Obsession creative team reveals the greatest filming challenges, share unique storyboarding process

It is an understatement to say that Obsession has been one of the most successful films of the year. Produced on a budget under $1 million, the film has a global box office revenue of $408 million. However, it wasn't easy to film such a moving film.

Obsession's creative team has now revealed the filming challenges and shared the unique process that went into making the film.

The biggest challenges of filming Obsession

Obsession is the success that it is because of its director, Curry Barker, and the hard work of the entire cast and crew. The film sheds light on the fact that you can't force someone to love you without facing terrible consequences. It also addresses the saying 'be careful what you wish for.'

The film's story follows Bear (Michael Johnston), who likes his co-worker Nikki. When he realizes that she doesn't like him back, he makes a wish to be the one Nikki loves the most using a novelty toy. His wish surprisingly comes true almost immediately.

Initially, Nikki is a loving partner, but her love for him soon spirals into an obsession, and Bear realizes that what's happening isn't what he wished for. It is quite evident that most of the important scenes in the film were extremely well-planned and required a lot of hard work to be well executed.

Speaking to Universal Pictures at Home, Michael Johnston talked about the most challenging part of playing Bear. As Johnston said:

"My biggest challenge on the shoot was preserving my intensity. There's a lot of really intense scenes. We would shoot all night and I reallly wanted to just give it 110% every time, but l learned pretty quickly that I had to save some for later. Curry is such a visual director. He's editing the movie in his head while we're shootting. So, l only really have to go all out for half the scene."

Many scenes in Obsession are intense because Bear is constantly shocked by Nikki's behavior along with the audience. The intensity is what creates the eerieness in most scenes. But that intensity isn't needed for all scenes, and it was thus a challenge for Johnston to reign in the intensity.

Curry Barker, the director of Obsession, also talked to Universal Pictures at Home about his creative process. Barker expressed that he had planned out scenes beforehand, knowing exactly how he wanted the film to look. He thus knew how he wanted each scene to look, which was an essential part of the filming process.

However, he saw things from a different perspective when his DP Taylor Clemons shared his creative process. As Barker said,

"But then when I met my DP Taylor, he had this process that he was doing on some of his films where he would scan areas with his phone with the LAR scanner and 3D scan it and then we put it in Unreal Engine and then you have these puppets and you can actually storyboard the movie in the video game."

Barker learned from Clemons and used the method in Obsession. As he continues saying,

"Using that process, we went scene by scene and we storyboarded the entire movie. And what's funny is we didn't just storyboard. I would actually edit it. So I'd be like, "Then we're going to cut this, then we're going to cut back to this." With that little cartoon, you almost kind of had the movie all laid out."

Thus, while there were challenges to convey what the creatives wanted the film to look like, they figured out a solution. It was extremely important that they knew everyone knew what they wanted because in a film like Obsession, every visual matters. As Michael Johnston pointed out, Barker is a visual director, and it turns out that's what helped them the most when they were making the film.

Obsession will be available for streaming on Peacock from July 17, 2026.

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