Title: Horror Meets Sci-Fi in 'I Saw the TV Glow'

[music]

Alison Stewart: We're concluding today's show celebrating independent films with a look at the sci-fi thriller "I Saw the TV Glow," which follows two teens in '90s suburbia, Maddy and Owen, who bond over a TV show called The Pink Opaque. The show is supernatural. Think Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Goosebumps. However, things take a strange turn when one of the teens, Maddy, mysteriously disappears and the show gets canceled shortly after, which leaves Owen feeling completely alone.

Then elements of the show's story start to bleed into Owen's real life as he struggles to figure out what is real and what is not. I Saw the TV Glow is available to stream now on Max. The film received Independent Spirit Award noms for Best Feature, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Lead Performance, and Supporting Performance. Earlier this year, actor Justice Smith, who plays Owen, and director Jane Schoenbrun joined guest host Kousha Navidar. Kousha started by asking Schoenbrun to describe the two main characters, Owen and Maddy, and what motivates them. Let's listen.

Jane Schoenbrun: Owen is sort of a scaredy-cat. I think he's somebody who has never quite felt comfortable inside his own skin. He's somebody maybe with a rebellious streak, but it's buried way, way down under a lot of layers of anxiety. He's someone who's like an introvert. He's someone who maybe lives in his imagination, and I think this is why he's so drawn to television and to these fictional worlds that he's able to sort of put his love into.

Then I think Maddy is similarly an outcast, somebody who doesn't fit cleanly in with the popular crowd in the 1990s. They're like high school suburban setting that they share. I think Maddy is someone whose response to not quite fitting in is less to withdraw and more to, like, fight back. She is the, like a loner hiding in the photography lab's dark room after school, glaring at anyone who dares call her a lesbian in the school hallway.

I think she's somebody who can't wait to escape, can't wait to find a world for herself that feels more magical than this place she's stuck. The two form this bond, and the bond is really based in this shared love of a TV show that, like the TV shows that I grew up watching and loved so deeply, maybe is dated and a little silly, and the monsters on the show are trying to be scary, but they're made with cheap latex costumes, but what they see in that show is something that they can look forward to every week and something that transports them to another place that lets them feel more like themselves than the environment that they're stuck inside.

Kousha Navidar: Yes, I feel like you and I must have grown up on the same TV shows, because while I was watching this movie, a lot of the aesthetic reminded me of the pieces of TV that I used to love when I was watching back in the '90s. Justice, when you read Jane's script, what drew you into the character of Owen?

Justice Smith: I thought it was a character epic, like I'd never seen a character have an arc that was like a de-evolution of sorts. It felt like there was a lot that I could chew on. I remember that I had to really let go and trust Jane's vision during the process because Jane knew what they wanted and had such a clear idea of what the story they were telling was. I feel like the more I-- I feel like I really had to get out of my own way and kind of trust the text and trust the story and just ride the wave with the character.

Jane Schoenbrun: The movie takes place, I think, we can say across a longer time span than movies usually track a character.

Justice Smith: Yes. We follow this character like 30 years.

Kousha Navidar: Justice, I thought it was interesting that you said that you were trying to-- you had to get out of your own way with the text. Would you say that's a way that this project pushed you as a performer?

Justice Smith: Oh, absolutely. This project changed a lot for me. Owen is going on this journey of running away from truth of balancing the impossible fork in the road of, "Do I want to continue to suffer in hiding, or do I want to suffer out in the open?"

[laughter]

Justice Smith: I feel like I was having this antithetical personal journey throughout the film as well where I was learning how to accept myself as enough as a performer specifically, because in the past I've been so obsessed with quality that it's gotten in the way of me actually living in the circumstance of the character, and with this, because there was so much to track, the progression of his asthma, his de-evolution, his different ages. Narrator Owen was another thing I had to track. Because there was so much, I had to just let go and be present. I felt like that taught me a lot about accepting myself in the moment.

Kousha Navidar: Let's hear a little bit of what that performance sounded like, because that's such a beautiful way that you're describing it, Justice. We can dive into Owen's character a little bit more in that way. This is him talking to Maddy when they're both in high school, asking if Maddy might be interested in watching The Pink Opaque together. Here it is.

Owen: If you wanted, I could come over again. I've been watching the tapes you've been making me, but I wanted to watch The Pink Opaque on Saturday night again while it airs.

Maddy: I like girls, you know that, right? I'm not into boys.

Owen: Totally. That's fine.

Maddy: Okay, I'm just making sure. What about you? Do you like girls?

Owen: I don't-- I don't know.

Maddy: Boys?

Owen: I think that I like TV shows. [chuckles]

Kousha Navidar: You can totally hear that idea that you were talking about, Justice, of does Owen want to suffer on the inside or externally. Jane, I think it's great when people show how genuinely excited they are about a project of theirs, and if you'll forgive me, I poked around your Twitter feed to see what you said about I Saw the TV Glow, and I love what you wrote back in December.

You said, "I left it all on the field with this one. I can't believe it even exists, to be honest. It came from my guts, and soon you'll be able to watch it wriggle and glow on the big screen," which really delighted me when I read it. I'm wondering, can you tell me about the guts there? What about the process of writing and executing this made it feel like it came from your guts?

Jane Schoenbrun: I am trans, just to put that out there for everyone listening on the radio. I started my physical transition not long before I wrote this film. The film was very inspired by early transition. By the way, that early transition, I think, forces you not only to understand every element of your life in the present tense in a new way, meaning that it's almost an inevitability and certainly for somebody who-- I'm 37 years old and solidly a millennial. I was very embedded in like a "straight millennial world," and I knew that transition was going to and already was throwing into absolute chaos everything that I had thought of as home, family, reality. It was like a period of incredible volatility and vulnerability.

I was dealing with all of that in the moment in a very visceral way when I wrote this film. I'm in a very, very different stage of transition, but it has been important to me on this entire journey to honor the rawness of that moment and the emotional truth of that moment because I don't think we see a lot of films entering pop culture the way this one will, that are trying to speak authentically from inside the experience of transition.

Kousha Navidar: As you thought about making a movie rooted in the conflict of expressing one's identity and dysphoria, were there pitfalls or devices that you were trying to specifically avoid?

Jane Schoenbrun: I think that any trans artist, and especially filmmakers, are hyper-aware of the ways in which film and media and cultural imagery of transness has not served us over time, largely because we weren't the ones telling those stories. Cis people were. I'd say, the representations of transness on screen, classically in a mainstream way, have been either images of monstrosity, you know, this is Buffalo Bill and his skin suit, or Ace Ventura Pet Detective vomiting at the revelation of transness.

This is a long lineage of there being something sinister about gender deviance, or we get these stories usually where the trans person is like a martyr, this tragic figure for us all to mourn, who tries to rise above their station in life and is punished for it. As an artist, I just take my role seriously. I think my role as an artist is to explore and question the human experience. In my case, that's a trans experience. What I'm trying to do when I make a film like this is really use the tools of the medium to try to express something personal that can feel like a wisp of smoke that somebody else might pick up on and say, "I've felt that too."

Kousha Navidar: Thinking about production-wise, a big part of this is nailing that '90s aesthetic. How would you describe that aesthetic?

Jane Schoenbrun: I think emotionally it's a movie about being in love with television, as we heard Justice talking about in that clip we played. This is something that I remember from my own childhood. I just looked forward to Nickelodeon's Saturday night block called SNICK all week long. Then getting to enter that space on a Saturday night was magical. [crosstalk]

Kousha Navidar: Do you recall any of those shows that you really dove into that really [crosstalk]?

Jane Schoenbrun: Oh, yes. The movie especially, I'd say, is reflecting on Are You Afraid of the Dark, which was kind of like horror anthology show that was a little too scary for kids. Then, The Adventures of Pete & Pete was another big one for me, and then, obviously, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is maybe the primary reference, which was sort of like my first long-term love, if you will. I watched that show over the seven years that it originally aired. I certainly invested more emotions in Buffy's high school experience than my own.

In trying to tap into that, it was almost like second nature to sort of return to the tropes, and even just like vernaculars and aesthetics of those shows, but I think I also had a deeper goal in that I wasn't necessarily trying to recreate those shows as they actually existed, because if you go back and watch a lot of those shows, they feel dated and cheap and like the monsters are in crummy latex. I think the goal I set for myself was to make a movie, both the TV show within the movie and the movie itself that could kind of have the aura and magic and color of how it felt to watch those shows back in the '90s as a child rather than how they actually looked.

Kousha Navidar: When I was watching it, I was thinking, if they made a movie about this kind of struggle 30 years from now, what medium would they use? Obviously, my first thought was social media, then scrolling and everything. Then I paused, and I went, "Well, it feels like there's something missing from that TV had, this idea of escapism." Do you think that there is a medium that matches that escapist quality that TV used to have? If not, what do you think is missing?

Just to give you a sense of where I was coming from it, the idea of appointment viewing, or it being long-form, or even commercials, all seem to make this medium of television so rife for escapism. Do you think that still exists today in any other format?

Jane Schoenbrun: I think there was something specific to the idea of like church, like the appointment viewing as church and this holy ritual that I would do every Saturday night, but I think that, if anything, our society has fallen more into-- I don't know if escapism is quite the right word, but into the longing to exist within fiction. I think you see this throughout culture, throughout the internet, and the kind of immersive theme park experiences that are more and more becoming the spaces we go throughout our days when we're not tapping into them through screens, this longing to exist within a cinematic universe that never has to end.

Justice Smith: It's so funny because when you said that, Jane, I thought about how it's true that everyone wants to exist in this cinematic universe, but then for actors who kind of actually exist in that universe, it's not as magical.

[laughter]

Jane Schoenbrun: Justice is like, "Trust me. Try it. Not as magical."

Justice Smith: It's like the finished product of a film isn't like--

Jane Schoenbrun: It's an illusion.

Justice Smith: It's an illusion. It doesn't tangibly exist. I think we're all pining for something that you can never grasp. It's funny because I see a lot of young people who want to be actors chasing that exact thing where they think if they become an actor, they'll get to that Oz, they'll get to that wonderland. It's like-- [chuckles] I don't know how to not be jaded, but I'm like-- When you get there, it's just smoke and mirrors.

Jane Schoenbrun: I spend a lot less time on the internet now than I once did pre-transition. I found myself just in the darkest corners of YouTube or social media, and I was fascinated by it. My first film is about it. One TikTok trend that I am absolutely fascinated by is this concept of reality shifting that has caught on there where kids literally try to convince each other that they can enter fictional universes.

I think this is indicative of what we're talking about, this longing to leave a reality that feels quite limiting behind and enter a space that we've been sold that feels more magical, whether that be Hogwarts or elsewhere. The film is reflecting on all of this, and the film is reflecting on all of this again after I did change my reality. I changed my gender. Part of that was a commitment to possibility and the possibility that such a thing could happen and that I could feel and become a person who I used to think was off-limits and inaccessible to myself.

Actually, it worked. I was able to shift reality and become a person and live a life that felt a lot realer and fuller and true, but what it took was commitment to that being possible. That's obviously not something that just I can do. All of the people around me need to back me up on that attempt, which is why being trans in 2024 in a world that still views us as fiction is so hard.

Alison Stewart: The film is called I Saw the TV Glow. That was Kousha Navidar's conversation with actor Justice Smith, who plays Owen, and director Jane Schoenbrun. That is All Of It for today. I'm Alison Stewart. We appreciate you listening, and we appreciate you. I will meet you back here next time.