Jane Schoenbrun knows themselves better than most people. Their latest feature, I Saw the TV Glow, has been hailed with glowing (pun intended) responses calling it “monumental”, “truly singular… a total fucking face melter”, and “the movie of [a] generation”. (That last review is particularly moving—congratulations, Julie.) Combine that with a successful festival run and a press tour exponentially bigger than anything they experienced with their microbudget debut, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, and it’s the kind of thing that could go to a filmmaker’s head.

But Schoenbrun has a plan for how to stay grounded amidst all this attention. A self-proclaimed “overplanner”, they’ve deliberately charted out their career as a director, making World’s Fair on a tiny budget before consciously scaling up with A24 for TV Glow. They know what they’re interested in as an artist and are as comfortable talking about art-house classics as they are Y2K pop detritus.

This self-awareness is evident in their work, which channels the emotional turbulence of Schoenbrun’s lived experience as a trans person into mesmerizing, visceral art-horror movies about the feeling of being outside of one’s body, the terror of unrealized potential and the liminal beauty that Schoenbrun calls “glow”. As Zoë shares in her review, “[I] was stunned speechless for a few seconds after finishing this one. Don’t know what else to say other than that it got under my skin in a way few films ever have.”

In I Saw the TV Glow, these themes are expressed through the characters of Owen (Ian Foreman, who ages into Justice Smith), a teenage outcast obsessed with a fictional mid-’90s TV series called The Pink Opaque, and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), his only friend and fellow obsessive. A gossamer blend of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Are You Afraid of the Dark? and The Adventures of Pete & Pete (among others), The Pink Opaque is about psychic teen BFFs Tara (Lindsey Jordan) and Isabel (Helena Howard) and their fight against big bad Mr. Melancholy, the sinister blue man in the moon. The show awakens something in Owen—something that scares him, and something he ignores at his own peril.

The film both evokes and evolves Schoenbrun’s memories of growing up in the suburbs around the turn of the millennium, infusing nostalgic locations with an otherworldly beauty. Capturing those images was a multi-part process, which—true to form—Schoenbrun approached in a thoughtful, methodical way. I caught up with the filmmaker at A24’s New York offices, in a conference room that looked plain to my eyes but Schoenbrun could probably transform into the most gorgeous space you’ve ever seen.

Right.
When I got there, I was thinking ‘Whoa, I can’t believe the number of resources that are being commanded to make my little trauma thing real.’ But I knew that if I could pull it off and make something that felt authentic to the kind of filmmaker I wanted to be [under those circumstances], that would be an amazing coup, something I could always be proud of.

Because I had worked in film for a long time before I started making my own movies, when I decided to make World’s Fair as small as I did, I knew I was investing in my voice as an artist. Knowing what I know about the American film industry, I don’t think I could have made that movie for a million or two million [dollars] without it getting watered down by a scared executive at a development company who would be like, “You can’t open a movie with an eight-minute shot of someone eating string cheese.”

In fact, if you start your filmmaking career already compromising—as I think, unfortunately, most American filmmakers do—that’s all you’ll ever be expected to do. So I made World’s Fair on my own with no resources because it was a gamble and an investment in myself as an artist. If people responded to it, I would be able to say, “Well, now give me more resources and I’ll show you what I can do.”

You can point at it and say, “You like that? Well…”
It was the plan from the beginning. I definitely didn’t know how to direct a movie at [the] level [of I Saw the TV Glow]—there’s this adage you hear from a lot of below-the-line crew that the director is the one with the least experience on set, and in my case it was kind of true. But I really tried to own that from the beginning, and learn. It was such a pleasure, actually, to talk not only to department heads but also to PAs and everyone about the infrastructure of how a set at this level runs. That was an incredibly important part of the process of learning how to work within the system to make something cool.

I was also learning how to advocate for myself as an auteur when a lot of other people’s money is on the line. That was its own learning process. It was both exhausting and made me feel good—because, again, I thought, if I could pull this off, I’d have something to be really proud of. I was working exhaustively in prep and pre-production with [cinematographer] Eric [Yue] and [production designer] Brandon [Tonner-Connolly] and [first AD] Willy [McGee] and my whole creative team to make a plan. We photographed every shot of the film before we shot it. That was part of me being like, ‘I don’t know what I need to prepare, so I better prepare a lot.’

Are there any specifics that you ?
Oh, yeah. The burning TV. Owen and Maddy at the vending machine side by side. Isabel in the grave. Owen opening himself up. A lot of the big moments in the movie. We would do two or three a day, and spend all day on them. We would start by Google Image searching: “We want this kind of television”, or “We need ’90s carpeting”, something like that. Albert would lay them all out in Photoshop, and then draw them. We’d export the collage, animate over it, and then we would just tinker obsessively with color.

I entered pre-production with these images, and not always, but in a lot of cases, the thing that you eventually see in the movie is a faithful reproduction and evolution from that. That was cool, because it would’ve been impossible with World’s Fair. So the budget does allow you to paint, but I am also a huge believer in the location scout as one of the most important creative moments in making the film. When I’m location scouting, I’m basically looking for something to beat me at my own game.

Oh, interesting.
I’m looking to step into a space and have that space give me something in a way that I couldn’t have imagined when I was writing the script, because I was living in an abstract idea. This doesn’t always happen, but I’d say there’s a dozen major moments in this movie that were really created or constructed around the location. For instance, the long tracking shot of Owen walking through the hallway in the school to the Caroline Polachek song—that school had those signs up in the hallway.

Really!
We evolved them a little bit. But Eric Yue, my DP, and I walked in there and he immediately took out his camera setup and mapped out that shot. We were like, “This is so strange”, and now that’s two minutes of the movie. Or when they blew up an inflatable planetarium for us, and when we saw what that planetarium could do, that became the moment. I was just constantly falling in love with spaces, like the fruit and vegetables on the wall of the supermarket. These were all things that I found waiting for me in the suburbs.

I would be so sleepy all through production if I wasn’t looking around like this. If I was just trying to faithfully recreate something I invented for myself two years ago, I would be so sleepy and so bored, and you would feel it in the movie. Production is collaborative: you’re collaborating with all of these different artists, but you’re also collaborating with reality and the world as it exists. I’m constantly looking for things that will evolve the vision and make the universe better in a way that I couldn’t do with a pen and paper in my bedroom.

Music inspired by the motion picture.
I really do think of them as twins or cousins, the process of creating the soundtrack and the process of making the movie, but they’re also each their own thing. I’m so proud of that soundtrack—just as a fan, and also as somebody who put a lot of emotional intention and love into it. Not from the perspective of ‘I’m going to make something that promotes my movie really well’ but ‘I want to make the raddest soundtrack’, because that’s its own creative pursuit.

Were you choosing artists who fit a certain vibe or tone when you asked them to contribute to the soundtrack?
Loosely. There’s definitely… I wasn’t going to ask Sugar Ray to make a song.

As righteous as that would have been. [Laughs]
I totally should have. [Laughs] I don’t know why I went to Sugar Ray there. Anyway, I’ve done a lot of curatorial work. I think the key to good curation is that it all has to exist in one universe, and yet it all has to be very much its own thing and diverse in every sense of the term. That was a huge part of the ethos of curating the list of bands. I was like, ‘I want some bands that are really well known, and I want some bands that are totally unknown and will maybe find an audience through this.’ There’s definitely a sad-girl lesbian thing going on at the core—

That’s my favorite kind of music, honestly.
For me as well. I love that stuff. And it fits with the movie, but I definitely didn’t want it to be sixteen sad white girls singing the same sad acoustic guitar song. So making sure the roster of bands really spoke to itself but also was surprising and could be an experience that felt really engrossing—that was all part of the curatorial process.

You make horror movies about alienation and dissociation. Dysphoria plays into that, obviously, but your work also engages with the internet and TV. How does that all come together for you?
I think it started from this ‘aha’ moment I had early on, when I was trying to figure out what I could make a movie about. I was like, ‘I should make a movie about watching things,’ because that’s what I did back then. I spent so much of my life doing that.

How you experienced life.
Yeah. I still do watch [a lot of movies and TV]. I don’t think I’m alone in that experience. It’s one of the things that we do most that we make movies about least.

I also, early on, emotionally zeroed in on this part of gender transition and this part of becoming oneself. One time, I was having a conversation with a co-worker who was a casual Buddhist, and I him saying to me, “I try to live my life 50 percent of the time in the audience watching myself, and 50 percent of the time on stage in the play.” I saying to myself, “Oh, I’m just in the audience. That’s all I do.”

Oh, wow.
The idea of the screen and watching as a way of, like Owen says in the film, narrating your own life instead of living it. A way of not being yourself. A way of having this dissociative distance that the characters in [my] first two films are both engaging in. And the idea of that gap being closed, perhaps in the way that we start to see at the end of [I Saw the TV Glow]. Owen and Maddy are taking steps to not just watch themselves on a screen but to become themselves on the screen. This is, I think, a really fruitful and deep motif to return to.

I also think screens are beautiful. Glow is beautiful, and the liminality of glow. I read a book of trans film theory called Shimmering Images [by Eliza Steinbock] after I made World’s Fair. It was all about why trans people are drawn to the liminality of glow and shimmer, static and fuzz. This idea that our lived experience is one of liminality is quite liminal in its way. It certainly makes sense that we would be drawn to that as an aesthetic or thematic motif in our work. So I do think there’s that element as well.

Before I transitioned, so much of my work was about dreams, and longing to enter a space where identity and reality could become diffuse in the way that it is a dream. I’m trying to conjure a similar feeling in my work.