Yahoo Lifestyle Steven Yeun Was First Attracted to Indie Film ‘Bubble & Squeak’ Because of an Email Titled ‘Cabbages’: The Script Was ‘Such a Wild Swing’
All it took Steven Yeun to first get interested in the film “Bubble & Squeak” was a well-titled email.
“I got an email in 2020 from one of my agents and the title was just ‘Cabbages,'” he says. “It had this wonderful script. I read it and thought it was so bold and such a wild swing — something that I’d never read before.”
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These stories and more engaged the audience at the Variety & Adobe Anatomy of a Film panel at Sundance with the team behind “Bubble & Squeak.” The discussion included actor and producer Yeun, director and screenwriter Evan Twohy, producer Christina Oh and actors Himesh Patel and Sarah Goldberg. Angelique Jackson, Variety‘s senior entertainment writer, moderated the lively panel.
Yeun was excited at the potential of helping a unique story like “Bubble & Squeak” get made.
“I wanted to help usher from my point of view the film to reveal itself, what I read on the page to just be realized,” he says. “That was my trust in Evan. Then, just coming together and playing the part that I had to play. I wanted to make sure that I was contributing and not doing anything beyond just sitting in my lane too. I always approach trying to make things, so it doesn’t change up things too much. I was just incredibly grateful for all these artists to come together.”
For Twohy, collaboration was the key to getting “Bubble & Squeak” off the ground.
“I feel like there are like a thousand different movies that could have been made from this script, or from any script,” he says. “It’s a lot about embracing that these are the people who showed up for it in this one moment, and that becomes this movie. And then it’s a strange feeling then that is the finished movie. It could have been all these other things, but I think I have the benefit on this one of having worked on it for so long, and it’s changed so much over the years. That sort of flexibility is on my side. I wasn’t married to one version of it because I’d seen it change so many times.”
“Bubble & Squeak” is Twohy’s feature debut, and he’s been working on it since he was a teenager.
“I started this when I was 18 years old,” he says. “The first words of it I started writing at 18, and then five years later I wrote it as a short play. And then 15 years later, now it’s a film. So it’s really followed me my whole life. It’s been a very moving experience to flesh this thing out as I’ve gotten older and been able to put all my life experiences into it. It’s very touching to reach this point.”
Despite his many years shepherding this project, Oh was impressed with Twohy’s willingness to collaborate.
“Strong leaders are confident in their own ability and open to hearing other people’s ideas, or problem solve together, be collaborative and not be so rigid,” Oh says. “I’ve had worked with many people that are the opposite of that, and I have to say, Evan was lovely. Anytime we had a problem or an issue, he was open to discussing something, and even going back into the script and figuring it out.”
The collaboration was so spirited that it made the shoot very pleasant, despite filming in a far-away location, Goldberg says.
“We were shooting in Estonia and we were all out of our element and far away,” she says. “We had such a wonderful time in Estonia, and Christina had this capacity to keep everything really calm and gentle. Obviously, in any independent film, we had our stressful days, but on some days we felt like, ‘Did we make a movie? Because we’re having such a nice time.'”
Patel agreed that the key to running a great set is positive energy, trust and collaboration from the top down.
“It’s a testament to the fact that you can do that without being a tyrant about it,” he says. “In fact, I think more often than not, you need to do the complete opposite and trust people, trust the artists around you to be the best people they can be. Then you’ll get what it was always meant to be.”
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