Justice Smith, Brigette Lundy-Paine and Director Jane Schoenbrun stopped by The Hollywood Reporter's studio during the Sundance film festival to chat all about their film 'I Saw the TV Glow' and reveal how '90s girl power shows like 'Buffy The Vampire Slayer' and 'The Secret World of Alex Mack' had a big influence on the film.
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00:00 --When I can't sleep at night, I'm just thinking about like how how how can how
00:07 can we save ourselves as a species?
00:11 --Burn it all down and start a
00:13 shut over?
00:14 --I don't know.
00:15 [music]
00:18 --Who wants to explain for viewers the concept of the show within the show?
00:23 --I can do it.
00:24 --And where you got the idea for The Pinko Pink?
00:27 --The Pinko Pink is a TV show from the 1990s.
00:30 It's about two best friends.
00:32 They meet at summer camp.
00:34 They live across the county from each other, but they have a psychic connection, and they
00:38 help each other each week fight a new monster who's trying to trap them in an evil hell
00:42 dimension called the Midnight Realm.
00:45 It aired for five seasons on the Young Adult Network and is a beloved 90s supernatural
00:53 girl power TV show.
00:56 --The show is sort of an amalgamation of a lot of the shows that I grew up watching as
01:01 a kid.
01:02 Everything from Alex Mack to Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Are You Afraid of the Dark.
01:06 --Does that show like bring up anything from your like childhood or watching shows?
01:12 Where does it fit on like what you would watch?
01:13 --Are You Afraid of the Dark?
01:15 Definitely I would watch.
01:16 Goosebumps, I would watch.
01:19 --Hannah Montana.
01:20 --That's not really the same.
01:22 --Just to complete that trilogy.
01:24 Feels the same to me.
01:25 --Is there a movie, the Disney Channel original movie Don't Look Under the Bed?
01:28 --No.
01:29 --Okay, well.
01:30 --I lived.
01:31 --It reminds me of that too.
01:32 --I was gonna ask why the 90s, but I suppose it's because for like for you there's a nostalgia
01:37 element.
01:38 --Yeah, I grew up in the suburbs in the 1990s.
01:43 I think actually like a very specific time, you know?
01:48 My parents generation I think fully bought into this like Reagan era idea of like a white
01:57 flight out of a working class background into this like nook where you can be quote unquote
02:02 safe but safe can also mean homogenized and oppressed.
02:06 So yeah, just reflecting back on like my gaze on my own childhood now that I've, you know,
02:14 understood myself as pretty intrinsically different than the image of normal that was
02:20 sold to me.
02:21 --What, like what did you connect to from either your own upbringing or current day?
02:27 Like what kind of was top of mind as you were on set every day for you?
02:31 --I was raised in a really queer, really freaky like art family.
02:36 And I think I was instilled with a lot of like freedom to be strange.
02:42 And I felt that through this film it was really important for me to communicate that to people
02:48 who don't know or who have been told repeatedly that it's not okay to be strange.
02:53 And so I kind of wanted to like use the energy of the film to like break into people's psyches
02:59 and like kind of allow them to like pervert themselves more freely.
03:03 --I had a lot of fight growing up.
03:08 And although, you know, I had a fight a lot, I'm grateful for my ability to push through
03:17 and survive.
03:18 And I wanted to examine like what it looks like when you don't have that sense of fight,
03:25 when you really are at the hands of your environment, even though it's wasting you away, how you'll
03:35 still kind of succumb to conformity just because it's less tragic than defying it.
03:44 --If you guys are like up in the middle of the night, what is it that keeps keeps all
03:47 you up at night?
03:51 --The anticipation of things to come.
03:54 I'm a very impatient person.
03:58 And so I find that like I'm always like, Let's just go, go, go, go, go.
04:01 And so when I have to wait, it really drives me crazy.
04:05 And I feel like sleeping is waiting.
04:10 --I feel like very anxious to dismantle Empire.
04:15 And like this movie feels like it has that in it.
04:18 Like I feel like this movie is like gut scream.
04:22 And so when I can't sleep at night, I'm just thinking about like, how can we save
04:31 ourselves as a species?
04:33 --Burn it all down and start over?
04:36 --I don't know.
04:37 I think about how the trick is played where we are made to desire our own repression.
04:46 [BLANK_AUDIO]