[Published at the San Francisco Chronicle with co-writer Bob Strauss] For his second feature film, “Run,” director and co-writer Aneesh Chaganty wanted to get as far away from his acclaimed first movie, “Searching,” as he could.

“As creative and as proud as I am of that film, through the entire process of making it I just couldn’t wait to do something ‘normal,’” Chaganty revealed to The Chronicle in a recent video chat from Los Angeles about his missing-person mystery that was told entirely through video screens. “Thankfully, ‘Searching’ was received well, but I knew how easy it is for any filmmaker to get put in a box. I didn’t want to be the ‘screen’ filmmaker. To me, ‘Run’ is intentionally the opposite. It’s hyper-hyper-simple, very classic, timeless.”

The new psychological thriller, which begins streaming Friday, Nov. 20, on Hulu, stars Sarah Paulson as Diane Sherman, the single mother of smart, wheelchair-using teen Chloe (Kiera Allen), who is preparing to leave their small town for college. But Diane, as Chloe and the audience come to learn, may not be emotionally prepared for her daughter’s departure.

Unlike “Searching,” in which the concerned father played by John Cho primarily acted alone into a GoPro, “Run” is mostly a tense two-hander between respected veteran Paulson (“Ratched,” “American Horror Story”) and Allen, a theater actor making her film debut.

The actresses clearly became quite close on “Run’s” winter location in Winnipeg, Manitoba, which provided a far different atmosphere from Chaganty’s hometown of San Jose, where “Searching” was shot and set.

“It was important to Aneesh, and it was also important to both Kiera and myself, that we had a bond that was outside of the working experience so that there was a real sense of ownership of the roles and of our connectivity and our willingness to be brave with one another, given the things we were going to have to try to create,” Paulson said from Los Angeles, where she is filming the upcoming “American Crime Story: Impeachment,” on a video chat that also included Allen.

“Kiera just, very quickly, without intending to, can make you feel like you haven’t accomplished anything in your life because she’s a really brilliant mind and has all these interests,” Paulson added. “I’m like, ‘I like to act.’”

“You were very vulnerable with me from the very beginning, which I really appreciated, given that I’m coming out of nowhere and I could be some crazy person who’s just shown up on set and thinks she can act,” Allen told Paulson. “But you really treated me like a peer, even when I felt like I hadn’t earned that yet.”

Watching Paulson perform tough scenes helped Allen prepare for Chloe’s own, emotionally extreme situations, the novice film actor said. For his part, Chaganty directed the two leads in polar opposite ways. He wrote a 16-page backstory for Paulson’s character, which she internalized before production began, and he barely gave the veteran any instruction on the set. But for Allen, he let her write her own bio for Chloe because he felt she needed to feel, more than be told, what the role was. He then worked closely with the ingenue once the cameras got rolling.

“It was a schizophrenic experience, almost, of how I talked to Sarah and how I talked to Kiera,” Chaganty said. “They acted in the same scenes, but their approaches to them were totally different.”

Chaganty and his producer and co-writer Sev Ohanian, along with fellow producer Natalie Qasabian, determined early on that Chloe should be played by someone who uses a wheelchair. That made the casting search unique and more difficult. Luckily, when Allen heard about the project, she sent an audition tape from her dorm at Columbia University — and it obviously impressed the “Run” team.

“It is way long overdue,” Allen said of her casting. “This is actually the first major thriller in over 70 years to star a real wheelchair user.”

Susan Peters in 1948’s “The Sign of the Ram” is believed to be the last example, “so it has been a long time, and to be a part of that moment is really exciting,” she continued. “Authentic representation is so important.”

Chaganty will be pleased if you detect echoes of wheelchair suspense classics in “Run.” Alfred Hitchcock and M. Night Shyamalan were his favorite directors growing up and part of the reason he went to Valley Christian High School, which he said was the only one in San Jose at the time with a strong filmmaking program.

“There’s, like, homages left and right to those filmmakers in this movie,” Chaganty gleefully admitted. “There are verbal references, shot compositions just straight-up stolen from ‘Rear Window’ or ‘Unbreakable’ or ‘Psycho,’ a lot of objects or even poses.”

While we won’t reveal the film’s twists and surprises, it’s safe to say that Chaganty was also inspired by fellow Indian American Shyamalan’s thematic obsessions. Paulson gave a good example when describing Diane’s mind-set.

“She’s sort of created a world in which what she’s doing is quite normal and what she’s doing has real benefit and is for a greater good,” Paulson said.

Chaganty viewed “Run” as a way of freeing himself from a world he quite spectacularly created.

“It’s two characters, one household, one camera,” he noted. “The question I was asking myself was could I take out all the gimmicks, all the complexity of ‘Searching’ and still tell a story that’s emotional and engaging and, most of all, thrilling? Obviously, the verdict’s still out on whether we did all of those things, but that was the intention. So ‘Searching’ and ‘Run,’ in a weird way, are very much talking to each other — just, maybe, not in a way that people think.”

“Run” (TV-MA) is available for streaming on Hulu starting Friday, Nov. 20.