We’re constantly told we’re living inside our screens, but what exactly is on the other side of the glass? Writer and filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun might have an answer. First, they blurred pixelated reality with the Lynchian 2024 tech-horror film I Saw the TV Glow , then again in last summer’s hall-of-mirrors slasher trip Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma . Now, the 39-year-old New York City native is releasing their first novel, Public Access Afterworld , which grabs the remote on the subject of actual-versus- televised reality and cranks the volume up to 10. This queer, speculative, decade-hopping, profoundly witty sci-fi horror phantasmagoria centers on a secret dimension on the other side of the static. Schoenbrun, who lives upstate, took an hour out of an insanely busy film-and- novel-release schedule to talk with their friend, actor and director Kristen Stewart , about love, sex, un-heteronormative connection, and the saving grace of becoming a famous trans artist.
SCHOENBRUN: Good. I saw your movie [ The Wrong Girls ] last night.
SCHOENBRUN: I loved it. It just really hit. My favorite movies are about that kind of relationship. I have a person in my life who is not a romantic partner that I spend most nights on the couch with. That’s the most important person to me.
STEWART: I know. I think calling it “platonic” puts a stink on a rela tionship. It’s like, “No, it’s deeply romantic and we don’t fuck.”
SCHOENBRUN: Yeah, because fucking can mess up one’s life. I was straight married—I mean, I still am. My wife is over there doing stretches in the doorway. [Laughs] But we’ve just completely un-heteronorma tive’d our lives. I just feel endlessly lucky to have six people who know me really well. Some of them are romantic partners and some of them are friends. Some of them I have sex with and some of them I don’t. Why does one have to have special hierarchy over the other?
STEWART: Man, it’s crazy. I know we’re doing an interview, but the modes and the models are crippling until they’re not. It’s so crazy when you realize how fucking in control other people are of the way you relate to other people. I’m old, dude. I’m fucking 36, and I am just now going like, “I don’t need to compare myself to anyone.”
STEWART: I know it sounds super trite, and I don’t mean to sound cheesy, but I really feel what you just said so hard because it’s super difficult to fucking break out of. Anyway, I’m smack dab in the mid dle of the book right now.
STEWART: And other than Abel, you are in all these characters. Do you feel beautifully schizophrenic when you write stuff like this? Because no one sounds the same. To think they all came from one person always stymies me, because their voices are so different, but they all feel like you. We haven’t known each other for more than a second, but I’m super proud of the book’s existence.
SCHOENBRUN: [Laughs] Thank you. I’m proud of it too. It was hard to write a book. I was really intimi dated by it. I remember this happen ing when I started to learn how to make movies too, feeling it slowly start to get good, or stop being some thing I was totally embarrassed by.
STEWART: Was it a ton of drafting and iteration? Or did you just have to get over the hump of self-consciousness?
SCHOENBRUN: I probably spent half a year rewriting the first 30 pages over and over, because I would read it back and be like, “I wouldn’t like this if I was reading it.” I remember getting really obsessed with writing dialogue. I was like, “Is my style just dialogue and nothing in between?” I guess the way I would describe it is slowly making your taste match your ability.
STEWART: I was wondering about you writing this, because I think in the beginning you were like, “Oh, maybe this is a TV show,” and it was too much.
SCHOENBRUN: Literally right after I wrote TV Glow , I was like, “I want to keep going,” and I wrote two full seasons of television. I used to do that when I was a kid. When I wasn’t trying to get stoned on the internet, I was writing. It wasn’t even fan fiction, it was original stuff. Really from the youngest age, by any means necessary, I was trying to tell long-form stories. And the medium of TV as a canvas was always so beautiful to me. Without anyone asking me to, I wrote 1,600 pages of television scripts and mapped out a full series where I was like, “I know exactly what’s going to happen in the first scene of the fifth episode of the third sea son.” [Laughs] But at this point, I had made one $100,000 movie. It became very clear it was not going to make it to the airwaves or be any thing like the form I would want. So, Jack [Haven] gave me a tattoo that says, “Make it real,” and I asked him to do that. I was like, “I just need to get it out,” which I’m still in the process of, but writing the first book took years. I moved up here to do it and changed my life completely. I probably spent twice as much time editing the book as I did writing the first draft, because the words are everything.
STEWART: That’s so fucking cool and crazy, because it does not seem like that. It seems so totally necessary and compulsive. It’s cool to be some body who has so much inside that there’s not enough time to make it all, so you have to put it somewhere else.
SCHOENBRUN: This was also my first time having a daily practice I loved and that felt healthy. The way TV Glow worked was I would dis sociate and think about it a bunch for years. The actual writing of it was just me locking myself in my bedroom for a couple of weeks and giving myself a panic attack every day. Whereas this was like, “I wake up, I sit at my desk, I make coffee, I write, I take a long walk, I get out of that world in my brain, and I go live my life with people I love.” In film, you don’t really get to do that because you create the blueprint and then you manage other people. You become this laborer to make sure the thing can be what it deserves to be.
STEWART: Does that process distract you from the act of seeing and being seen as a director, because you’re so busy logistically? I was wonder ing how viscerally visible you feel in your movies, and if you feel that way while you’re working?
SCHOENBRUN: Viscerally visible in what sense?
STEWART: Because you’re making stuff with people who really under stand what it is. You’re not just in your bedroom writing. Your friends are mirrors and the work you’re making is all reflective.
SCHOENBRUN: I don’t know, because I lived with the story of the book for a couple of years. The same thing happens with film. By the time I was ready to make it, I was a different person, and I needed to find what was it about Abel, for instance, in that moment I still resonated with. And the same for Jules and Willa. The writing wasn’t going to be good unless I felt some present-tense emo tional stake, and the same is largely true for filmmaking. But I also think directing is performing and writing is performing. I find myself constantly aware that I’m not performing when I’m on the couch with my loved ones. I would even go a step further and say I’m really good at that, probably because of some trans trauma. Because when you’re a kid, you learn very young that people want you to perform a version of yourself that isn’t you. I learned how to do that really well, and I think it’s an essential part of filmmaking.
STEWART: Now at least you’ve learned the performance you want to give.
STEWART: We’re all doing that all the time. It’s like, I want you to feel a certain way, and I’m working hard to make that happen—
SCHOENBRUN: [Laughs] I do feel stoked. It’s working.
STEWART: It’s such an unavoidable thing. The real F-word is Fake. There’s no real real. That would feel so limiting and scary. I look back at recent performances—and when I say performances, I mean ways I acted around people—and go, “Oh, girl, you could totally have done that better.” That’s just trying to be the person you want to be, and how to get as close to people as you can.
SCHOENBRUN: Miasma is sort of a movie about self-awareness as an ailment, or as a thing that keeps you from self-consciously being yourself. But I don’t think that un-self-con sciously being yourself means not being self-aware. I think it’s closer to what you said, which is perform ing the version that feels thrilling.
STEWART: Yes, and default settings are crushing and very easy to get sucked into. I love your movie so much. I don’t think it’s massively divisive, but some people love it and then some other people are like, “I don’t know.” I’ve built it up to a lot of people, and I’m sorry about that, but most of them love it.
SCHOENBRUN: [Laughs] Yeah, you should be sorry about that.
STEWART: Do you sort people? I do. I’m like, “Oh, so you love it and get it, and you didn’t.”
SCHOENBRUN: I think when it comes to gender and sexuality, the reac tions people have been having to both of them are either, “Oh, my god, I feel like I’m standing naked in front of the mirror. How did you possibly make me see this invisi ble thing I’ve known was the air I breathe?” Versus like, “What the fuck?” I actually think that with both films I’ve tapped into some thing maybe there isn’t language for, that some people know and other people don’t, because they don’t experience it.
STEWART: Yeah. I don’t want to talk about negative reactions, because some people are fixated on things the movie isn’t about at all. But it’s so fucking cool to have a larger body of work, because I love TV Glow , and then this book popped out. It’s the adjacent piece, and the people want it.
STEWART: Writing a book like this makes it real for a fuckton of people, but I do want to see your TV version of it pretty badly.
SCHOENBRUN: Totally. There’s something almost increasingly theological in the work. I feel like my relationship to god and spirituality is ambivalent in many ways. It’s like, we think we make the mov ies, but the movies make us. It’s this idea that “make it real” means fic tion, and fiction can beget reality, right?
Suit, shirt, Belt, and Shoes Givenchy by Sarah Burton.
SCHOENBRUN: I experienced this in 2019 and 2020 in this intense way of, “Oh, I’m so scared and ashamed to be the person I know I am and want to be. Let me fake it until I make it.” In this case, faking it until I made it was being a hot trans girl artist.
STEWART: The fucking girls in this are so cool and funny and scary, and it hurts so bad when they hurt each other’s feelings.
SCHOENBRUN: They’re being terrible to each other.
SCHOENBRUN: It’s messy. I’m proud of that. My book agent, Bill Clegg, kept saying, “Hero’s Journey,” and I don’t completely disagree. It’s about this trans girl realizing she’s a superhero and trying to save the world. But there’s enough about that narrative I’m suspicious of.
STEWART: The name Bethany is so fucking hilarious. She should have a cape.
SCHOENBRUN: I love her, but she’s also a fictional version of me. David and Bethany—I feel like one is my worst nightmare version of my pre-transition self and one is my imagined post-transition ideal self. By the end of the book, it’s like they’re duking it out for literally which one of us is real.
STEWART: They say “make it real” means “make a choice.” But “make it real” is like, everything is a choice.
SCHOENBRUN: One component of this experience is “I probably would have died pretty young because I hated my life and was depressed and in the wrong gender and body and reality.” And then I became a famous trans girl artist. It’s just beyond my wildest dreams. I’m suspicious of it too, or it feels too close to The Secret or something.
STEWART: Like manifesting? You’re right. That starts to sound icky and totally not the point.
SCHOENBRUN: But there is some thing to finding the thing inside you that hurts the most and learning how to heal your relationship to it. The reason Hero’s Journey as a con cept felt weird to me is because it’s actually not in Bethany’s control to save the day. The forces she exists within have power over her.
SCHOENBRUN: And she gets to be the hero of this fictional story, but it’s ruined her in some way. It has depleted something in her, and in many ways she’s still a victim. It’s almost like she’s trying to will her self to not be a victim as a means of control. I relate to all of this, but I’m not just like, “Let me write a story about the coolest, hottest girl I can imagine and wish I was.” The desire to do that becomes part of the work.
STEWART: That’s why it’s inter esting that you’re the person who wrote it. It feels like a comic book. It feels like somebody who wants something really badly instead of somebody who’s trying to tell you something. And the characters don’t feel remotely archetypal. They’re so specific. That’s why I was telling you you’re a schizo.
SCHOENBRUN: I am a schizo. Do you ever have this, where you’re falling asleep at night, and you snap back awake and realize there were two people in your head talking to each other?
STEWART: Honestly, I’m glad it’s happening.
SCHOENBRUN: We’re all a little bit schizo, or else life doesn’t make sense from one moment to the next.
STEWART: I don’t think I’m a fickle motherfucker, but I’m definitely coming from five angles most of the time.
STEWART: I’m coming at this from five angles, but I swear they coalesce.
SCHOENBRUN: Yeah, and those moments are beautiful.
SCHOENBRUN: I’m hiding right now. I’m trying not to look at the internet.
STEWART: Why? People love the movie so much. It must feel fucking cool to have a surging outpouring group of really cushy, tender fucking fans. I haven’t been a part of something like that in a while.
SCHOENBRUN: I’ve been part of that so many times. That’s the thing I’m trying to get back to. I’ve been on a press tour since May, and talk about self-conscious. You’re talking about yourself constantly instead of look ing at things outside yourself.
SCHOENBRUN: The county fair hap pens right behind my house, and that’s this weekend. I’m going to the demo derby, and there’s this one food stand that sells a meatball sub. They dig a big hole in the bread and fill it with meatballs. I’m going to get one of those.
STEWART: I’ve been called back to serve a story. It’s a TV show, and I’m playing an iconic figure in American history. It’s very big and heavy. It’s accent stuff and body stuff and sports. A lot of knowledge and a lot of dialogue, like I’m a real actor again. I haven’t done that in a minute, a part that wasn’t bizarre, esoteric, cool, and super personal. And this is not that.
SCHOENBRUN: Yeah, and you’ve got your thing you’re directing.
STEWART: [Laughs] I can’t wait to compartmentalize. That’ll be fun.
STEWART: We could talk forever. We need to kick it. We need to fucking hang.
SCHOENBRUN: We need to hang. Thank you for doing this. Thanks for reading it.
STEWART: Of course. I’m sorry if I didn’t do a great official interview.
Cape and Skirt Dries Van Noten. T-shirt Mr. Saturday. Shoes Givenchy by Sarah Burton.
Makeup Ayami Nishimura using Laura Mercier.
Source: Fashion
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