Chloe Okuno is a writer-director based in Los Angeles. Her recent work includes writing a remake of “Audrey Rose” for Orion Pictures and writing and directing a segment of the anthology series “V/H/S/94.” While studying at AFI, she received the Franklin J. Shaffner Fellow Award, and directed the award-winning horror short film “SLUT.”

“Watcher” is screening at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, which is running online from January 20-30. More information can be found on the fest’s website.

W&H: Describe the film for us in your own words.

CO: “Watcher” is a psychological thriller about a woman who moves to Romania with her husband and soon becomes convinced that there is a man in the building across from her who is watching her and potentially stalking her.

W&H: What drew you to this story?

CO: I’ve always admired true psychological thrillers that are dedicated to getting us as much as possible into the head of our protagonist – making us feel everything that they are feeling. I was drawn to the simplicity of it as well – the story of a woman who is not believed.

It can be a very devastating experience, and one that many people have probably encountered at one time or another. Women in particular frequently are confronted with this sort of patronizing stance from the people around them.

We learn to modify our emotions so that we cannot be written off as overly emotional, even if those emotions are justified. It becomes a very exhausting cycle. This is a movie that explores that within a more heightened genre scenario, but the core frustrations are ones that I’ve experienced personally and was interested in exploring.

W&H: What do you want people to think about after they watch the film?

CO: I hope that the movie is immersive and emotional. What people take away from it afterwards is really up to them.

W&H: What was the biggest challenge in making the film?

CO: Of course, making the movie during the pandemic was very difficult. There are already a million ways a movie can get derailed – you really feel every day as if you’re at the mercy of fate, so when you put a global pandemic on top of that and are one positive COVID test away from having to shut down it’s very mentally stressful.

W&H: How did you get your film funded? Share some insights into how you got the film made.

CO: Ultimately we were financed by a film fund called Image Nation, which had partnered with Steven Schneider and Roy Lee on a new company that makes low budget genre movies. This is the first movie from that slate, so in a lot of ways we were all finding our way through this together and there was a certain amount of pressure to succeed.

It was a very long road getting to this point. I was hired to direct the project in 2017 by a company called Lost City. We did some development on the script, then Roy and Steven came on and set it up at Image Nation, and we worked on the script more while we waited on the official green light to move into production.

I’d say that ultimately the film was funded because we found the right producers who believed in it.

W&H: What inspired you to become a filmmaker?

CO: Filmmakers inspired me to become a filmmaker. The people I loved growing up that just spoke to me and excited me in a way that nothing else did: David Fincher, the Coens, Quentin Tarantino, Sofia Coppola, Sergio Leone, Hal Ashby, Ridley Scott. And then I did a summer directing course, shooting little movies with a four person crew on 16 mm cameras, and I completely fell in love with the whole process — even the stress was weirdly addictive.

W&H: What’s the best and worst advice you’ve received?

CO: I had a teacher at AFI who did all the year-end reviews of first-year students. You went into his office and you were supposed to sit down and listen to a critique of everything you’d done that first year. When I went into his office, he just looked at me very sternly and said, “You need to start taking yourself more seriously.” I was sort of shocked. I think it was literally the only thing he said to me for the whole critique, but he’d cut through all the bullshit and just said what I really needed to hear. I had another teacher at AFI say something that still sticks with me, which is, “Acceptable is not acceptable.” Sometimes when you’re making a movie, you know that you’re probably just getting away with something. Maybe it’s not bad, but you have to always try to push past that and fight for it to be great. “Acceptable” is not acceptable.

I don’t really remember the bad advice. But I did have an important person in my career really drill into me the idea that if my first movie was bad, I probably wouldn’t make another one. Even if there’s some level of truth in that, it wasn’t necessarily helpful. Nothing will be perfect and as long as you can find value in your work and try to communicate something that’s meaningful to you, I have to hope that there are other people who’ll see the value in it as well.

W&H: What advice do you have for other women directors?

CO: You have a very difficult job. You will probably have to put up with an absolutely incredible amount of bullshit. Find other female directors who are going through the same thing you are. There is a huge amount of comfort in sharing stories with people who have been through it and truly understand where you’re coming from.

And keep fighting for your movie. Sometimes I think women have a very hard time advocating on behalf of ourselves because we’ve been taught not to make a fuss – to make ourselves as small as we need to be to make men comfortable. If you find it difficult to stand up for yourself, keep standing up for the movie you’re trying to make and fighting for that. Like it’s a baby and you’re Chow Yun-Fat in “Hard Boiled.”

W&H: Name your favorite woman-directed film and why.

CO: God, there are literally so many I love. Penny Marshall’s “A League of Their Own,” Amy Heckerling’s “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” Kathryn Bigelow’s “Point Break,” Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation,” everything from Nora Ephron, everything from Lynne Ramsay.

Maybe my favorite is “American Psycho” from Mary Harron, which was so ahead of its time. Sometimes I think women are really, truly the best people to unpack – and, in the case of “American Psycho,” to satirize toxic masculinity. We have a dark sense of humor about it because we are positioned to see how utterly ridiculous it is, but we’re also the people who know how truly dangerous and violent it can be. Harron captured all of that.

W&H: How are you adjusting to life during the COVID-19 pandemic? Are you keeping creative, and if so, how?

CO: Definitely keeping creative in terms of having to finish post on “Watcher,” but now that that’s wrapped, I would love to just crawl into bed and watch “Gilmore Girls” for around five months, honestly.

W&H: The film industry has a long history of underrepresenting people of color onscreen and behind the scenes and reinforcing — and creating — negative stereotypes. What actions do you think need to be taken to make it more inclusive?

CO: I think it comes from both the top and bottom. POC need to keep pushing their way into the business and people at the top need to advocate for POC and hire them. If more POC are behind the camera, we’ll see a more nuanced, authentic, human representation of POC in front of the camera. And that builds upon itself in some ways, helping to inspire others and show them that they can do it too. They can be filmmakers or producers or actors, etc.