If It Gets Too Real: Jane Schoenbrun on Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

In an era in which so many viewers demand that movies be mirrors to their own experience, Jane Schoenbrun does something that seems radical: They invite you into their world and ask you to surrender to their perspective for a couple of hours. The risk of alienation is what every great artist, in any medium, ought to strive for, and it’s been my anecdotal experience (and not just on the hellscape of social media) that Schoenbrun’s features—from We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021) to I Saw the TV Glow (2024) and now their latest and most buoyant feature, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026)—elicit responses from viewers that go well beyond “divisive”: These films are on a wavelength that your brain is either attuned to or not. For those of us who can pick up the frequency, the rewards are bountiful.

Schoenbrun’s films are a little scary, a little sweet, and a lot resistant to strict categories despite hovering on the peripheries of genre. World’s Fair was, in a way, terrifying, for the destabilization of its form, its two harrowingly unsettled performances, and the feeling it implanted in the brain of not knowing what we were watching. (Is this a horror film? Is this “really” happening?) For my money, it handily outplayed David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999) in the simplicity of its “Is this a game?” gambit. TV Glow moved beyond role-players into the realm of passive watchers, but its ruptures were even scarier, and somehow even sadder: a literally gutting dramatization of how external forces (television, parents, unrequited loves and other strangers) get inside you while what’s already dormant in there eats you alive. 

Now, with Camp Miasma, Schoenbrun continues to interrogate our image-mediated, queer selves but for the first time has done it with liberatory ecstasy. Hannah Einbinder’s Kris is a hot, young, heretofore independent filmmaker who has been gifted the challenge of resurrecting the Camp Miasma slasher franchise for a Hollywood studio. Now “zombie IP,” the Miasma movies evoke the Friday the 13th films as much as Sleepaway Camp (1983), with which they share a flagrant transphobia. They were both inspirational and “problematic” for the academic-minded Kris, as well as a source of perhaps guilty erotic awakening. To help make the project more palatable, Kris has decided to track down Miasma’s original “final girl,” Billy (Gillian Anderson), now a reclusive grand dame who lives on the campsite where the first movie was shot. The bond between the two women (intellectual, playful, scary, and finally erotic) becomes Schoenbrun’s anchor, the surprising chamber drama at the heart of an eccentric comedy that maintains a consistency of meaning and purpose while zigzagging across multiple tonalities and keys. The film, with its lustrous matte-painting backdrops and scrupulous recreations of ’80s slasher branding and memorabilia, with its candy-coated mise-en-scène and geysers of erotic blood, is a journey toward a cathartic enjoyment that is unapologetically their own. As in their earlier films, Schoenbrun is inviting you to join in their experience of the world, and of cinema. You can take the ride or not. The pleasure is all theirs.

MUBI: This film is in keeping with your previous two features in so many ways. They’re all about our relationships to cultural detritus and “bad objects” or things that are considered bad for us, whether it’s TV or slasher films or junk food. 

JANE SCHOENBRUN: I would say, yes, there is this language I’ve been building through my film work and that I return to each time I start a new project—not to do the same thing over and over, but because I do think that I’m building the mechanisms through which I can express complex ideas in narrative commercial cinema. And one of the key ways I can do that is by playing with the layering of media within the media. The screen is this thing that the characters are interacting with and entering, this thing that the film is engaging with. That’s been there from the beginning, and it’s something that I keep returning to, because it feels like it’s a grammar through which I can express things in more and more complex ways. 

The other muse of these first three movies—and I just have to be blunt about it—has been transition. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow are both movies that I made after early transition, but they were reflecting on the experience of coming out. They were kind of using the screen to talk about dissociation, to talk about not being in one’s body, to talk about living as a voyeur. This new movie, which in my mind is the first one that was inspired by post-transition, is a movie about that distance starting to contract, about starting to feel like you actually are in your own body—stepping through the screen, making your life into the movie.

And in early transition, the way I felt that most notably was through sex. Sex was trauma for me for the first 32 years of my life. It was something that I was completely dissociative and avoidant about. When I was having sex, I didn’t want to be having sex, and I certainly wasn’t present with myself, because how could you be when you weren’t in the right identity and body? After transition this slowly started to ease, and the way this started to ease was through stepping into a new identity, and into an identity and a body that I felt comfortable with. And then things continued to ease through the safe exploration and slow working through of that oblique sexual trauma of pre-transition life, with someone else who was able to hold me through that—in all of its darkness and joy and goofiness and terror. So that was the initial idea: I wanted to make a movie about that mystery, that feeling of slowly coming into yourself, and the feeling of not just watching yourself during sex or watching yourself during life, but actively existing in your identity and in the world. As a filmmaker, it made a lot of sense to make a movie about entering the film as a way of entering yourself. 

The slasher film struck me as the perfect vessel for this. I’d read Men, Women, and Chain Saws [1992] by Carol Clover in college, and also Willow Catelyn Maclay and Caden Mark Gardner’s wonderful book of criticism, Corpses, Fools, and Monsters [2024]. As a young, closeted kid coming of age in the ’90s, Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs [1991] and Ace Ventura were my images of trans sexuality, and you can trace those images linearly back to Norman Bates and through Sleepaway Camp and Friday the 13th [1980]. These were movies that were, for a lot of trans kids, so comforting. I lived at the video store. I think in fifth grade, my best friend and I rented every single Nightmare on Elm Street movie in a week. I can’t say I was, like, turned on by Freddy Krueger butchering teens, but I could feel the obvious sexual energy in those movies. And so when I started thinking about how to make a movie about this moment of sexual awakening and this lessening of dysphoria or this coming into one’s own body, how could it not be in conversation with Buffalo Bill, with Norman Bates, with this image of the trans monster—which was my self-image pre-transition, and is certainly the cultural image of me that I think still exists in a lot of people’s eyes.

On top of that, the slasher genre in general is the horniest genre in the world—like, one degree removed from porn. Especially in the ’80s, before the internet was around, there were these scantily clad girls running around getting chopped up by a breathing killer who was maybe a gender deviant. What’s going on there? It’s not just me who’s obsessed with gender.

MUBI: I want to talk about the Hannah Einbinder character, Kris. You mentioned Carol Clover, whom you also call attention to in the film. Kris is an academic, analytical thinker, not in touch with her body, not in touch with her sexuality. And she writes about “the intersection of queerness and cultural depictions of monstrosity.” It’s through her that we enter the world of the film. 

SCHOENBRUN: Every time I make a film, the characters come last. I had “Psycho from the perspective of the shower curtain” years before I had Hannah playing a nebbishy filmmaker who’s remaking a movie. But I think it was a way of having my cake and eating it, too. I remember seeing Jordan Peele’s Nope [2022] in theaters and really admiring it. What he’s pulling off is studio filmmaking at a massive commercial pop-cultural level. And in order to talk about ideas that are complex and genuinely new to pop culture (as I’m hoping to do with this film), one of the tools in his arsenal is humor. I like showing the audience that I don’t take myself too seriously, because if I watched a pretentious screed about the slasher and the lineage of gender trouble in the slasher film—I mean, I would watch it, and maybe, like, fifty other people would. But it’s not fully representational of who I am and who I want to be as an artist, to be just lecturing. So I’m trying to work that in, in a way that won’t alienate an audience that doesn’t want a graduate thesis. 

MUBI: It’s like when Kris points at the movie-in-the-movie and says, “This part’s transphobic,” and then two seconds later says, “Split-diopter shot!” It’s funny because that’s basically the way that we talk about movies now. 

SCHOENBRUN: A hundred percent. I would always refer to that split-diopter gag as my Letterboxd joke. I do think of it as a tightrope that I’m walking. Clearly my ambition is not to just make a slasher movie that you can laugh at and have fun at then go home and feel sated. There is an investigation happening here that is emotional and personal and profane, I think, in a real way. I don’t think we talk about sex, and I don’t think we talk about power in sex, and I don’t think we talk about sexual trauma and sexual deviance, and where the line between fantasy and trauma can live. I’m really hoping—in the same way that TV Glow was able to open up a conversation about transness that’s a little more interior and complex—that this movie will allow some kind of cultural conversation around sexuality and queer sexuality. I am also very much trying to be an entertainer and not just to feed you your vegetables. I want to make movies that invite you in and have a multitude of effects on many different levels. 

MUBI: You’re doing the opposite of feeding vegetables: You're feeding us candy. Can you talk a little bit about the incredible preponderance of candy in the film, which is, of course, visually appealing but also says a lot about pleasures that are forbidden?

SCHOENBRUN: Yeah, it’s a movie about play, right? It’s about seeing Hannah in her PJs in bed, watching a horror movie, eating Raisinets mixed with popcorn, within the first ten minutes. That’s me telling you that I hope you come to the movie with that spirit—because I did. That’s my night most nights of the week, if I’m lucky, if I’m living my best life. It’s like, let’s turn off the lights, and go on a journey that’s going to be both bad for you and good for you in the way that the art that I love is. 

MUBI: And this stuff isn’t going to kill you. We’ve been told since childhood, Don’t eat the candy, your teeth are going to fall out. Don’t eat that, you’re going to get fat. But this stuff’s not gonna kill you.

SCHOENBRUN: Well, yeah, and two things on that. One is that it’s been a part of queer sex for me, especially at first. And a part of getting more comfortable having sex when sex was a very anxiety-inducing thing… It’s like, you go to the fucking bodega, you buy a bunch of candy and you got that candy waiting for you, and then you eat it with your partner or whoever it is, and you’ve performed this thing. You’ve gone to the scary place, but then you can return to the safety of eating candy in bed. It’s aftercare, in a way.

And yes, it’s also correlational to the tagline: “If it gets too real, you can always turn it off.” This is the tagline Billy keeps quoting to Kris, and this film is very much a conversation about consent. I do not think sex can be laundered of its darkness. Clearly, it is coming from a place where, without even thinking about it, we are interrogating the deepest and darkest parts of ourselves and fundamental societal taboos and the threshold between life and death. Everyone’s got fucked-up sex shit going on. And the healthy response to that as a society isn’t just to not have it or ignore it, because that’s how you get fucked-up fascists. The way to deal with it is to find someone that you trust, say “if it gets too real, you can always turn it off,” get a bunch of candy, and open up parts of yourself that feel scary to expose. 

I think that is what the movie is about, and the slasher genre is a way of talking about the specific trans trauma of seeing yourself as a monster that I needed to get over if I was going to be able to have a healthy existence.

MUBI: The optimism of the film really creeps up on you, but it packs a wallop. It’s one of the few films that I can remember that has this joyful sexual freedom but still hits you like a ton of bricks. You’re dousing them in blood at the end, but the blood is joyful—kind of like the ending of Carrie [1976] we all actually want. 

SCHOENBRUN: Yeah, it’s a remake, right? It’s remaking the lexicon of the slasher, where at the end of those movies, there’s always the terrified girl covered in blood saying, “He’s gonna be back.” He’s still down there at the bottom of the lake. But the film is fundamentally optimistic. It’s not saying we need to remake these slasher movies because they used to be problematic and someday they can be not problematic. Like, no: Sex is fucked up. We’re fucked up. But there are ways for us to grow and become. And we’re leaving those characters in a space where they are pantomiming the language of every one of those movies that’s promising another remake and another remake and another sequel, but in a way, what they’re actually saying is damn, can’t wait to get home, have more sex. It makes me feel great, and I hope it makes others feel great. 

I wrote this movie from a space of joy. I wanted to make something after TV Glow that would surprise folks and was not meant to devastate you in quite the same way. I was most surprised, once we got to production, how emotionally visceral those sex scenes felt and how directing those sex scenes felt to me. Those scenes with Hannah and Gillian, and [film-within-the-film stars] Amanda Fix and Arthur Conti, rank as some of the most challenging, but most emotionally rewarding and walloping scenes I’ve directed. I just knew we had touched something there. The deepest emotional points in the movie happen during the sex scenes. I was so nervous to direct them. I wanted them to be provocative and emotional and vulnerable, and I knew that I was asking so much of the actors.

I remember talking about that feeling with my partner, who came to visit, during prep. I was kind of avoiding thinking about how I would direct the actors or how I would be with everyone that day on set. I’d never done it before. And then my partner was like, “It’s funny, because you’re talking about dissociating from directing the sex scenes, when the sex scenes themselves are about dissociating from the sex act.” I was like, “Oh, my God, you’re right.” So, in some oblique way, my directing the sex scenes is like what the movie is talking about: coming into one’s own capability and identity as a filmmaker, and as a sexual person.

MUBI: I want to talk about Billy, and Gillian Anderson’s performance. She’s a really slippery character. Hannah’s character changes and grows and is our focal point, but we never get a complete handle on Billy’s character, which I find fascinating. Yet she is the catalyst, the one who opens up Kris—and perhaps the audience—sexually.  

SCHOENBRUN: I think it’s a movie about two people who don’t have a lot of options out there for others who can intellectually and sexually match their freak. And they meet and match each other’s freak. There’s something that Billy says early on, when Kris is eavesdropping through the crack in the wall: “It’s been a long time since I’ve let somebody see me, my art.” She’s mentoring Kris throughout the movie. She tells us about her own coming to terms with sexual trauma during that final campfire scene. She returns us to the scene of this sexual assault, and at this point, when they’re talking outside, they overlap each other’s lines. Kris says, “That look in your character’s eye,” and Billy says, “That look in my eye.” The flashback to the movie-within-the-movie and whatever trauma this real person has experienced have merged, as in a dream, into one. 

And what Billy has confronted is that she had to build herself from the ugliness and trauma of sex rather than avoid it. I think it’s a different style of sexual trauma than the one that Kris is talking about, which is more oblique and about not being able to be present in her own kink. But I do think that Billy has confronted these things about herself and understood that to live a full life, she needs to be not hiding from that Little Death mask, which becomes the symbol of her trauma. Instead, she needs to be recreating it. The thing that she doesn’t have when the film begins is somebody to do that with. I think her arc in the movie is very much about growing a little too comfortable with a certain kind of isolation and solitary fantasy life and then getting to play this role, which I don’t think is an uncommon role, especially in queer relationships, where one person is earlier on in their sexual journey. She is sort of the “dommie mommy,” or this mother figure who’s holding this character through something. I think the mystery of the movie, in many ways, is the mystery of what happened to Billy and how she’s learned to live as a result of it.

One of my core ideas in the movie is that Kris kind of starts the movie as the audience surrogate—Kris is the straight man, Kris is the stand-in, Kris is the one being, like, “This is crazy.” And Billy is starting the movie in a pure genre tenor. And as the movie goes on, they bring each other to a middle level that they share. Kris grows more comfortable entering this stylized world and stops being so much this figure on the outside looking in. And Billy opens up parts of herself, having this very sobering revelation of her own trauma that allows her to feel safe with someone else in a way that she hasn’t in a long time. 

MUBI: Yeah, there’s such a warmth to Gillian as the film moves on. She’s playing this stylized, icy, remote, mysterious figure at the beginning, but by the end, when she’s in the supermarket, there’s something so moving about watching her reintegrate into the world. 

SCHOENBRUN: So much of that is Gillian. I remember reading press reports about her before we worked together, and they would always describe her as a technician. They would always talk about her incredible technique, and her ability to be so precise in her performance. But I think what’s so wonderful about her performance in this film is the incredible vulnerability on display. She’s showing us herself, and she’s showing us this complex person who’s filled with love and curiosity and loneliness and sadness. The film is a mystery about who this larger-than-life person is, and while the film doesn’t give you a one-line answer to that question, the whole film is an unpacking of that mystery. I remember thinking a lot about the Norma Desmond of it all, in prep and production, because that’s not how I see Gillian. I don’t see Gillian as this over-the-hill movie star. I see Gillian as incredibly elegant and tender. It felt like play—we were dressing her up in these extravagant Blanche Dubois–style outfits, and playing with classic Hollywood iconography. And the film does this in general: for instance, with the matte backdrops. There’s a lot of classical Hollywood elegance to this movie.

MUBI: It’s a very tactile movie, and it seems to exist in a netherworld between real and imagined. I love the matte backdrops and the evocation of winter and summer, and how they’re both kind of happening at the same time. It feels less surreal than hyperreal.

SCHOENBRUN: I think there are several hyperrealities at play. Obviously, there’s a flesh layer underground, where the living embodiment of the orgasm rises through a vent in the wall to slash up people at summer camp. The mattes were there from the very beginning as a technique. I think I had seen Black Narcissus [1947] for, like, the hundredth time at MoMA with Scorsese there. I always said, we can only do this if I have my team from TV Glow back. So I wrote this movie with Willy McGee, Sepi Mashiahof, Brandon Tonner-Connolly, and Eric Yue in mind, in the same way that you would write for an actor in mind, in the same way that I wrote Little Death for Jack Haven. I was writing the “Long December” one-shot for my cinematographer, Eric, and I was writing the flesh layer and the matte-painted backdrops for my production designer, Brandon. Because the process of making TV Glow felt like what I always hoped filmmaking feels like, I wanted to start right where we left off and then push way, way deeper. Early on, just for a second, there was this potential scheduling conflict and maybe Brandon wasn’t going to be able to do it. I remember being like, well, then we’re not doing the mattes, because I can only imagine feeling safe doing something that audacious with somebody I know I’m in creative lockstep with. I think a lot of the movie’s boldest moves are the result of being incredibly aligned and in deep and continuous collaboration with a group of artists who share my sensibilities.

We talked a lot on this set about portals. My assistant director, Willy, would say in interviews with potential crew members, “Jane’s movies are about portals.” I think what he meant is that the movies are trances, and they invite you into a heightened space. Obviously, that’s also literally what’s happening to Kris in this movie. She’s being invited into this otherworldly fantasia and into this romance that will allow her to open herself up. So, the matte backdrops became a way of tracing that emotionally. They’re never there just to be there. They’re there to deepen the portal. And then when they’re there at the end, in springtime, I was really excited because it’s a way of saying, no, this wasn’t just to evoke winter imagery: This is a state of mind. When they emerge into spring, they're able to carry that magic back with them into the world. 

MUBI: It made me think of Sirk: the season as an expressionistic state of mind. 

SCHOENBRUN: I always try to start with some kind of visual arc in my organizing of a movie. With TV Glow, it was the warmth and nostalgic color palette of that parachute, and then the digital, colored hellscape of the arcade at the end of the film. And here it was winter to summer. 

MUBI: And the kids are no longer throwing snowballs but playing with water guns.

SCHOENBRUN: During prep, we were talking about the opening credit sequence, and I was just pulling up old-school websites, GeoCities-style: like Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street fan sites that had these old merch pages where you could see the Freddy Krueger pinball machine or the Jason lunchbox from the ’80s. And I remember having this a-ha moment, thinking, oh my god, I feel like a kid, and it’s about to be Halloween. I realized that’s why the kids are there at the beginning and the end, because this is a movie about returning to that state of childlike play. That’s the ethos with which I approached the making of the movie, and that’s the emotional state that I hope the movie can conjure in people.

MUBI: Can you talk about all that paraphernalia and the memorabilia you created? It’s all so detailed and so wonderfully fussed over. 

SCHOENBRUN: I hope it shows love. All of it is handmade. I hope it feels like only somebody who lived and breathed slasher movies as a twelve-year-old could undertake that level of obsessive detail-oriented ephemera. I almost thought of it as its own movie. Maybe, like, two weeks before production, my core team and I sat down and closed the door and shut off our phones, because we were just deep in the rigors of prep, and we had a three-hour creative spitball session. We workshopped it together and laughed and came up with fake taglines and brainstormed the funniest possible stuff that wasn’t in the script but needed to get written for that sequence to really work. We shot the opening credits, I think, on the last day of production. We described it as like a bonus movie within the movie. After doing all the sets and design for the movie, we created, like, a hundred pieces of merch. I really try to think of filmmaking—when I’m writing it, when I’m conceiving it—as leaving lots of gifts for future versions of all of us to enjoy.

MUBI: It’s also a gift to Counting Crows fans! You called it a movie of portals, but I was thinking of them as ruptures. For me, the first pretty major one is the one-shot with the Counting Crows’ “A Long December.” At that point, we’re inside the movie-within-the-movie, which is beautifully shot on 35mm. It looks mostly like it could have been a film from the early ’80s. But once the one-shot hits, it completely exits that world aesthetically. It’s in a different vernacular. Why did you decide to shoot it like that? 

SCHOENBRUN: Well, I want to say first that I like the word rupture. I really think about this movie as sex. Like, the structure of this movie is queer sex. Or the structure of this movie is whatever the female orgasm is. So, yeah, there’s foreplay, and then there are these ecstatic ruptures that take you back into a space of safety and calm and maybe even darkness, in the same way that that sex scene between the two of them stops and then starts again, by the fire. The movie’s kind of having sex with the audience. And, you know, if it gets too real, you can always turn it off. 

I grew up a Counting Crows fan. My cousin was their guitar tech. So, when I was ten, I went backstage and got to meet them. Those albums have never really left the rotation for me. I love those records. It was going to be R.E.M.’s “Nightswimming” playing during that scene. And then I was like, wait, it’s got to be “A Long December.” There’s something in the lyrics to that song, this sort of resigned defiance that next year is going to be better than this year. There’s also this thing I’m clearly working out in the movie about Hollywood. It’s obviously not an accident, but Jack tends to slash right on the word “Hollywood” in that song.

But you’re right: It’s the midpoint of the movie, and it’s when the rocket ship takes off into the sky. Emotionally, it is a reclamation of slasher language in a way that they’ve only kind of talked about until that point. Billy, as with many “final girls,” was stuck in this shitty fucking movie made by probably misogynist monsters, and is just being served up for something, be it sex or death. And there is this powerlessness that’s being explored in a very gendered way in the film-within-the-film that I think is pretty accurate to the exploitation and slasher movies of that time and their gender politics. Then Billy conjures something, and all of a sudden, we see the film in a completely different way. We see the film in a way where the killer is not the breathing, leering, stalking man, but this angel of wrath.

And it’s Jack, and Jack dances for us, and what Jack pulls off in that one-shot is something I’m prouder of than anything I’ve ever made. That was Jack with the SnorriCam, a sixty-pound rig strapped to their back. It’s just completely triumphant in exactly the way that I want the film to be triumphant. I think it’ll probably confuse some people, but some people will be jumping up and down. We probably spent a hundred hours in prep just for that sequence. This movie is about not playing by the rules, so why should this shot play by the rules that have been established? 

MUBI: You keep pulling the rug out and changing the rules as you go along. 

SCHOENBRUN: Well, it’s also what Kris says after the film-with-a-film ends: “I must have seen that movie a hundred times but I’ve never seen it like that.” It's something that I’m trying to actively encourage in my own movies. I’m trying to make  the movie that will change over time as you look back on it. You’ll have a different relationship to it. And so much of the experience of Kris seeing the movie like that when she watches it—and sees that incredible, triumphant angel of wrath, dancing through space—is seeing it through Billy’s eyes. 

MUBI: At one point, Kris calls the Miasma films “zombie IP.” And the movie is in conversation with the way that franchises are cannibalizing themselves, and the way that Hollywood cynically pulls things out of its back pocket, recreating them without soul and without politics and without thought. This movie talks about all that in very funny ways. But for all of its optimism—about female sexuality and coming out and reclaiming spaces—there’s also a very cynical side to it in terms of its representation of commercial filmmaking.

SCHOENBRUN: It just had to be in the movie. TV Glow was my first film made with real money, and real money coming from places that talk to other places that make up a consortium of capitalists that are running culture and entertainment—at least on a mainstream level. I am a trans person in America in 2026 trying to make personal work for millions of dollars that I’m getting from people at the highest levels. How could they share my values? But I do think that, as a trans girl in Hollywood, I have a specific perspective on it, in trying to walk this tightrope of making things that I can feel proud of. It’s totally crazy. It’s robbery in a lot of ways. It’s a heist, and it requires a dance and a negotiation that is complex and troubling and disturbing, and I don’t want to leave that out of the movie.

Throughout the movie, I’m peppering in artists whose work I really like, like Avalon Fast or Louise Weard. I’m bringing these people from queer, DIY film spaces into this commercial movie that is of course about someone from a queer, DIY space coming into a commercial ecosystem. And the movie, I hope, is troubled by it, in a very core way. The forces with which commerce operates—especially in 2026, and especially for trans and queer people who aren’t just trans and queer as an individual identity but trans and queer in politics—are so far from a world that shares our values. This just has to be at the very center of any work that I’m making with that money. There is something intrinsic to the tension of the film, which is the tension between art and commerce, the tension of a legacy of misogyny, capitalist exploitation, and white supremacy. The movie is wrestling with this from the inside, in a way that isn’t just having a laugh. Hopefully the emotional stakes of it feel complex, because if they weren’t, the movie would be a lie. 

This is the first movie I’ve made that really feels like me and my personality. TV Glow and World’s Fair are movies that came from these very intense moments in my life, ruptures that were quite traumatic. And this one came from a very deep place. But I feel it’s the first time I pulled something off where I look at it, and most of me, if not all of me, is in there in some way.

Michael Koresky is Senior Curator of Film at New York's Museum of the Moving Image, the coeditor and founder of Reverse Shot, a frequent contributor to the Criterion Collection, and author of Sick and Dirty: Hollywood's Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness and Films of Endearment.