Jane Schoenbrun is a non-binary filmmaker who co-created ongoing touring variety series “The Eyeslicer,” which has screened in hundreds of venues across the world, including MoMA, the Tribeca Film Festival, and Kansas City’s oldest porn theater. In 2018, they created the Radical Film Fair, a film flea market and mentorship event that drew thousands of attendees. Schoenbrun is the director of feature documentary “A Self-Induced Hallucination,” producer on Aaron Schimberg’s “Chained for Life,” an EP on season one of Terence Nance’s “Random Acts of Flyness,” and creator of the omnibus “dream film” “collective:unconscious.”
“We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” is screening at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, which is taking place online and in person via Satellite Screens January 28-February 3.
W&H: Describe the film for us in your own words.
JS: The film is about a young girl experimenting with her identity on the internet through her participation in a massive multiplayer online horror game.
W&H: What drew you to this story?
JS: I wanted to make a movie about growing up within the liminal space of the internet, and I wanted to explore questions about identity, power, and authorship through the lens of the creepypasta genre.
W&H: What do you want people to think about after they watch the film?
JS: I hope the movie mutates in everyone’s memory a little differently. I tried hard to craft a film filled with images and ideas and ambiguities that I hope will linger in people’s minds in different ways over time.
I also hope that people remember the film as a strange and beautiful journey they went on, not so different from a dream they had. The filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami once said that his favorite movies are “kind enough to allow you a nice nap,” and I love this sentiment!
W&H: What was the biggest challenge in making the film?
JS: I’m trans, and still fairly early in my physical transition. Because I spent so many years in a state of repression and dysphoria, I’ve always had a bad case of imposter syndrome, and an ambient sense of shame about my own creative expression. In many ways, making this movie and refusing to self-censor my authentic expression was a push towards self-acceptance and a conscious attack against repression.
W&H: How did you get your film funded?
JS: Our main funder was Dweck Productions, run by a woman named Hannah Dweck. Hannah and her business partner, Ted, have become my close friends through the making of this movie, and I cannot begin to express how supportive they have both been. Their mission as a company is to support diverse filmmakers with distinctive visions who are telling personal stories. They allowed me so much freedom and emotional support in the making of the movie.
W&H: Share some insights into how you got the film made.
JS: I made the decision from day one. I wanted to conceive of a film that I could make with friends and on my own terms. I did not want to feel beholden to funders who didn’t share my goals, who might want me to make decisions that conflicted with my vision. I wanted to make something personal and daring and completely representative of who I am as an artist. I had seen enough through previous industry experience to know that, as a first-time filmmaker, the bigger the budget I tried to secure, the harder this would become.
Once I had a script that I was proud of — and a clear vision for how to make it — I started approaching friends with whom I wanted to collaborate. The first people I talked to were the Flies Collective, a production company in New York that I had collaborated with on other projects in the past, and who I knew were allies in the struggle to make honest art films in America. I asked them to be my guardian angels and to help me shepherd the project from a dream into reality.
Then I slowly started assembling a team: I brought on Sarah Winshall and Carlos Zozaya, both wonderful producers who I also really like and trust as friends. I asked Daniel Carbone from the Flies Collective, a brilliant filmmaker and cinematographer, if he’d be open to being director of photography for the film. I approached Abby Harri, who I’d known for a decade and who worked as a street casting agent on a lot of films that I love, to help me find our lead actors. I tried to surround myself with people who were creative, sensitive, talented, and passionate, people who I felt safe around. My biggest rule in crewing up was no jerks.
As for money, I emailed everyone who had ever been nice to me asking if they knew anyone looking to fund a feature. Sending these emails was humiliating — it always is — and led down many dead ends. But it eventually also led me to Dweck Productions, so the humiliation was totally worth it.
As for the production itself, it was my first time directing, and my lead actress Anna Cobb’s first feature film. She gives an incredibly raw, committed, and brave performance in the film, and I really wanted to cultivate a dynamic of trust, positivity, and open creativity on set to make sure we both felt comfortable.
I worked hard to set a tone of calm and positivity during production, where every day could feel fun and exciting for everyone on set. I knew that if we had a stressed out or toxic working environment, we would all suffer, and the film would suffer as well. Creating this wholesome energy on set is one of the things I am most proud of with the film, and so important for first-time filmmakers to keep in mind — directing can be stressful!
W&H: What inspired you to become a filmmaker?
JS: I’m the type of person who finds sad songs comforting. What drives me to want to make movies is the desire to create something honest that might be comforting to others in a similar way.
W&H: What’s the best and worst advice you’ve received?
JS: For this film, the best advice was from my assistant director Willy. He told me before production that if I disagreed with someone in my crew on an artistic or logistic decision, the most important thing was explaining why I disagreed, so they could understand my vision and my rationale for what I was doing. The clear communication helped keep morale up too.
For a lot of first-time directors, the instinct is to bulldoze — “I’m in charge and I want it this way” — which comes from a place of insecurity, really, and hearing that advice before production really stuck with me as an important lesson to keep in mind.
The worst advice for this film was that the movie needed more “kills per minute” in order to be commercial.
W&H: What advice do you have for other directors?
JS: I’m non-binary, and one thing that is really important for me to remember as a trans filmmaker is that the films I am making — if authentic — are likely going to differ in many core ways from those of cis filmmakers. However, we live in a male, cis, straight, white supremacist power structure, a specific subset of the population that has dominated the media we’re used to consuming.
So if a film speaks from a different gaze than these gatekeepers are used to — different perspective, set of desires, narrative structure, aesthetic — they might simply view these films as “wrong” or as “unsatisfying” in some way.
For me, it takes a lot of strength to conquer the imposter syndrome these boundaries instill, and to value my own authentic art outside the cis, straight, male, white supremacist system that dominates this country. But it’s the whole point!
W&H: Name your favorite woman-directed film and why.
JS: I believe it is “Old Joy” by Kelly Reichardt. That film gains such power from restraint, in a way that I am just totally in awe of.
W&H: How are you adjusting to life during the COVID-19 pandemic? Are you keeping creative, and if so, how?
JS: We were very lucky to wrap production just before COVID-19. Since I edited the film myself, post-production has kept me gloriously occupied. Though I confess, like many of my friends, I’ve definitely lost my fair share of days to doomscrolling Twitter.
W&H: The film industry has a long history of underrepresenting people of color onscreen and behind the scenes and reinforcing — and creating — negative stereotypes. What actions do you think need to be taken to make Hollywood and/or the doc world more inclusive?
JS: Many more people of color should be running production companies, be in positions of power at agencies and film festivals and on boards of directors, and have more control over the financing and distribution channels of Hollywood and the doc world.
But also — I don’t know if a white supremacist power structure can truly reform itself. This is a fundamentally broken system, one that has never been anything but broken. It is a system that, in 2021, operates with such a massive bottom line that it is, realistically, only ever going to be beholden to the cold forces of capital.
I think it is also important to remember that change can also come from outside the Hollywood ecosystem — by people building and supporting new, autonomous avenues of financing and distribution on a local, grassroots level.
