Making Movies Without Permission: How Jenna Kanell and Thang Ho Are Building a Fearless Filmmaking Studio

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When it comes to the entertainment industry, genuine partnerships built on trust and creative chemistry are rare treasures. Such is the case with Jenna Kanell and Thang Ho, whose short film Spray Bottle recently garnered acclaim at the Florida Film Festival. What began as mutual admiration between two filmmakers whose shorts were playing in the same COVID-era drive-in block at the Atlanta Film Festival has blossomed into a promising creative partnership.

The journey of Spray Bottle represents a perfect marriage of talents – Jenna’s background as both an actor and stunt performer informs her directorial vision, and Thang’s producing expertise creates the foundation for their success. Their short film, which features Jenna’s real-life brother and explores her authentic fears about caregiving through a series of action sequences, demonstrates their shared commitment to creating emotional, truthful stories that cast underrepresented communities as heroes rather than victims.

Jenna Kanell and Thang Ho of HOCA Studio

As they prepare to begin work on their first feature film, De Novo, a high-concept sci-fi set in a post-human world told through the eyes of a female mycologist, Jenna and Thang are positioning their new studio venture, HOCA Studio, as a place where creative trust flourishes. Their complementary skills and experiences – from working as ADs to performing various on-set roles – have created a partnership based on mutual respect and a shared philosophy: prepare meticulously so you can make creative mistakes freely. With their upcoming panel “Making Indies Without Permission” at the 2025 Atlanta Film Festival, they’re ready to share their hard-won wisdom with a new generation of filmmakers.

I had the honor of chatting with Jenna and Thang earlier this week, where we explored their creative journey from first collaboration to the formation of HOCA Studio, the success of Spray Bottle, their ambitious sci-fi feature De Novo, the supportive Atlanta filmmaking community, and their refreshing perspective on making mistakes, taking calculated risks, and creating authentic stories.

How Jenna Kanell and Thang Ho Are Building HOCA Studio

What was the inspiration behind Spray Bottle, and how did you come to work together?

Jenna: It’s the first project that we ever made together. So Spray Bottle – I originally wrote it because our executive producer, Jason Reitman, came to me and encouraged me to write something that would incorporate my stunt experience. I’ve worked for a long time as an actor, a stunt performer, and, as a director, but never at the same time. He was very encouraging to do both.

The story that I came up with was very much drawn from real life – that is my real little brother in the film. It’s inspired by my real fears of what it will be like to be a caregiver for him one day, and it’s kind of a worst-case scenario, incorporating action. Thang and I had met prior at an event, and we both had already seen each other’s work and really respected each other’s work, and were really excited about the idea of working together.

Then we made Spray Bottle together, and I realized I couldn’t live without him.

When Jenna first came to you with the Spray Bottle, what were your thoughts on it, and how did that kind of kick off?

Thang: Yeah, I’ve actually already been a fan of her work because we both had shorts in the same block at the Atlanta Film Festival, funnily enough, in 2021. I want to say it was like the COVID year, where we had everything at the drive-in, so we didn’t really get to actually meet each other.

I made a film not too long ago that’s very similar in concept to what Jenna made, and I thought, ‘Oh wow, she did it better than I did.’ I really wanted to know who this was. Fast forward a couple of years later, we met at the porch at this event and we chatted, and then we went to Carol Street Cafe – big shout out to the favorite spot in town.

We then had a couple of glasses of wine, and we wanted to make this movie, and the rest is history.

What was it about working on Spray Bottle together that made you guys want to have a more official, long-term relationship with HOCA Studio?

Jenna: For me, it was the trust. It was so nice to be able to trust that everything that I needed was going to be in place and that I could focus on all of the things that I needed to do. It was just an amazing experience working together. We were able to find a common language, and there was a very quick sort of trust in terms of drive and ambition, as well as abilities and networks within the community, and a love for truthful, emotional, yet still entertaining storytelling.

Thang: Yeah, I think first I was drawn to the story, the way that she wrote that script, because I am a big fan of stories that represent people in different communities, but in a way that they’re the hero of the story, more so than the victim of the story. That was what first drew me towards how she wrote the script.

Immediately, I was like, ‘Oh great, this is fun and we got to do stunts and we got to do all these things.’ Every step of the way, it probably felt like the easiest producing project that I had ever done. We also developed our friendship from that project, and, like Jenna said, I think the trust from working with each other – if somebody said that they’re going to do something, it happens. With that, we started having more conversations about joining forces.

It had been just a very easy and secure process that we’ve had together since Spray Bottle.

With both of you having creative backgrounds, how does that influence you when coming to the studio side? Because typically, you know, studios are giving notes, pushing back on budgets, all of that sort of fun stuff. So, how do you approach studio work, given your creative backgrounds?

Jenna: It works kind of perfectly because we both have very strong points of view, but they’re very different from one another. We both had a lot of experience, but it’s been different in a sort of complementary way.

In a way, it’s really nice because we can – that trust is there in terms of ideas and thoughts, and we can bounce off of each other and notice things that the other one might not notice. But that trust also comes in being able to say ‘these are the battles, these are the hills I will die on, these are the ones I won’t,’ and being able to have those conversations and communicate and sort of inspire each other because we both have similar goals but different ones at the same time, but they complement each other.

Thang: I think that we have both worked in so many different roles on set. I think that we both worked as ADs before as well – you know, arguably one of the most stressful positions on set. We take on a lot of people’s stress in that role. So, as creatives, I think that we keep a lot of that in mind when we write stories.

The panel that we’re doing at the Atlanta Film Festival this coming week is called ‘Making Indies Without Permission.’ But one of the first topics that we’re actually going to talk about is, what are the permissions that you should be thinking about? And also, how do you write for the edits? Like, how do we write for the final product instead of just throwing things at the wall and seeing what hits? I think that philosophy of not being fearful of making mistakes, but doing the best that you can in prep to set yourself up to be able to make mistakes freely – I think is sort of how we would balance that in our working relationship with each other, and also with the studio side.

I know you’re starting to work on your first feature as well. What can you tease about that?

Jenna: So glad you asked. We are very excited about this. It’s called ‘De Novo,’ and it’s a high-concept, low-budget sci-fi that takes place in a post-human world, but through the eye of a mycologist, a female scientist who studies fungus. And it’s something we’re really, really stoked about making together.

I’ll be directing, Thang will be producing. I’m also acting in it. We’re in the development stages, and we’re about to begin fundraising. We’re about to launch our WeFunder in May to gather all the funds that we need to make this happen. It’s been in the works for a long time, and we have a really good team assembled. And it’s a really cool, unique story that hasn’t been told before.

How have you guys found Atlanta from an indie filmmaking standpoint? Has it been really supportive? What’s the community been like?

Jenna: We’ve built a really amazing community. I really love our community here in Atlanta. I mean, it’s amazing because I’ve worked on the studio side a lot and on the indie side, and you can really learn a lot from both of them. There are pros and cons to each one. There are a lot of people here who have training on really big sets that then can use that experience to create their own stories. There are so many people here who are hungry to tell bold, risky stories – but calculated risk, of course. And there are so many people here with amazing skill sets. I mean, the talent pool is incredible, and it’s a great city to create things in.

Thang: Yeah, I feel very lucky because I’m from Vietnam. I was born and raised in Vietnam, and I came here. I came to the United States for college. I went to Boston for college in business school. So, the majority of it was trying to figure out what I was going to do for the rest of my life.

And once I discovered this, this community is sort of my chosen family. We’ve been very lucky to have people who trust us to have their best interests at heart when they arrive with us. And the relationship that Jenna and I have with each other is also the relationship that we have with many of the people we know, which is built on trust. And we have just been very, very lucky. And it just feels like you hang out with a bunch of friends when we’re making things. So it’s been really great.

Jenna: Yeah. And we’ve actually already shot about ten pages of the feature so far. And some of that has been with our friends, and they’re all really talented. Similarly, they all come from different perspectives, different places, and different backgrounds.

And so everyone’s experience sort of feeds into that and creates something really beautiful. And everyone’s just excited to be a part of it, which is something that is sometimes hard to find in certain other markets.

When you formed the studio, was there anything that surprised you about that process? What does it actually take to put together a studio?

Thang: I’d like to start by saying that I’ve been working on this with my other partner, Vishvesh Bakshi. We met in film school during the years that we spent in our formative years. For a while, Vish is a very technical guy, so I had shoes to fill with that. How do we have the forefront? We have the background. We have all of these things. How do we kind of balance each other out?

One of the things that I’ve learned in this industry is that it’s also not about finding people with similar strengths, but also finding people who cover your weaknesses. And so, when we first met, aside from the trust we’ve talked about earlier, I recognized the expertise that Jenna brings to the table.

In terms of what it takes to build a studio, I think it takes a foundation of trust. And I think that there’s a bit of loyalty, a little bit of blind trust. There’s a little bit of foolishness. There’s a little bit of instinct, but also apparent evidence that you have to have enough experience to see it. Because I opened the studio when I first came out of film school, and I made many mistakes before I met Jenna, actually.

So, one of the mottos we always say is ‘Come make mistakes with us,’ because the process I went through and Jenna, with her years of experience in the industry, have just made many mistakes before. So, by the time we met, I think it’s the lessons we’ve learned from our mistakes and how we can balance each other in terms of expertise and skill set. And also compounded that with whatever foolishness we believe that we can make it happen. So I think that’s what it takes for us.

Jenna: And I mean, mistakes as a concept is, I think, something that’s – to address the surprising element – something that’s often surprising I think to a lot of people is that it’s a really beautiful thing to have a learner’s mindset and to admit when you don’t know something and to admit how much you don’t know yet.

And it’s not about not making mistakes, but about what mistakes you make, and not making the same mistakes twice, and learning from them, and who you make mistakes with. If you take the fear component out of it, you might end up with something that’s incredibly beautiful that someone else would have been too afraid to try. So it’s like, you have to be willing to make mistakes.

Jenna: One of the things I always say, which I think is the most important piece of advice I would impart, would be to get, like Thang was talking about, every kind of experience you possibly can, regardless of what you want to do on set, to do a bunch of other things that are not that and to work outside of your lane and get different sort of perspectives.

Like he was talking about both of our experiences in the past with first ADing, for example. You learn not just about how to build a schedule or why a schedule is built a certain way, but I know I also learned a lot about how to communicate with every department, what each department needs, and how long all of that realistically takes. You get a really good sense of the big picture because it’s so easy to be in your lane and to just look at what it is that you’re doing and what you need and to forget that it’s a team sport and it’s so collaborative and it only works if we all work together.

And so I always say that the more perspective you can get on that, the more well-informed you’ll be.

Thang: Yeah, I think the most important advice I’d give to any young filmmaker would be the same reason why I got into film to begin with. The reason why I got into film is that films feel so much larger than you. And I always compare—even within the film industry, I think that there’s very specific, even though it’s a team sport, it’s a different team sport. Like, narrative filmmaking feels like soccer. It feels like basketball when you’re a team and you’re trying to score a goal. Whereas, like music videos, it feels more like F-1 when you’re there to serve the driver and trying to make the driver the best version they can be.

I’m stealing this from Mr. Spielberg, but he said that your dreams don’t come screaming at you. They whisper to you. And what you love is what makes you the most valuable to the people around you. And so I think you should listen to what you love and get really good at it. And then that’s what you can bring to the table because that becomes your best currency in surviving in the industry.

We’re seeing major shifts in the streaming landscape, and in the film industry in general, as consumers experience either subscription fatigue or platforms consolidating, or superhero fatigue. How does the current state of the industry in this kind of changing distribution model affect how you guys are approaching what you’re doing, or does it impact it at all?

Jenna: It certainly impacts it to a degree, but I also think it’s important not to—I mean, we agree, we’ve talked a lot about how it’s important not just to chase trends and like Thang was saying, to be informed by what it is you care about and finding your authentic story, because ultimately if it’s authentic to you and if it touches you and connects with you, then there’s going to be someone else who connects with that.

And so, you know, rather than reverse engineering something, it seems like people want to look at what speaks to you and speak from that place.

Thang: Yeah, I think the model right now is actually really exciting for us because we’re stepping into this stage of making our first studio’s feature film. I do think that when it comes to industry trends, there’s always a pendulum swing. And I do think that after the years of pumping out content being the king, I think we live in a year, and I’m hoping that this next couple of years will be the renaissance of the revival of indie filmmaking.

We’re just starting to see signs of that with Anora winning the Oscars and the successful box office of Sinners, which is a phenomenal movie. I feel like there’s a hunger for that if you know how to market things right. And I think that it does open up a lot of doors, but you do get put in a larger pool.

So it’s just about how you market your film, which is something that we’re very conscious about as we’re heading into making our first feature film, just writing off the spirits, and also being very smart about how we market our film.

Check out the full interview below.