‘I Saw The TV Glow’ Director Jane Schoenbrun On Witchcraft and Vending Machines
Director Jane Schoenbrun seems to have a line directly from the millennial depressed and dissociative collective consciousness. Their film We’re All Going To The World’s Fair captured the teenage experience of sitting alone online, trying to find connection in all the wrong places. Now, with a much bigger budget thanks to A24, Schoenbrun’s newest film I Saw The TV Glow is a technicolor exploration of dysphoria, fandom, and friendship in all of its beautiful and toxic forms.
I Saw The TV Glow follows Owen (Justice Smith) throughout his life and how his existence orbits around the existence of a 90s teen TV show, The Pink Opaque. He discovers the show through Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) and they launch a strange and tentative relationship, bonded by their love for the show and their own individual suburban traumas. But when the show is mysteriously canceled, everything changes.
We spoke with Schoenbrun about the film’s incredible production design, speaking to the full experience of fandom, and, of course, Salad Fingers.
Dread Central: My first question for you, truly, is where did you find a Fruitopia vending machine?
Jane Schoenbrun: You have to ask Brandon [Tonner-Connolly, the production designer] that question. His methods are mysterious and beautiful.
DC: But truly I wanted to talk about the production design of I Saw The TV Glow, especially the high school, with this kind of totalitarian vibe. How did you work with your production designer on this film?
JS: He is an absolute magician. We’re both hyper-organized people. I came with a 300-page reference document that literally had a section for vending machines and it had a section for televisions and it had a section for planetariums. I did my homework before we even started prep, so we were very keyed in from the beginning. But also, I don’t know how he did it with the budget he had, and the only explanation is just either sorcery or being an intensely good manager.
He knew exactly what to do with less money than he should have had, how to build all of the worlds that we were trying to build, and the attention to detail was just insane. He would keep me out of his sets until he was really ready to share it, and then he would invite me in. I would do these walks around the set that were, I don’t know, some of the most childhood-esque moments of my adult life where it is just stepping into a space that you dreamed up.
It’s not just the Fruitopia vending machine. The vending machine next to it is filled with period-appropriate snacks. The Reese’s in there are like 1996 Reese’s wrappers and the Post-it notes on the table are like 1996 Post-It notes. It’s pretty stunning what he was able to do.
The other big part of it was, I am a big believer in the location scout as an essential part of the creative process. It was something I think I learned on World’s Fair where we had no money, so I needed to find my production design in the real world. So as we were scouting on I Saw The TV Glow, I wasn’t just trying to find a place that could be turned into what I had written. I was trying to find places that could evolve what we had written.
For instance, when we walked into that high school, those signs were really up on the wall. We recreated them and amped them up a little bit. But Eric [Yue], my DP, and I were both like, this is the weirdest hallway we’ve ever walked down. And these messages on the wall, we just immediately took out Eric’s camera and shot that shot. We were like, oh, it’s all here.
DC: So weird.
JS: I think this held true for a lot of different moments in the film. I just kept wandering into spaces and being inspired by the space. When you are a control freak and you over plan, you’re overplanning so that you can be present in the actual moment of making the movie and be inspired to change the plan without breaking everything. So I think a big part of the creative process of actually making the movie was just listening to the world around me.
DC: That’s so cool. When did you write the script for I Saw The TV Glow? Was it before or after World’s Fair?
JS: I wrote it after World’s Fair was shot, but before it premiered.
DC: I was curious because I love the scope of this one, plus you have a bigger budget than World’s Fair. What was that like for you to expand the scope of what you had worked on previously?
JS: To me it was massive. The jump from one to the other, I think it was something like 30 or 40 times the budget I had on World’s Fair. World’s Fair was like 10 friends in the woods. So I was very conscious of what a massive jump that was going to be. I was very conscious of myself stepping onto that level of professional set as one of the least experienced people there, probably. And I was very conscious of not so much what you get when you get more money, but the differences in what you can make.
And I think actually there are losses as much as there are gains. I knew enough to know that I couldn’t make a movie that was as loose and improvisational as World’s Fair. It was a movie that was sort of fluid and dependent on just capturing Anna basically and letting Anna go. For instance, in World’s Fair, that tarot card scene was inspired the night before by Anna reading tarot cards. And then we spent the morning the next day doing tarot card readings on camera. You just can’t do that on a movie of this size and with this production schedule. All of the departments and moving parts need to be so dialed in. So from the beginning, I knew I was almost working in a different medium. But I really needed to plan for the strengths of this new medium that I was working within.
And of course, the benefit of that bigger budget is just that you get a bigger paintbrush and a more precise paintbrush and you’re able to sort of paint with the kind of intention and build the kinds of worlds that I could have never dreamed I would get the resources to make. I’m a control freak and over-plan either way, but on this one, I was over-planning composition. That became the magic trick of the movie instead of making something where the magic trick in World’s Fair is making you feel like this is just totally off the cuff and natural. The magic trick is like, look what I conjured.
DC: Oh, I love that. Look what I conjured. I love thinking about it like magic because movies are magic to be perfectly frank, and TV is magic.
JS: Filmmaking is witchcraft.
DC: It really fucking is though!
JS: Lucy Dacus, the first time I met her, she was like, is anyone a witch? We were doing a costume fitting for this music video I made with her. She goes, “Is anybody here a witch?” She kind of said it half joking. And I was like, I am. Later on, she was like, I said that because I always say it, I thought you might be a witch. And I kind of said it like a joke so that you would only answer if you actually were one.
But I think there’s a level of making I Saw The TV Glow at this level and literally just being in an abandoned parking lot in suburban New Jersey, lighting colored smoke bombs inside a custom ice cream truck, and hundreds of people are there helping you and some guy’s money is being spent on this. How else do you explain that if not like I did some witchcraft to get here.
DC: Fuck yeah. That’s so awesome. So what were your hyper fixation shows as a child or as a teenager?
JS: I mean Buffy is the big one, obviously, but there’s also Are You Afraid of the Dark? There’s a bunch of Goosebumps. It’s a melange of early 90s Nickelodeon television. That’s sort of the roster of influences there.
DC: Hell yeah. I got a little bit of Pete and Pete, too.
JS: Definitely some Pete and Pete in there.
DC: Love a Pete and Pete. I love [The Pink Opaque] credits, especially when the credits roll either at the front or the end of an “episode”. This is a movie with such attention to detail of knowing exactly how these shows are formatted and how much down to the technical aspects of just the credits for a fictional TV show.
JS: It’s not a put-on. I was Owen in a lot of ways and I gave all of my love, of which I think I have quite a good deal, to Buffy in my youth. That was the thing I cared about most. The thing that occupied most of my emotional registers. It was where I put a lot of love that I didn’t feel safe to put into the real world. It went into television shows and message boards about television shows and into these sorts of parasocial relationships with fictional characters and into just the dream of what would happen next week or next season on one of those shows. So I think the movie is speaking from this pretty earnest place in trying to be representative of that level of fandom and the ways in which it’s maybe unhealthy.
DC: Yes. I’ve never seen a movie address this level of what I experienced with loving shows as a kid. So I love that you’re addressing fandom as something very complicated and the friendships and relationships that come around that. But I really quickly wanted to know how you landed on the title The Pink Opaque.
JS: It’s named after a Cocteau Twins compilation album.
DC: Hell yeah.
JS: Cocteau Twins have been a huge one for me. I feel like there are few bands that represent my gender like the Cocteau Twins do. My 30th birthday party, and this was before I was out even to myself, I told everyone it was Cocteau Twins themed and you had to come dressed as your favorite Cocteau Twins song. And my gay friend was like, this is the gayest party any straight person has ever thrown. And I was like, huh, yep. Flash forward two years.
But I used that name The Pink Opaque as a stand-in. At first, it was just temp. I was like, this is a really cool name for a show and I need to come up with something like this, but better. And I couldn’t. So it stayed.
DC: I mean, it’s a really good fucking name. I would’ve watched and worn t-shirts of The Pink Opaque as a child and probably now. So I get that.
JS: Are you listening, A24? [Laughs]
DC: I Saw The TV Glow is a really fascinating film that really captures liminal spaces super well and analog horror vibes. Have you watched analog horror on YouTube? Is that anything that you kind of dove into in whatever spare time you have?
JS: I see people talking about it a lot online, especially in the last three months. I feel like this word was invented or just reached me. I definitely watched a lot of Salad Fingers when I was a kid and watched a lot of fucked up shit that felt more like snuff videos than YouTube. Oh
DC: Oh, same. Analog horror is more recent, too, because it wasn’t anything I grew up with. I was a Salad Fingers and weird snuff video shit on the internet kid.
JS: Obviously for World’s Fair I deeply familiarized myself with the Creepypasta world. And that aesthetic, which feels derived from the Salad Fingers of it all, is similarly invested in these. This cursed image energy. It’s not like, let me show you the most grotesque torture porn you’ve ever seen. It’s much more about, let me show you something that feels subtly wrong in some way, or you have to squint to see what’s disturbing about it. So I imagine I’m not an expert on analog horror. I see people talk about The Backrooms, but I don’t know what that is, but I should look it up.
DC: If you ever have time for a deep dive on YouTube of really weird videos that are almost like PowerPoint presentations, but scary, I highly recommend.
JS: I need to do it. This is what I did most nights back before transition. But I do sometimes worry that I’ve fallen out of touch with my people, where I came from. But I see people talking a lot about analog horror and I see people talking a lot about it with reference to my work and something like Skinamarink which I adored. And I do think it’s cool because it’s like even back in the day, those snuff adjacent YouTube videos were basically danker Stan Brakhage films. It’s cool that you can push right up to the edge of genre or horror filmmaking and sort of touch the other world of just straight-up experimental image-based art. I feel very excited about the way that kind of work is a natural fit on the internet and thus mutates outwards into our popular culture.
It’s a very good thing because the experimental aesthetics that [analog horror] naturally gravitates towards, we could use a lot more of that in our contemporary pop culture space. I think we all feel it. It taps into something, this liminal space cursed image, energy taps into something that we all feel has to do with capitalism being wrong. We all are drawn to it because it expresses an inner wrongness that’s hard to articulate and wouldn’t be well articulated by something more traditional and less experimental.
I Saw The TV Glow is out now in theaters.
Categorized:Interviews
