‘I Saw the TV Glow’ is one of the hottest movies of 2024. It took Jane Schoenbrun a lifetime to get

NEW YORK — Filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun is walking along a trail in Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, looking for the lake she sat next to while working on the script for the film “I Saw the TV Glow.”

Cemeteries are not always the chosen location for interviews, but the location has a special meaning for Schoenbrun. Built in the 1830s on a hillside overlooking New York Harbor, Green-wood is where Leonard Bernstein, Boss Tweed and Jean-Michel Basquiat are buried. But it was also a rural sanctuary for New Yorkers before any parks were built. People used to picnic here.

“It’s amazing that it’s here,” says Schoenbrun, smiling under a cloudy spring sky. “The level of isolation compared to everything around you is so crazy.”

For Schoenbrun, the attraction is not the famous tombs. Green-wood has been a safe haven for reflection and transformation for them. In the first year of taking hormones, Schoenbrun met friends here who, while resting on a hill, regularly took photos to record their physical progress. Schoenbrun’s first in-person meeting with Brigette Lundy-Paine, one of the stars of “I Saw the TV Glow,” was here.

Schoenbrun wrote the film in late 2020, just a few months after transitioning. In that tense moment of transformation, the script was thrown into a manic sprint.

“I remember stumbling out of my room after I finished, going to my partner and saying, ‘I can only do this so many times’—that level of spilling everything onto the page,” says Schoenbrun.

When “I Saw the TV Glow” was approaching production, Schoenbrun was no longer in the same space. They came to Green-wood to draw contours and rekindle the “terror of initial transition” that had already passed.

“I was falling in love. I was having a more consistent feeling of comfort in my body in a way I never had,” says Schoenbrun. “And I thought, ‘(Expletive), I’m about to make this movie about trauma.’”

“I Saw the TV Glow,” which A24 opens in theaters on Friday, has been hailed since its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival as an intensely intense psychodrama of self-discovery. In 1990s suburbia, a lonely stranger named Owen (Justice Smith) meets Maddy (Lundy-Paine), a cool, prickly high school student who opens her eyes to a “Buffy the Vampire”-style TV series. called “The Pink Opaque”. ” It stars two young women in battle against a supernatural villain called Mr.

Their obsession with the show – especially Maddy’s – takes on a feverish character. “The Pink Opaque” becomes something like a portal to another, more authentic self. “I Saw the TV Glow,” radiating adolescent angst and trembling with the tremors of body dysphoria, is for Schoenbrun a pre-transition parable.

“I think ‘TV Glow’ is about the very unpleasant process of committing to throwing yourself off a cliff,” says Schoenbrun. “I think repression exists because you know that if you don’t repress it, there will be consequences and your life as you know it will no longer be your life as you know it.”

“I Saw the TV Glow,” poised on the cliff of becoming, is at the forefront of a new vanguard of trans cinema. Films such as “The People’s Joker”, by Vera Drew, “Orlando, My Political Biography”, by Paul B. Preçado, and “T-Blockers”, by Alice Maio Mackay, created new forms and cinematic images that convincingly reflect the trans experience.

“I Saw the TV Glow”, however, was defended in a unique way. A24, the boutique independent studio, is distributing. Emma Stone is a producer. Co-stars include Danielle Deadwyler, Phoebe Bridgers and Fred Durst. Ultimately, they all responded to Schoenbrun’s unfiltered vision.

“I felt like it came from a really deep place in Jane. He was asking to be connected. It was like an invitation,” says Lundy-Paine. “It was like: are we going to carry the soul completely, show it completely? And we said, ‘Yes.’ We allowed ourselves to go there.”

Schoenbrun, as they traverse the circular paths of Green-wood, is brilliantly chatty, self-deprecating and confidently insightful – particularly about his own journey. Schoenbrun, 37, grew up in Ardsley, Westchester. They worked at a local movie theater, but were more captivated by the evolving characters of shows like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Before starting out as a filmmaker, Schoenbrun frequently wrote for Filmmaker Magazine; recently filmed them for his cover. They were married for a decade before discovering they were trans in April 2019 on a mushroom trip while struggling to write their first feature film, “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.”

“I was really trying to figure out why I was so ashamed of making my own art. That was explicitly the goal of that trip,” says Schoenbrun. “I thought, I need to figure out why I can have a day job and work really hard for someone else’s stuff, but why does the idea of ​​sharing and defending my own thing seem horrible to me. Internalized gender shame is where I ended up in a very tortuous way.

Gender, transformation and film production remain intrinsically linked for Schoenbrun. Their cinematic tastes are broad, but tend, they say, toward films that seem impossible and films that suggest new possibilities. The gentle dramas of Kelly Reichardt, the body horror of David Cronenberg and the strangeness of Tom Green’s “Freddy Got Fingered” emerge like signposts.

“How does cinema, how does art continue to become itself, as we expect human beings to be doing the same in their inchoate, flawed, destructive ways?” Schoenbrun says, smiling.

Smith, the 28-year-old “Dungeons” actor & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” and “The American Society of Magical Negroes” were drawn into the odyssey of Owen’s arc.

“Typically, as characters get older, they become more self-assured. That character diminishes,” says Smith. “It was one of the first films where I thought, ‘I really have to let go.’ I was having this parallel experience to the character who was so resistant to accepting himself as enough.”

Schoenbrun now emerges as a filmmaker and as himself at the same time. The 2021 Sundance premiere of “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair,” about a teenager immersed in an online horror RPG, was virtual. But it was still the biggest audience Schoenbrun has had since the transition. “For me, that was starring in a school play in my underwear,” they say.

In both cases, the response was validated. That doesn’t mean there won’t be difficulties along the way. As they pass seas of graves, Schoenbrun notes the high mortality rate for trans people.

“You exist in a much more precarious space than before,” they say. “The past is (expletive) to you because of all that wasted time and the future is (expletive) to you because you can no longer feel stable in the narrative of, like, one day I’m going to be a grandfather.”

But it would be difficult to see anything other than liberation and hard-won self-realization in Schoenbrun. The doors of self-awareness may be just opening for Owen in “I Saw the TV Glow,” but they have been ripped off their hinges by their creator.

“It was an incredibly moving few years, feeling things for the first time that I had kind of known or experienced as a ghost,” says Schoenbrun. “Trans people love ‘Under the Skin.’ I think it’s because of the feeling of finally entering the human race, but as an alien experiencing things for the first time.”

An outside point of view, however, can be highly desirable, even necessary, for a filmmaker. As our circular route takes us back to Green-wood’s front gate, Schoenbrun says they now feel not 37, but 23.

“It’s so, so incredibly beautiful,” Schoenbrun says eagerly. “And I can’t wait to do work on it.”

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Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP

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The story has been updated to correct the film title “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.”