The first sound you hear at the beginning of All That We Love, the new film directed by Austin-based filmmaker Yen Tan, is wind chimes tinkling in the breeze. The gentle stillness of this opening scene immediately reminded me of the hush that envelops the world when someone you love dies. In this case, that someone isn’t a parent, sibling, or a spouse. It’s a pet.
“My dog Tanner died ten years ago, and I was looking to films to see if there was something I could watch to help me go through what I was going through,” Tan says. “But I wasn’t able to find anything.”
When he lost his Chinese Shar-Pei, Tan watched the classic tearjerker Marley and Me, which ends (spoiler alert!) with a couple losing their adorable yellow Labrador, Marley. As beloved as that story is by anyone who understands that the bonds between humans and dogs run deep, it wasn’t exactly what Tan needed. “I wanted to know what happened to the characters after Marley died,” he says.
Based on that impulse, ten years ago, Tan sat down with his cowriter, Clay Liford, and wrote the first draft of All That We Love, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City this month. At the time, he was reflecting on his relationships with his husband and his friends, and the fact that those relationships seemed to have deepened in interesting ways in the wake of Tanner’s death. While he spent a decade seeking funding for the film and reworking the script, he worked on other projects. He knew that a story about someone grieving the loss of a pet would resonate with audiences since it’s such a universal experience, so he never gave up on it. “The movie went through so many steps,” he says. “That’s the nature putting together an independent film.”
I initially met Tan way back in 2007 at the inaugural Lone Star Film Festival in Fort Worth. Festival cofounder Bill Paxton (RIP) was there, and Robert Rodriguez, in his signature black cowboy hat, was that year’s honoree. A big moment for me was meeting T Bone Burnett and bonding over the fact that my grandparents and his parents had lived on Modlin Avenue in Fort Worth. The real highlight, though, was hanging out with a group of young directors like Tan, Liford, David Lowery, and Kat Candler, who, along with brothers David and Nathan Zellner, had formed a tight-knit group of independent Texas filmmakers who’ve since gone on to work on award-winning television series and major studio films. Tan says that even though some of his friends have “blown up in major ways” and ventured outside of Texas to produce and direct projects, the sense of community they built here remains strong. When Tan’s husband died earlier this year, several of them came back together for the memorial.
“Having that camaraderie and realizing that in many ways we’re still the same is very nice,” he says. “We all know this idea of community filmmaking doesn’t really happen anywhere else. The more we grow and branch out to other parts of the world and make films, the more we realize that what we had here is something to be cherished.”
All That We Love was originally set in Texas, with the characters living in Austin and taking trips to Bastrop or the Hill Country. Tan was used to making small-budget, nonunion films in the state, like the 2013 Film Independent Spirit Award nominee Pitstop, which he wrote with Lowery, and the 2019 GLAAD Media Award nominee 1985. With indie films, Tan says that where and when you shoot isn’t really dictated by the director, it’s dictated by the cast. Because of the schedules of costars Margaret Cho and Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Tan and Liford relocated All That We Love to a nondescript city, and shot the film in Los Angeles. Shooting in California, on a union production, took some getting used to.
“I’ve been in the DIY world for so long making films in Texas, and suddenly I was confronted with all these rules I had to follow in California,” says Tan. “It was an awakening and I struggled with that initially, like, what do you mean I can’t do these things?”
His “little ass movie” follows empty nester Emma (Cho) as she struggles to navigate life after the death of her dog, Tanner—named after Tan’s, though film Tanner is a mutt. Her relationships with her daughter, Maggie (Alice Lee), and her best friend, Stan (Ferguson), become strained. Her ex-husband Andy (Kenneth Choi), who abandoned her and Maggie years ago, unexpectedly returns, and all of this, in the wake of losing Tanner, causes her life to turn upside down. Grief over losing an animal is so often looked at as less devastating than losing a person, but the film treats Emma’s bereavement over Tanner with as much respect and care as any other type of loss. Tan said Cho responded to the script because she’s lost dogs of her own, so she could bring some of that experience and those emotions to the character.
Ferguson’s character, meanwhile, is grieving the loss of his husband. “This was written ten years ago when I didn’t have any actual real life insight about what it’s like to lose your partner,” Tan says. “Now I watch the film and everything that he’s saying or experiencing is almost like a sense of did I forecast this somehow? [It] feels very real and present to me.”
Tan hopes that their stories will help people feel validated in their own grief, whether they’re missing a pet or a person. “A film can’t answer all the questions or address everything someone is feeling,” he says, “but for ninety minutes, maybe you can feel like somebody gets it.”
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