Jane Schoen­brun: ​‘I want­ed the film to feel like we’re lost in the haze of the internet’

After pre­mier­ing at Sun­dance and screen­ing at vir­tu­al fests through­out 2021, the inter­net-set exper­i­men­tal com­ing-of-age/hor­ror dra­ma We’re All Going to the World’s Fair has begun its larg­er roll­out. In their fea­ture debut, direc­tor Jane Schoen­brun fil­ters their per­son­al his­to­ry online and aspi­ra­tions for trans cin­e­mat­ic lan­guage into a film cap­tur­ing the idio­syn­crasies of vir­tu­al con­nec­tion and feel­ing dis­con­nect­ed from oneself.

LWLies: Can you talk about your expe­ri­ences online as a teenag­er that you were draw­ing from in mak­ing World’s Fair?

Schoen­brun: I was of that gen­er­a­tion where the com­put­er entered the home and slow­ly became more and more of a mag­net – espe­cial­ly for me as a queer cre­ative kid. It was a space that was real­ly impor­tant for me, because it was hard to be both of those things where I was grow­ing up – it was viewed as dark or strange or dan­ger­ous or wrong. I would wait for every­one to go to bed and stay up on the com­put­er, writ­ing and read­ing fan fic­tion, lurk­ing on mes­sage boards and AIM­ing with peo­ple from school and weirdos I met online. It was some­thing I nev­er acknowl­edged or talked about in my ​‘real life’. That’s the dom­i­nant expe­ri­ence I was draw­ing from emo­tion­al­ly and try­ing to explore with the film.

I was drawn to dark­er tones – hor­ror movies and sad music and The X‑Files were invit­ing for me as a kid. I wasn’t find­ing a gaze that felt beau­ti­ful or excit­ing to me in the day­light. I have this vivid mem­o­ry of fourth grade: they told us to bring in a book that we loved and I brought in a nov­el­i­sa­tion of an episode of The X‑Files. This ​‘future foot­ball play­er’ kind of kid asked me what book I brought. I just remem­ber see­ing his face drop and him say­ing, ​‘Oh, you’re into that kind of thing.’ The mem­o­ries we hold onto from that age are all about things we don’t under­stand yet that are very fun­da­men­tal, and that’s a queer mem­o­ry to me. And [World’s Fair] is a queer film for a sim­i­lar reason.

Since the inter­net is far dif­fer­ent now than it was in our ado­les­cence, how did you tai­lor your expe­ri­ences in mak­ing a con­tem­po­rary inter­net film?

I made a deci­sion ear­ly on that I wasn’t so inter­est­ed in real­ism. Peo­ple some­times get frus­trat­ed with the film for not giv­ing you a year that it’s tak­ing place, and I think that goes for the dif­fer­ent aes­thet­ics we see. It’s draw­ing as much from the dial-up wild west haunt­ed land­scape that was my child­hood online as it is from 2012-era creep­y­pas­ta ama­teur YouTube aes­thet­ics. Maybe a lit­tle less from the con­tem­po­rary inter­net. It just felt lim­it­ing to choose an inter­net to stay in. That had every­thing to do with how per­son­al the film is and how much it’s about reflect­ing on these dif­fer­ent gen­er­a­tions that had a sim­i­lar expe­ri­ence to mine as a queer per­son find­ing them­selves in the light of that screen.

How did you devel­op Casey as a char­ac­ter based on your own expe­ri­ences, and how much did Anna Cobb bring to it?

I want­ed to find a col­lab­o­ra­tor to build that char­ac­ter with, rather than putting it all on the page and try­ing to fit a human being into this pre­con­ceived notion of that char­ac­ter. Much of the film is rid­ing on Anna’s shoul­ders, as some­body who is all we’re look­ing at for most of the film. You need­ed some­body incred­i­bly tal­ent­ed, who felt very alive and very real – in that way of stum­bling across some­body online and being fas­ci­nat­ed by who this per­son is when the cam­era shuts off… some­thing haunted.

In Anna, I found some­body who was over­flow­ing with per­son­al­i­ty and charis­ma. She’s so engag­ing and smart. The oth­er thing that Anna has is an incred­i­ble craft and work eth­ic that I think is bor­der­line unhealthy for some­one her age – she takes her work so seri­ous­ly. So I wrote [Casey] 70 per cent of the way there, and then the last 30 per cent was tai­lor­ing the char­ac­ter to Anna and let­ting Anna seep into it. And Anna is very dif­fer­ent from Casey – Anna is very goofy, doesn’t like com­put­ers, doesn’t like hor­ror movies. But she put so much of her­self into it and found a way to get in the head­space of that char­ac­ter. And in that space, she tapped into this lone­li­ness and anger, and all of that is what makes the char­ac­ter sing.

What did cap­tur­ing the per­spec­tive of JLB [Michael J Rogers] along­side Casey’s bring to the film for you?

One of the core things I want­ed to say about the inter­net is how ephemer­al and tran­sient it can feel. Struc­tural­ly, I want­ed the film to feel like trav­el­ing from one bed­room to anoth­er, and in between we’re sort of lost in the haze of the inter­net – feel­ing very far away and dis­tant from the warmth of the start of the film. It would do a dis­ser­vice to over-explain, [but] I think it has a lot to do with dys­pho­ria and transness and lone­li­ness. It also has a lot to do with this idea that the inter­net dis­ap­pears – videos come down, peo­ple dis­ap­pear. Maybe you know someone’s first name, but it becomes impos­si­ble to track peo­ple down, espe­cial­ly if they’re not telling you details about their lives, which Casey very inten­tion­al­ly is not.

Like Casey says in her last line, ​‘One day soon, I’m just going to dis­ap­pear and you’re not going to have any idea what hap­pened to me.’ She says it like a threat, and that threat is real. It has a lot to do with the ways we try to know peo­ple but can’t ever quite know what’s going on in some­body else’s head. The way I’m talk­ing about online expe­ri­ence and per­for­ma­tiv­i­ty in this paraso­cial space is a metaphor for that – the ephemer­al­i­ty of human connection.

Much of World’s Fair exper­i­ments with its visu­al style along­side the tech­nol­o­gy being used. What sig­nif­i­cance did embrac­ing the cin­e­mat­ic lan­guage of this tech­nol­o­gy hold for you?

I was real­ly engaged with this as some­one who came up in a microbud­get film­mak­ing scene under a film cul­ture that, even in its ​‘inde­pen­dent’ spaces, is deeply entrenched in com­mer­cial real­i­ties, cap­i­tal­ist pur­suits, and mon­ey­mak­ing – and, as a result, is deeply con­ser­v­a­tive and at risk of feel­ing like a zom­bie. It’s rare that I see some­thing that feels whol­ly new and excit­ing and not try­ing to fit into a mono­cul­tur­al com­mer­cial land­scape. Where I was see­ing cre­ative work being made was in the short form, whether by rad­i­cal microbud­get film­mak­ers or by kids on the internet.

If you immerse your­self in that work, you can see pat­terns and aes­thet­ics and cul­tur­al obses­sions that feel new and fresh. They’re pick­ing at some­thing that is very con­tem­po­rary and that hasn’t been explored in a real­is­tic way in film [with­out being] watered down into a more tra­di­tion­al, com­mer­cial form – bleed­ing some­thing of its pow­er to fit into the struc­tures of IP.

In con­struct­ing my film, it lulls you into a set of expec­ta­tions about what kind of film you’re watch­ing, in the same way that Casey’s videos lull you into an expec­ta­tion of what she wants you to think and feel. Then the legs get kicked out from under the film in many ways, one of which is the cam­era and the aes­thet­ics and per­spec­tive and ​“pro­duc­tion qual­i­ty” or ​“ama­teur nature” of the film. Maybe most sig­nif­i­cant­ly, though, is who our nar­ra­tor is – there’s this increas­ing­ly com­pli­cat­ed con­ver­sa­tion about whose cam­era we’re fol­low­ing as the film goes on.

When you make a film, you’re spend­ing a lot of your time and social cap­i­tal and emo­tion­al health to get 80 min­utes of some­thing that hope­ful­ly feels excit­ing to you. If I was going to bite that off with the min­i­mal resources I had at my dis­pos­al, it need­ed to be some­thing that felt big to me cre­ative­ly. It couldn’t be big bud­get-wise, so it had to be some­thing where I would go into this swing­ing with ambition.

As a trans view­er, how the film sub­tex­tu­al­ly presents transness and dys­pho­ria is espe­cial­ly excit­ing for me. How did you strike a bal­ance between mak­ing a film root­ed in transness and cap­tur­ing the inter­nal nuances spe­cif­ic to trans people’s lives?

The answer is pret­ty sim­ple: I was trans and made a movie. This movie walks hand-in-hand with my own tran­si­tion. When I start­ed work­ing on the film, my egg hadn’t cracked yet; I would have said no to the ques­tion ​“Are you trans?” And yet, I was try­ing to unpack a feel­ing that I would lat­er come to call dysphoria.

By the time I got there, I tried to stay true to the artis­tic prac­tice of not sig­ni­fy­ing any­thing, and that was real­ly scary. Instead, I focused on com­ing from a real emo­tion­al space and this need to express a feel­ing that I was work­ing through. [I was] unpack­ing stuff from my teenage years, but also unpack­ing the process of fig­ur­ing out my transness and under­stand­ing gen­der and iden­ti­ty in a deep­er way than I had pre­vi­ous­ly. That all went straight into the film with­out over-explain­ing it or mak­ing it safe. It wasn’t until the film pre­miered at Sun­dance and I saw that it did res­onate with oth­er trans peo­ple that I let myself exhale from this years-long process of mak­ing some­thing that I wasn’t underlining.

One of the things that you’re strug­gling with most ear­ly in tran­si­tion – the first thing I tell peo­ple when they come out to me as trans – is that it’s real. That imposter syn­drome that doesn’t get talked about because our ene­mies try to use it against us is a real part of ear­ly tran­si­tion. See­ing these things that I always thought were just me being a weirdo or me nev­er being able to fig­ure out why I was dif­fer­ent from every­body else [in] oth­er kids out there deal­ing with sim­i­lar desires, gazes, and strug­gles as I had was one of the most val­i­dat­ing things in my life.

In your director’s state­ment, you say we’re still find­ing ways to artic­u­late what it’s like to be trans and feel dys­pho­ria in film. What do you hope to see from your trans peers in fur­ther explor­ing that?

Again, it’s a fair­ly sim­ple answer: trans peo­ple being giv­en the oppor­tu­ni­ties to make per­son­al and dif­fi­cult work that’s leg­i­ble to them, even if it’s not leg­i­ble to cis gate­keep­ers. A big part of what I do is take meet­ings to try to get new films made, and I’m rarely – if ever – across the table from a trans per­son. I don’t think there are any trans peo­ple in real posi­tions of pow­er across the indus­try. Or if there are, they’re still in the clos­et and maybe always will be, because unfor­tu­nate­ly it’s an age thing. I speak in col­lege class­es and there’s always two or three non-bina­ry kids in there talk­ing from per­son­al expe­ri­ence about why [World’s Fair] res­onates, and I think that’s generational.

If I’m stand­ing on a soap­box talk­ing about trans shit and what we need to do to rede­fine it, it’s because there aren’t many oth­er peo­ple of my age group out there doing that. I’m a lit­tle fur­ther into my life right now, and I’m get­ting oppor­tu­ni­ties to do things that are big and hope­ful­ly will make a dif­fer­ence for this ongo­ing con­ver­sa­tion. But real­ly, my hope in five years is that there will be trans films every­where. I have peers who I adore and look up to who are doing great work in the space. But it’s so nascent. Even a cou­ple years ago, it was not exis­tent at all. It just needs to keep grow­ing. Auton­o­my, trans final cut: that’s what needs to happen.