Interview: Don’t Make Me Go director Hannah Marks on why a cast change took the film in a new direction

One of the hits from last month’s Tribeca Film Festival reaches a wider audience this week in double quick time. Hannah Marks’s road trip tale, Don’t Make Me Go, pulls in to Prime Video and the father/daughter relationship at its core is sure to win even more hearts.

Single dad Max (John Cho) has been diagnosed with a terminal illness, something he can’t bear to tell his teenage daughter Wally (Mia Isaac). But, with her future in mind, he sets out to bring her and her birth mother back together again. It’s an important journey for both of them, which allows the two to become closer yet, at the same time, they each have their own paths to follow – a coming of age story for each of them, in fact.

In the interview below, director Hannah Marks describes why her close relationship with her own father meant that, when she first read the script, she felt it had her name all over it. She also talks about how both father and daughter have their own parallel love stories, with Max’s being the more precarious of the two. Casting played a crucial part in that particular narrative, one that changed the dynamic. “Originally, Annie was going to be Max’s age,” she recalls. “But we fell in love with Kaya Scodelario in the role, and that created the new dynamic of a younger woman with an older man.”

She also its to being a huge Cho fan – “he thrives in every genre” – and answers the question that everybody seeing the film will be asking themselves. Yes, he really can sing.