Golden Globe and Emmy award-nominated writer-producer-director, Ken Mok makes his feature film directorial debut in the upcoming rom-com, The Right One.  Under his company’s banner, 10×10 Entertainment, Mok produced Invincible (2006) starring Mark Wahlberg, as well as the Golden Globe-nominated film Joy (2015) starring Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper. 

The Right One stars Australia’s Cleopatra Coleman (The Last Man on Earth, In The Shadow of the Moon) who plays Sara, a novelist suffering from writer’s block who finds inspiration when she meets Godfrey, played by comedian/musician, Nick Thune, a down-on-his luck oddball who regularly changes personas in order to deal with his past.  Once Godfrey realizes Sara is using his experiences as inspiration for her novel, he abruptly disappears from her life.  The film also stars comic actor, Iliza Shlesinger (Spenser Confidential) who plays Sara’s no-nonsense agent, Kelly.

Born and raised in New York, Mok began his career as a news producer on CNN before moving into the world of entertainment where he launched his production company, 10×10 Entertainment more than 20 years ago.  He found his way into the film business through honing his skills in unscripted projects such as Making the Band, which ran for 12 seasons, as well as his position as executive producer on America’s Top Model.

This is your feature film directorial debut – what were the unexpected challenges and joys?

With any kind of indie film the toughest part was obviously getting the financing together to get it made.  And I think the other hard part was making the transition from the unscripted world to the feature film world, that was a bit challenging to get people to think of me outside that box.  The greatest joy was that the transition to directing which was actually very easy.  I think my skills from running shows really translated to the feature world because there’s so much overlap in terms of the responsibility you have as an executive producer to being a director.   So, I slid into that role pretty easily.

Was directing always the goal or did it evolve naturally?

I think directing was always a goal for me.  At the start of my career, I’d always wanted to write and direct films.  But twenty years ago when the reality boom first started, I got sidetracked into the unscripted genre because I had a skill set that allowed me to write, direct and produce.  When I first started out in my career I started out in the news business as a news producer and I could do all of those things so it made a natural fit for me there.  And then in the last four or five years, I really started concentrating on the craft of writing.  I knew that if I could write material that could stand out I had a chance of directing it.  And that’s really what I focused on.

Your protagonist, Sara, suffers from writer’s block.  Is that based on your own experience?

Surprisingly not.  I haven’t had writer’s block in the material I’ve written.  In the last three or four years, I’ve written about four or five feature scripts on spec, and I’ve been very lucky with those that I never had writer’s block, but I do have a lot of friends and colleagues in the business who have been afflicted with that. 

The Right One has been described as your passion project.  Why this subject?

It comes from two things.  I’ve always been fascinated and obsessed with the late actor Peter Sellers, who played Inspector Clouseau most famously in the Pink Panther series.  The interesting thing about Peter in real life, what everybody had said about him, was that when he wasn’t playing a character he didn’t know who he was.   He literally was a cipher that had to be filled up with a character and because of that everybody said he had a lot of mental instability in his real life.  It made me wonder about what would cause a person to be like that, that a person would have such a weak identity?  And then I had read an article about five years ago about this very popular social media influencer who suddenly quit because everything she was posting on social media was fake.  It was this very idealized, curated version of herself and she couldn’t deal with the pressure of that anymore. So I combined that idea with the idea of Peter Sellers to make The Right One.

How did the cast come together?

The funny or traumatic story behind this was when I originally wrote the script, I wrote it for a very specific actor who I won’t name.  He fell in love with the script and took on the role. Six weeks before we’re about to start filming, that actor dropped out and so did the female lead.    So, I had no leads!  I had written Kelly specifically for Iliza Schlesinger and I had booked her.  So, luckily, I was a big fan of Nick’s, and I was a big fan of Cleopatra Coleman’s.  So we really scrambled to get them on board but it took a while for us to do that and it came together two weeks before shooting.

You must have been a nervous wreck during that time?

It really was nerve-wracking.

You began your career as a news producer on CNN.  News has changed so much since when you started – how do you view the news now?

When I started out in news it was more than a couple of decades ago.  At that time I already didn’t like news and when I started producing news for CNN, I quickly realized after the first year and a half that I wanted out of it.  It’s a very cynical world to live in.  You’re dealing with a lot of stuff that you just don’t really want to deal with, and it’s the same grind every day.  So I realized at that point that I wanted to go into something that was to me more honest, which was entertainment and create content that people could really enjoy and be enriched by.  So I left the news business many years ago.  And it’s very disappointing to see what news has become.  The truth is really optional now and it’s just become platforms for opinions regardless for a viewer who is either on the left or the right, they have their own way to reconfirm their own belief system rather than watching something and getting the truth and the facts.  So I think journalists everywhere are really alarmed at what has happened to the news business, it’s just become propaganda.  And I’m very, very happy that I left that business very early on.

Why should we watch The Right One?

It’s a different take on the romantic comedy. It’s the perfect feel-good movie and like I said I think the timing is right on this film right now.  It’s a film that everybody really kind of needs and I think if people watch this film they’ll come away feeling good.  It’s a good way to say goodbye to 2020 and be hopeful for 2021.