Jane Schoenbrun Talks ‘I Saw the TV Glow’: “To Make This Kind of Movie You Need to Dance With the Devil”

Jane Schoenbrun has discussed “dancing with the devil” a.k.a., senior execs in Hollywood’s film industry, while making hit film I Saw the TV Glow .

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Trans director Schoenbrun spoke candidly at the San Sebastian Film Festival event Wednesday afternoon following a screening of the movie, taking the time to praise Emma Stone , whose production company Fruit Tree — co-founded with her husband, Dave McCary — financed the project.

“They had essentially said to me, ‘We just want to use our power,'” Schoenbrun explained. “Like, this is Emma Stone: ‘We want to use my power to help people like you make movies.’ And I was like, ‘Cool, I’ll take your power!’ She was great and so supportive. She got on all of the Zoom pitches and having Emma Stone in the room advocating for you does help you seem like an adult and not a weirdo.”

I Saw the TV Glow follows the journey of a boy, Owen (played by Justice Smith), growing up in the suburbs in the 90s, who bonds with a girl, Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), over their shared hyper-fixation on a young adult TV show called The Pink Opaque . But the pair see something reflected in the screen that becomes more real than the world they thought they knew. Where Maddy runs headfirst, Owen represses what The Pink Opaque seems to be telling him. The film is an allegory for young queer people, and in Owen’s case, perhaps trans people, hiding from the shame they might feel by burying themselves in television.

The Pink Opaque is a masterpiece of world-building by Schoenbrun, focusing on two young girls who can only communicate by a psychic plane and are tasked with defeating the supernatural villain “Mr Melancholy” who plots to steal their hearts. Schoenbrun confessed on Wednesday a lot of the show was inspired by shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997) and Twin Peaks (1990).

“I was just pulling very specific things from episodes of Buffy , or Are You Afraid of the Dark? that I loved. It was just fun,” the filmmaker said, before listing directors that inspired the film. “[David] Lynch, obviously [David] Cronenberg, Gus Van Sant’s teenage death trilogy, and then also 90s television. There was this idea to take the aesthetics that I loved and just felt like were in my DNA, because I just grew up on it, from Buffy or Nickelodeon TV shows or Goosebumps . To take this sort of schlocky, but very colorful [aesthetic].”

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However, Schoenbrun was also asked about pushing the boundaries of what they described as “the left of what you’re allowed to do in a commercial infrastructure with billionaires’ money on the line who don’t share my values,” nodding to the LGBTQ+ stories that they want to keep telling in their films. “And it’s not binary, there are lovely people who are allies in that mission and in the industry… But make no mistake, it’s like top-level evil.” The writer-director continued to say that the only way to make it easier on the conscience was to “care less”.

“To make this kind of movie you need to dance with the devil,” they said. “To make something that, at its core doesn’t share the values that I would want my movies to share [in a commercial industry]. But it’s fun. I’ve just been in the most insane situations, when you see that top level.”

“David Lynch parodies it in his work — when you get to Mulholland Drive, it’s very clear that he’s just reflecting on this exact absurdity. These shadowy figures. It’s real because there’s a certain level of money involved and there is something fun about taking them for a ride… I’m a mischief maker.”

I Saw the TV Glow released in theaters in the U.S. in May and is now available to stream on Max. San Sebastian Film Festival runs from Sept. 20-28.

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