‘Spa Night’ at 10: Andrew Ahn on Telling Queer Asian Stories, Sundance, and Hollywood’s Next Wave

This year marks a decade since “Spa Night,” the quiet, sweat-beaded debut that launched Andrew Ahn‘s career in 2016. He came through the Sundance Labs in the same era as Ryan Coogler and Chloé Zhao, both since minted as Oscar winners, back when the labs looked like the surest on-ramp in American independent film.

A decade later, Ahn has four features to his name, directed episodes of “Bridgerton,” and a working philosophy that has quietly refused to age.

“The only truth in this industry is that the industry is constantly evolving,” Ahn told IndieWire, with the equanimity of a man who has watched at least one wave crest under him.

What follows is the story of an artist built by institutions in transition, and one whose films have spent 10 years declining the easiest version of a fight.

Rewatch “Spa Night” now, and the first surprise is its cinematography. While indies and studios keep delivering movies in a “gritty” desaturated gray, Ahn and cinematographer Ki Jin Kim built something colorfully transcendent: widescreen compositions that stress the physical arrangement of bodies, and an unembarrassed attention to the color, texture, and heat of skin. David Cho’s (Joe Seo) millennial wardrobe is the only thing that time-stamps it.

“We were not trying to force an aesthetic based on a trend,” Ahn said. “We were thinking about Koreatown, about a sense of repression, a sense of summer, sexual exploration.” He’s still delighted by a choice Kim made in the casting room: while watching audition tapes, the DP decided the film should be shot handheld if one actor were cast and locked to a tripod if Seo got the part, based purely on the energy each gave the role.

“That feels like filmmaking,” Ahn said. With a Film Independent grant and an “old school, super French” colorist named Marjolaine Mispelaere, they pushed for grain and touch because, as Ahn put it, “so much of this film is about desire.”

That desire is a good deal more explicit than even admirers tend to remember; the film is full of nude bodies in real spas. The cruisy interiors were stitched together from two locations, including a since-shuttered spot called Lion Spa and a second Koreatown bathhouse, neither of which, Ahn noted, still exists in its former glory. Shooting it on a microbudget, years before intimacy coordinators became standard, meant the director and his producers became their own.

“We were doing as much as we could pre-intimacy coordinators, doing that job ourselves,” he said, with audible relief that the role now exists. “The more people there to support your actors, the better.” He felt no qualms about the nudity itself. “It was very story-driven. I didn’t feel like we were exploiting anybody or titillating.”

Ten years ago, in this writer’s first interview with Ahn, he said something about “Spa Night” that turned out to be a thesis for his career: “David’s dilemma isn’t that people are condemning him for being gay. That’s too easy.” Last year, promoting his version of “The Wedding Banquet,” he said it again almost verbatim: The film didn’t want to “deal with homophobia, which would be such an easy villain. What may seem like homophobia is just the grandmother’s concern to protect her grandson.”

It’s the same refusal, nine years apart, held through a political stretch that gave any queer filmmaker ample reason to point at the obvious antagonist and let it rip. Ahn seems mildly startled to hear his own consistency read back to him. “It’s interesting that that philosophy has stuck around these past 10 years. I didn’t quite realize it,” he said. “Part of my interest is in the internal lives of queer people, how we’re internalizing that, what is our own struggle.”

This focus on internal life isn’t a pivot away from reality, but one he earned by addressing reality head-on.

“The hardest thing about making ‘Spa Night’ was making a queer film within the Korean American community,” he said. Actors and locations turned the project down for being queer. His coping mechanism was to convert that fear into fuel. “Even if no one’s being explicitly homophobic, there’s always the anxiety of going into a space and wondering, ‘Once they find out who I am, is that going to change the way they look at me?’ Compartmentalizing the fear was the only way I could make the movie.”

‘Spa Night’©Strand Releasing/Courtesy Everett Collection

That anxiety hasn’t fully left him. On the set of “The Wedding Banquet,” while staging an elaborate Korean wedding ceremony, Ahn found himself bracing before meeting the consultants and veteran actress Yuh-jung Youn. He was unsure how a woman of her generation would feel about performing in a gay movie. Then, Youn told him about her own queer son. “That made me feel like we’re a creative family, that we can make this film together,” he said.

It is perhaps this specific relief — the shift from bracing for impact to finding family — that allows him to keep his stories focused on the nuanced “grandmother’s concern” rather than the “easy villain” of homophobia. And while there are plenty of films about homophobic violence, Ahn doesn’t feel called to add to that particular canon. “I just have a lot of empathy for my characters,” he said.

It’s the same instinct that animated the question I’d put to him a decade earlier, when he described his gay and Korean selves as two things that “don’t quite fit together yet.” Did they ever reconcile? Or did he stop needing them to?

“A big reason I’m a filmmaker is that I want to tell stories that reconcile these two identities,” he said. “It’s not that I’ve figured it out. I’m just trying in my own work to create a space where being gay and being Korean don’t feel in opposition. The only way to change culture is to create culture.” All four of his features, he noted, are about Asian Americans, and all are queer either openly or, implicitly, as in the case of 2019’s “Driveways.”

He didn’t think that could be his career path when he started. “After ‘Spa Night,’ I was pretty certain I’d have to make films that weren’t queer and/or Asian. That felt so nuts.” He namechecks Justin Lin’s “Annapolis” and Wayne Wang’s “Maid in Manhattan” as the type of studio assignments he assumed were the price of a sustainable career. Assignment that he’s largely sidestepped.

Ahn sounds happiest cataloging the company he keeps. James Sweeney’s “Twinless” sent him: “What a joy to see someone who’s also gay and Korean kill it. That’s one I’m so happy is part of the canon.” The canon, in other words, that 2016 Ahn wasn’t sure would ever have room for him.

If his principles have held, his confidence about the road ahead has not. “I can definitely sense a certain conservatism in the industry that’s mirroring what’s happening in the world,” Ahn said. “I feel like with these four movies I’ve been riding a wave. I’m a little bit scared to say that wave might be dying, and I have to paddle back out and try to catch another.”

Andrew Ahn, Bowen Yang, Joan Chen, Kelly Marie Tran, Lily Gladstone, Han Gi-chan, and Yuh-jung Youn at the IndieWire Studio 2025 at Sundance presented by Dropbox held at The IndieWire Studio on January 26, 2025 in Park City, Utah.Clayton Chase/IndieWire

That fear has a number attached to it. Earlier this month, a Substack post began making the rounds with a statistic that could ruin any film programmer’s morning. Curry Barker’s “Obsession,” shot for $750,000 and routed around every traditional gatekeeper in the business, had, by its author’s own admittedly generous-to-Sundance accounting, out-earned all 68 titles to play the U.S. Dramatic Competition at Sundance since 2020 combined.

You can quibble with the math, and the author invites you to; they padded the festival’s side of the ledger with streaming acquisition prices and still couldn’t close the gap. But the number lands like a verdict on an entire way of making independent film, and it arrives at a moment when a new generation of filmmakers is deciding if film festivals can provide a return on investment.

Ahn is, by temperament and biography, an institutionalist. 13 years ago, he honed his craft at the Sundance Screenwriters Intensive, where he sat in rooms led by Joan Tewkesbury (screenwriter of Robert Altman’s “Nashville”), who just turned 90, and listened to a young Coogler, who just won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for “Sinners.” What Sundance gave him, he said, wasn’t a deal. It was a standard.

“There was a rigor I don’t know if I’d ever considered. Making a feature is hard work,” he said. “The constant feedback, the reflection. Sometimes when you’re alone, you think, ‘I’ve worked enough.’ It’s only when you have other people around that you go, ‘Wait, no, there’s more.'” He still uses it as a hedge against his own complacency: “As I get older in my career, I have to remind myself not to coast.”

So when the conversation turns to the Gen Z filmmakers building audiences on YouTube and selling finished movies straight to distributors, bypassing the labs, the festivals, and the fellowships entirely, Ahn neither bristles nor pretends fluency. “I’m less familiar with people building a film career through direct audience engagement on social media. I don’t know if I want to engage in that, but I’m happy that it exists,” he said.

The filmmaking movement that launched Ahn’s career may be ending, but he isn’t dwelling on the past. “I don’t bemoan the loss of a previous era. It’s cool that there are so many pathways for people to tell stories.” The harder question is whether the new wave produces the next queer Korean kid with a small, strange, personal film.

For Ahn, ensuring that future means preserving and honoring the pipeline that shaped his own cohort.

“I love the institutions that supported me, Sundance, Film Independent. I would not be who I am without them,” he said. “I’m doing everything I can to give back.” Of seeing Coogler and Zhao, lab classmates, side by side at the Oscars: “The impact is undeniable. The legacy exists.”

What he wants next is unguarded and a little romantic. He’s loved making comedies, but, “I’m dying to do another drama. I’m so inspired by filmmakers like Celine Song. I’m desperate to do something like a sweeping love story.” He daydreams about a music movie in the key of “Almost Famous” or “Amadeus.” Whatever it is, he expects it will keep its center of gravity. “Hopefully they’ll all still be gay and Asian in some way,” he said.

It’s his whole position onscreen and off: refusing to let the easy villains win, and making rigorous work about his community. And though the wave is turning, Ahn is already squinting at the horizon for the next one.

“Spa Night” screens at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on Thursday, June 18, with writer/director Andrew Ahn and actor Joe Seo in person, moderated by comedian and actor Margaret Cho.