting here!”
Brianna: (Laughs) Yeah. “Hey, thanks for letting us use your house!”
Julian: Obviously, I would love to share it with my father. It's ironic because it wouldn’t exist without him dying. But I know he would absolutely have loved it.
Raspberry premieres at the Sundance Film Festival, January 28th - February 2nd in “Shorts Program 2”. Tickets are available now, with the Explorer Pass granting virtual access to all 49 short films in this year’s festival, as well as “New Frontiers” and “Indie Series” programs.