Christopher Makoto Yogi '09 is a director, screenwriter, and editor from Honolulu, Hawai‘i. His most recent film is the critically acclaimed I WAS A SIMPLE MAN which premiered in the U.S. Dramatic Competition of the Sundance Film Festival and was released by Strand Releasing. His previous feature film, AUGUST AT AKIKO'S, premiered at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam and was named one of the best films of 2019 in the New Yorker Magazine. Chris has developed both television and feature films with A24, Searchlight, and 2AM. He is currently in development with Waypoint Entertainment on a feature adaptation of a Haruki Murakami short story and also in production on a documentary with Michel Gondry's Partizan.

Photo by Michelle Mishina

What inspired you to pursue a career in filmmaking?
I’ve always loved movies. My grandpa loved taking me to the theater, and going to Blockbuster was one of my favorite pastimes. I was also a really creative kid and I loved art and books, and somewhere around fifth or sixth grade I just started telling people I was going to be a screenwriter. To the utter confusion of my parents. I don’t think I even knew what a screenwriter was, but I liked writing and I liked movies and so it probably just made sense to me. I kept exploring writing in high school and then, around my senior year, I met a bunch of other film nerds who loved movies as much as I did. That really jump-started me thinking about filmmaking because we would come up with film ideas together, write together, and make silly movies on VHS cameras. I found making films with my friends so thrilling and fun that I just thought, wow, I would love to do this for the rest of my life. I thought it would be a hobby, though. I didn’t think I would have an opportunity to pursue it as a career, because no one in my family was in the arts. That felt like a weird, unreachable pipe dream.

Was attending USC and the School of Cinematic Arts always your goal?
It was a goal to go to graduate film school. Around my senior year, when I was really starting to get the bug to make movies, I met an alumnus from my high school named Chris Lee, who had been the head of Columbia TriStar. He came to speak at our school, and I remember asking him a lot of questions about filmmaking. He told me I should think about film school, and if I was going to do film school, I should go to graduate film school. He suggested I go to undergrad and study something interesting, live my life, gain experiences, and then apply for graduate film school. That advice stuck with me. I went to undergraduate school in Hawai‘i and studied poetry and creative writing. While I was there, they were starting a film school at the University of Hawai‘i, and a lot of the teachers were USC graduates or former USC professors. When I took their class, they talked to me about USC film school, how great it was, and by the end of the class they were writing my recommendations. Studying filmmaking in Hawai‘i as an undergraduate turned out to be fortuitous because it solidified a creative mission for me: to explore my home through cinema. At the time, I was inspired by world cinema, especially from Asia, where filmmakers were exploring their home cultures and histories in artful and progressive ways. I wanted to do that too, but rooted in what I knew: my home, my family, and what I grew up with. By the time I arrived at the School of Cinematic Arts, I knew that I wanted to make films in and about Hawai‘i, and I built toward that throughout my time there. For my thesis film, I ended up flying home and making it in Hawai‘i.

Were there any classes, professors, or experiences at SCA that had a particularly strong impact on you?
I was in the production program, but I knew screenwriting was going to be one of my focuses. Two screenwriting teachers, Nevin Schreiner and Topper Lilien, were especially encouraging. They would tell me they had never seen this side of Hawai‘i in movies before, and that what I was writing was unique and worth exploring further. That encouragement was essential. I also accidentally fell into the documentary program, which I had not really been aware of when I first got to USC. I loved documentaries, but I did not realize how amazing the SCA documentary program was. Some friends in my class came to SCA specifically to study documentaries, and after talking with them I became fascinated by the curiosity of nonfiction filmmaking. Documentary filmmakers come in with a question and filmmaking becomes the process of exploring that question. I found that exploratory style beautiful and inspiring. My 508 instructor Jed Dannenbaum would encourage us to bring that documentary ethos to fiction as well, and he really supported my work all the way until I graduated, and beyond. I really am grateful for him, and miss him. So, I started dipping my toes into documentary filmmaking and editing, and those classes opened up a whole new creative world for me. I have continued to pursue documentary filmmaking ever since, and the friends I met in the doc program are some of my best friends to this day.

In general, many of the people I work with to this day are classmates from SCA. My thesis film, which was a fiction film, was made with a crew I met primarily in the documentary program. Both my feature films were shot by Eunsoo Cho, a DP I worked with at USC, and I am making a documentary right now with another DP from the doc program, José Asunción, who also shot my first feature. The sound designer I work with, Sung Rok Choi, I’ve worked with since my time at USC. And there are so many more, they are not only my dear friends, but are people I turn to for advice or creative feedback. They are like my brain trust.

Do you draw inspiration from your personal life or lived experiences when crafting narratives? Could you share a bit about your creative process?
A lot of my creative process is me working out something that is going on inside me or in my life. I usually have a question, or I am trying to make sense of something, and I don’t know the answer going in. I am just trying to explore it. Sometimes it's just a sense, a feeling, sometimes it’s an idea, sometimes an image, and a lot of the process is going inward and listening to that. I like to do a lot of research, reading, talking to people, and getting information that way, but then I digest all of that and look inward to see what emerges. For whatever reason, Hawai‘i often ends up being what I am drawn to.

What is your favorite role or aspect of being a filmmaker?
It’s hard to choose, I’ve fallen in love with the whole process. With screenwriting, I love the ability to retreat into myself, be alone, create solo, and get what is in my head onto the page. But then I also love bringing those ideas to a group, having other people look at it, getting their ideas, and watching the thing blossom into something much more complex and beautiful than I ever could have made alone. That process of starting by myself and then going onto set and collaborating with people I love and trust is so fulfilling. I have been making films with some of these people for many years, so we know one another really well, it feels like we’re a band. And then after production, I enjoy puzzling through what we’ve done in the edit. When I was young and first got the film bug, I really fell in love with editing. I saved up tips from delivering pizzas, bought a cheap DV camera, and started shooting everything: skate videos, parties, my friends hanging out. Then I would go home and teach myself Adobe Premiere by ingesting the footage and playing around with it, adding music, making little experiments. That is when I really saw editing as this amazing art form, because you can take raw material that seems almost useless and turn it into something specific and interesting. When I got to SCA, I did not think editing would be something I focused on but I took a documentary editing class, and that turned out to be fortuitous because right out of school editing was essentially how I paid the bills. I edited for many years — reality TV, documentaries, fiction films — while also writing in the mornings and evenings, trying to get screenwriting and directing work off the ground. I am glad I had editing to keep me afloat, and I still enjoy the process, it’s very similar to writing. I ended up editing both my features so far, and will probably continue working in that way.

As a local from Hawai‘i, how do you uplift and diverse voices and stories in your work?
Because of my creative drive to explore Hawai‘i, I have become very invested in other voices within the Hawai‘i independent filmmaking community. The Hawai‘i film industry is robust in terms of the productions shot there, including network TV shows and big Hollywood studio work, but it is only in the last ten years or so that an independent film scene has really blossomed. This is an exciting time because there are a lot of young, emerging Hawaiian and local filmmakers telling stories from their own personal and very unique perspectives. I also love mentoring, so I am invested in helping up-and-coming writers and directors however I can. When I go back to Hawai‘i, I speak to the film students at the University of Hawai‘i, and my high school now has a film class that I visit. My hope is to inspire them to see filmmaking as an expression of who they are and what interests them. There are no rules. I’m also invested in the Asian American film community. After moving to LA for film school I met so many other Asian American filmmakers in LA and I got involved in the community, like with Visual Communications, a nonprofit that has supported me throughout my career.

Visual Communications: what is it, etc.? 
Visual Communications is a really amazing, radical film group that emerged in the 70s to support films made by Asian Americans. They have been around for a while, but they carry on that radical mission, hosting a festival, lots of events, fellowships, and grants. Once I moved to LA, I started attending the festival, making friends, and helping however I could. I did a fellowship with them called Armed with a Camera where I made a short film, and I continue to be very supportive of the work they do. I actually met my wife at one of their festivals. Now we are married and have kids, so our family is a product of that community.

How do you integrate or collaborate across different mediums, such as poetry, to tell meaningful stories?
More than anything, the creative process is mysterious, so it’s hard to pin down where any of it comes from. What the training in fiction writing and poetry taught me is to trust my voice and trust what is coming in. To trust what I am receiving. Sometimes that is best communicated through a poem, sometimes through a short film, and sometimes through a feature film. I think the practice of trusting your voice and expressing yourself as honestly as possible is like a muscle. I try not to second-guess myself too much or be overly self-critical while I am writing, initially, because that tends to muck everything up. Then of course, I go back and revise and make it better and better, although that too is mostly instinctual and about trusting my taste. Mostly, though, it is a constant practice remaining open and aware so that the creative transmissions keep on coming.

How do you navigate the industry, manage production, and overcome production challenges?
In directing, I have learned that so much of it is about creating the energy and atmosphere that everyone on set looks to. You are holding the center, and people look to you for how they are supposed to perform, communicate, act, and be. So it is important to understand that your energy shifts ripple out and can move through the production very quickly. At this point, my understanding of directing is about being mindful of that and approaching everything with a calm and clear-eyed sense of purpose. And lately I have thought that directing may not be the right word for the job, because directing implies dictating. So much of the job is actually holding the center of the film and listening: listening to your collaborators, listening to your actors, listening to their ideas, because you never know where a great idea will come from. As a director, you have done the work of preparation, you know what you want, but you also have to be in a mode of paying deep attention. Ultimately, you are listening to the movie too, because often the movie will tell you where it wants to go. On set, when I watch a take, I have my preconceived ideas of what the scene is and what I want but I am also trying to come in clean and pay attention to what I am seeing, what sparks in me, what makes my heart race, what turns my stomach, and what lights me up. My body tells me if it's exciting, then I explore that with the actor and the team. So my directing philosophy is really about paying attention to what is in front of me, what the film wants, and what the people around me need. It is also about creating a bubble of trust. That can be broken, of course, and there are always interpersonal obstacles, but if you create good energy and a sense of trust early on, then when you hit a challenge you can work through it honestly, speaking freely, knowing that everyone is trying to do the same thing, which is make a great movie.

What advice would you give to emerging creators?
This is a difficult career path. But an incredibly nourishing life path, and one that keeps on giving. As a career, it is super competitive, and the rejection can be overwhelming. Even after decades of rejection, it still stings, but you do gain some perspective on it. You have to build a deep sense of purpose, or some kind of mission, around why you are on this path and what you were put here to do. If you have that sense of purpose, it helps to build resilience. I don’t totally know how someone finds that purpose, but I think if you can spend time meditating on what you really want to do or why you love film so much, that sense of direction helps you weather the many obstacles. And if you approach the craft with a sense of curiosity, there is much to learn. I've found that the craft of filmmaking continues to be a great teacher, in all aspects of my life. And finally, find your people and stick with them, build with them. The memories of making things I love with the people I love are more important to me than the finished product. Even if a movie goes on to play at fancy festivals or get seen by lots of people, at that point the film is living its own fancy life. What I cherish is being on set and having fun with my friends and doing great work together. So being grateful for those relationships and continuing to cultivate them is key. It will make the journey so much more fulfilling.

What’s next for you? Are there any new projects on the horizon?
This chapter of my life is really interesting because my last film, I Was a Simple Man, premiered at Sundance the same month my first child was born. So since then I have been exploring how to balance family and parenthood with developing movies and television shows. I have two children now, and I truly believe that the lessons of parenthood are making me a stronger and more interesting filmmaker. I’m certainly more curious, patient, and have a different perspective on things. Finding that balance has been meaningful. Right now, I am developing my next feature, which is an adaptation of a Haruki Murakami short story. I am making that with Waypoint Entertainment, and the producers along with Waypoint are my partner Sarah Kim and another Stark alum, Coco Francini. I have another feature earlier in development, a wild and crazy period romance between the artists Isamu Noguchi and Frida Kahlo. I also recently developed a television pilot with A24 set in the surf world in Hawai‘i and I wrote a script for Searchlight, which was a manga adaptation. So there has been a lot of writing. We hope to shoot the Murakami feature this year, and I can’t wait for everyone to see it soon.

Links: 

Website: www.nahwave.com

Instagram:@makotoyogi

Substack: https://makotoyogi.substack.com/

Trailer for I WAS A SIMPLE MAN: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1ISpED1kQg

Trailer for AUGUST AT AKIKO'S: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toee4I0AhaE

Story by Emily Tutnick