Director Jennifer Phang is an idealist, but she's also realistic. Spend any amount of time with her and it's apparent there is a constant internal tennis match in her mind between a cynicism nurtured by exposure to an unfair society and a stubborn hope that we can learn to be better—better to women, better to the environment, better to each other. It's a struggle we all face, but in her new film, Advantageous, it's Phang's optimistic side that takes match point.
The film is just Phang's latest attempt to be a part of the solution she so deeply hopes for, to raise our awareness of the issues she views as most pressing in our world. Now that Advantageous is done she's moving on to a science fiction love story involving a super collider and, she says, "an alternate dimension where you can find lost girls and fix your love problems." She's also working on a global warming related project called The Canopy, The Stream, The Sea. She describes it as having "that easy style of Before Midnight where you're relaxing in a beautiful place talking about problems," but it's about a climate scientist who has disappeared in the Borneo rainforest and the people who try to pull her back into civilization so she can continue her environmental efforts.
"It's basically an anti-cynicism movie," Phang says. "It's an attempt to re-engage moviegoers who've lost hope."
And thus we arrive at the battle between hope and cynicism in Advantageous, out now on Netflix. It tells the story of a woman named Gwen (Jacqueline Kim) living with her daughter in the near future. Gwen has a seemingly tidy existence as the spokeswoman for a cutting-edge biotech company, but unemployment is at catastrophic levels, and the most prized job candidates are either A) men or B) younger and more marketable women than single mother Gwen. So when she gets fired in an "it's not personal" flourish despite being the most qualified person to fill her role, Gwen must decide what she is willing to sacrifice to ensure her daughter's future.
So from its humble beginnings as a dystopic short film to its debut at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the US Dramatic Special Jury Award for Collaborative Vision, here is the story of Advantageous.
Advantageous the feature was born out of Advantageous the short film, which was brought to life through the Independent Film and Television Service's Futurestates short film series. It's an anthology that imagines what our world will look like in the decades to come based on the visions of various independent filmmakers. When ITVS approached her about pitching a film she jumped at the chance since, as she says, "That was an opportunity I didn't want to pass up, because who funds short sci-fi about women's issues?"
With ITVS behind her and a story in hand, Phang then found her star, and eventual co-writer, in Jacqueline Kim. In person, Kim is as deliberate and thoughtful as she is on screen as Gwen, and seems to be as eminently stoic. Ask *Community'*s Ken Jeong, who plays a character named Han in the film, about Kim and he offers glowing praise. "She's just beautiful in so many ways—inside and out—as a performer, as a character, as a person," he says.
The Advantageous short was shot in New York, where Phang was living at the time, and it debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2012. The footage from the short—and material that ended up on the cutting room floor during editing—would serve as the foundation for the eventual feature-length film. So far, it's the only Futurestates installment to grow into a larger autonomous property.
At least a little tiny bit of the reason why Jeong, who also co-produced the film, thinks so highly of his co-star Kim is because she was the reason he got hired in the first place. Apparently, she had seen him in The Hangover 2, and where most people celebrate his gangster alter ego Leslie Chow for his bombastic antics, Kim was more interested in the nuances of his performance, the little business of fleeting eye movements and hand gestures that she saw as giving the Chow character his real depth and substance.
Jeong and his wife were already fans of the short film, so when he got the call from Phang about getting involved, his wife told him he had to accept. Being a dad to a pair of 7-year-old twin daughters really made the themes of Advantageous resonate for him. "The short is so moving," Jeong says. "It's just one of the proudest moments of my career, just to be a part of it as an actor and for them to even trust me with this material and this role."
Jeong gets legitimately choked up explaining how emotionally affected he was during filming at times, but because he's still Ken Jeong, he also starts riffing on what the Ken Jeong-style tagline to the sequel would be: "Advantageous 2: The Ken Jeong Criterion Collection. 'Shit's about to get real, yo!'"
There's a key operating tenant that indie cinema icons Jay and Mark Duplass have been spreading for a while: the "available materials school of filmmaking." In other words, it means you take what you've got around you and grow your vision from there. For Phang, that meant calling on the community she's amassed over her years making under-the-radar films and using all their available talents.
She knew she wanted Advantageous' protagonist, Gwen, to play an instrument in the film. Kim could play the trumpet, but there was a piano in the apartment they had rented out, and Kim could play that too. So, piano it was! Kim is also a proficient French speaker, much like Samantha Kim, the young actress cast to play her daughter, Jules. Now the two characters could speak in French to each other and Gwen could help Jules with her homework.
Beyond those more practical props, a large portion of the visual effects were done by a group of recently graduated and currently enrolled art students that specialize in helping independent filmmakers with VFX, and she got connected with them by a woman she worked with on Half-Life in 2008.
For the score, Phang tapped an old friend named Timo Chen to form its sonic palette, which he did by creating sounds from scratch and folding them together with over-the-counter software components, hand-played instruments, and found objects.
Chen also did the music for the original Advantageous short, but that didn't require much besides a handful of atmospheric pieces and its piano theme. When Phang came back to him for the feature film he really got to go in a much more experimental direction.
When people think of science fiction they often imagine synthesizers and digital sounds, but Chen sought to make a more hybrid sound to fit the characters and themes of the film.
"I wanted to use a lot of traditional instruments, but play them in different ways that weren't used before," he says. "I'd go on my journey and when I came back I'd say, 'Look, I got these souvenirs.' And [Phang] would look at some of them and try them and say, 'Some of these are working. Can you go forward with this?'"
During his journey to create the film's subtle sonic bloodstream, he also used very unconventional methods, like playing piano strings with a toothbrush, banging pots and pans together, and using anything around him that felt inspiring to make music, including Velcro, a vibrator, a baritone violin, a bicycle, and even a hurdy-gurdy.
By the end of his process, Chen says what you hear in the movie is about one-third readily available sounds found in any music production software, one-third handmade sounds he built, and one-third live instrumentation. The score is not obtrusive; it's more like a heartbeat that gives the film and its two core female characters a unified spirit throughout.
"This was a science fiction tale but also it was a story of a mother and daughter. It was a story about women and human struggle," Chen explains. "I wanted the score to have a very humanist element to it."
The whole conceit of Advantageous is a gamble if you're a director who wants people to be able to actually watch it, but thanks to the digital age and the power of Netflix, Phang's three-year journey from short film to feature film to film festival is about to conclude with a day-and-date theatrical and VOD release. Netflix, the emerging champion independent artists of our time, will also be translating Advantageous into 18 languages, and being on the streaming service means it will get an immediate global release.
"We feel the film is urgent and has an international need and reach, so it's a perfect situation," says Phang. "And Netflix itself was excited for that particular reason. They have localized needs, and because it crosses local platforms and niches—women, sci-fi, Asians, Americans—with their special algorithms, everything will work out!"
Phang delivers that last line with her recurring dry but genuine enthusiasm, and even though it's funny to think about an algorithm that just fixes everything, the impact Netflix can have on a film like hers is clear. The fact that a film distributor can track and serve so many localized areas of interest—and that it benefits their bottom line to do so—means there's a market for countless independent movies that big studios simply don't have time for anymore. Now we can have our Advantageous entrees before we get to our Thor desserts.
Based on what we are conditioned to expect from movies, Advantageous is still something of an underdog with its predominantly female and Asian-American cast and light science fiction story about the disenfranchisement of women. It is a movie of glances and slight gestures set to the hum of a baritone violin, not a cosmic epic with explosions and booming horns. Phang knows this, and by creating a film so personally connected to her she has ultimately made a piece of art that is overwhelmingly human and relatable.
But here's the really cool thing: By virtue of even making this movie—and getting it picked up by Netflix—with its cast and its ideals and its activism clearly on display, Phang has already proven that the bleak vision presented in Advantageous need not be our inevitable future—a future where women are disposable and asked to literally trade in their bodies if they want to survive. But that doesn't mean those ideas still don't trouble Phang.
"What are our standards for survival?" Phang asked during an interview at Sundance. "People feel like it has to be a 'me or them' kind of world, because it's their upbringing. That's the actually the world we were trying to explore, a very self-aware society where everyone is playing the same game. But everyone really just wants to have love and protect the things and the people they love."
This is the cynical part. But what has the director hopeful is that she sees a growth in appetite for stories like Advantageous. "There are women with voices and brains and power and intelligence that have been waiting for this moment," she says, adding that for years she was worried saying the word "feminist" meant she would never make money. Now she notices female CEOs using the word and sees hope. Her movies are meant to push that dream forward.
"I think of sci-fi as a way for people to deal with real issues in a slightly abstracted way so that they can handle it," she says. "I feel the momentum. It feels like it's exponential in its growth and I'm excited."
