During his nearly 10 years as a cast member on Saturday Night Live, Kyle Mooney dipped his toe into filmmaking as the co-screenwriter on the well-received 2017 film Brigsby Bear, in which he also starred. But with his latest work, Y2K (now in theaters), Mooney steps behind the camera for the first time as director (as well as co-writer with Evan Winter and in a supporting acting role). Y2K tells the story of three high school friends (Jaeden Martell, Julian Dennison, and Rachel Zegler) who must battle against killer robots built from late-1990s technology that are set lose on the world just as New Year’s Eve 1999 becomes New Year’s Day 2000.
Y2K is a violent science fiction alternative history work with a great number of laughs and some terrific performances by the young leads, as well as a wave of ’90s music and references that lend to its vibe as not just a film about the decade and Y2K paranoia, but also makes it feel like a film made in that period.
During their recent visit to Chicago, I had a chance to sit down with Mooney and Winter to discuss the creation of the film, their memories of that mildly scary time (they were in their early teens), and the wonderful creature design of the murderous robots. Please enjoy our conversation.
As a lifelong Prince fan, this Y2K thing was on my mind for many many years…
Kyle Mooney: Did you say “As a lifelong Prince fan”? Does he have a Y2K song?
Evan Winter: “1999”
KM: Oh, duh.
EW: Kyle is a huge Prince fan.
KM: I actually am, but I was thinking “Was he Y2K obsessive?”
So where did your obsession with Y2K come from, to the point where you’re going to make this horror-comedy-sci-fi-alternative history thing?
KM: For me, it was just such a letdown.
Yeah, not a single plane fell out of the sky.
KM: Exactly! So I just carried that with me, and it was always a minor obsession in the back of my brain. Nothing I put any time into, but on New Year’s Day 2019, I had the very starter concept about making a movie about teenagers going to a high school party and Y2K actually happens. I contacted Evan, who was a guy I went to college with and is a very talented filmmaker and writer and was like “What do you think of this?” and then we started riffing on it.
So that’s more recent than I would have guessed. How long did the script take to complete?
\We had a draft within a year that we felt pretty good about, but that was early 2020 and the pandemic happened, so that pretty much halted whatever progress we had.
Did you continue writing then?
EW: The script after a year of writing was not too far from the finished film, so it really was about having a little bit of momentum and then COVID shut everything down in the industry, and then about a year later, when people realized that production was going to pick back up, we started talking again and landed with the A24. We probably talked about the script throughout that COVID year but it truly was a thing where we had time to tweak it, but it was more wondering if anything was ever going to happen again.
Since you were teenagers when this actually happened, how much are the people in this film based on people you know at the time? How many of the events in the first half of the film are things you guys took part in?
KM: I grew up in San Diego; Evan grew up in Eugene, Oregon. Definitely there are amalgamations of us in different ways. He and I needed each other to say “This is the culture I grew up in.” We both were really into underground hip-hop, so the CJ character who is obsessed with that is taking a lot from real life. And Danny and Eli are versions of ourselves or our best friends, but each character is somebody we were aware of or knew or had our own version of in our hometown.
EW: It’s like The Breakfast Club in that, those are such archetypal characters, and we liked the idea asking “What are the more niche archetypes, but filtered through the experiences we had an people who we knew. We were trying to have both emblematic characters that are universal, but also very specific to that time period with rap rock or underground hip-hop.
I realize 24 years ago isn’t that long ago, but how much did you want this to feel like a film made in that time period? Even the poster has that retro vibe.
KM: A lot. It’s something we talked about from moment one. It was a period when we were psyched to go the movie theaters, not that we aren’t now, but seeing Men In Black and Independence Day, those big blockbusters of the era, that was such a treat. It was fun to try and get as close to that as we can within the limits of our budget.
EW: Simultaneously, the first section of the movie…the late 1990s was this incredible moment, looking back at it now, for these teen house party movies—PG-13 or R rated teen party movies. We thought and talked a lot about those.
KM: It’s pretty remarkable how many of those movies came out in that period, 1997-99.
As I was watching it, the thing that stuck with me was how much it felt like something that was made in that era. Speaking of which, I want to talk about the robot designs. They look like they’re made of tech that was available at the time, but how much of that was practical, was it a guy in a suit, it is digital?
KM: So much of it was practical. We had Weta help us out with some of the main design, and our production designer Jason Singleton and his team created some practical puppets. There is some CG as well, but we trying to get away with as much practical stuff as we could.
EW: It’s such an incredible process to go through with the Weta folks. It’s in the script, and we describe certain things, like the laptop head and a lawnmower leg, and all of that stuff is described, and then we start working with them to build concept designs, and you get to a fairly detailed place where you’re really excited about the look and silhouette and design. Then we get our performers who are going to be inside the suits, and then they scan them and build the suits to their exact weight and size. And then we know their capabilities in terms of movement and strength. It was probably a yearlong process from start to finish with Weta to get those suits. They are all fully realized, the screens worked, the claws were operated by the people inside and another guy from Weta with a joystick, helping. It took multiple people to do it.
A lot of that tech isn’t inherently menacing looking, but the way you get over that is the screen head, having any image show up on that screen. Was that something you thought of initially, or was that a Weta creation?
KM: We knew that the screen would be doing something, but that was really late in the game. There’s this emblem that we called the digital eyes and it morphs throughout the movie, but that’s something we landed on in the last couple months of the edit.
EW: We knew conceptually what we wanted to do, how it was going to emote in certain ways, so we built those screens to practically glow and give off light, so we knew they could interact with our actors in real life on set. But the actual design of it and how it evolves, we knew we would get to that when the cut was locked and the time is right. But it did come together really quickly.
Jaeden, Julian and Rachel are borderline superstars of their generation. Did you have to give them a crash course in the era? What did you give them to watch or listen to?
KM: Specifically, we gave Jaeden and Julian a list of movies that high schoolers would have watched then. We made individualized playlists for everybody that were in line with their characters, but it was really on the actors themselves if they wanted to invest and learn. I feel like we were hopeful, and I think it’s true, that these characters are timeless to some degree. You can relate even if you weren’t alive then, so some people were digging in and trying to learn as much as possible. But other were like “It’s pretty obvious what this kid is going through; I’m going to do my best.”
The one thing that isn’t timeless is that Arli$$ reference, which I’m sure you had to explain to them.
KM: I remember them asking “How do you say this?”
When you typed it into the script, did you use the dollar signs?
EW: I think we did.
KM: I think you’re the first person to mention Arli$$.
Speaking of timeless, Fred Durst is having moment now. I remember seeing him act in I Saw the TV Glow. How did you land on him? Did it take any convincing to play himself 25 years ago and poke fun at his image?
KM: It took a slight amount of convincing, but he was there within a week of Evan and I pitching the movie together. We thought it would be fun having Fred Durst playing himself. We truly bounced around other persons of the era, but nobody satisfied all the things Fred did, so when we found out the movie was greenlit, he was the first person we went out to. And thank god. We feel he’s pretty incredible in the movie. We were all pretty awestruck at how wonderful an actor he was.
EW: Yeah, there are a lot of layers he has to be able to operate on simultaneously, and we’re so psyched about his performance.
You go pretty hard on the blood and guts in this film, and I thank you for that. There must have been conversations about how hard to go. The film was going to be R rated anyway for the language, so were you like “Let’s just lean into the R rating”?
EW: Again, a lot of the kills were in the script, and the tone is pretty clear, so when we were talking to A24, they got it and knew what it was going to be. The conversations were more like “How do you see this being executed? How bloody is it, versus how sanitized?” We were always very excited about the technology element, the stuff that feels very quaint and anachronistic.
KM: One thing that excited us from moment one was this is a movie that, in theory, would be seen by your friends communally and have people reacting. Having laughs and full “Oh my god, I can’t believe that just happened” moments was something that was really enticing.
This movie might qualify as a jukebox musical. You have whole songs presented here. Outside of a Limp Bizkit song, how did you figure out what other music you’d feature?
KM: We definitely had songs written into the initial script. Again, part of the DNA of the movie is, if we’re going to sell the time period, we need the music. It was a lot of plug and play, and some of it came down to who was willing to let us use their music, but we’re incredibly happy with the tracks we ended up with.
EW: We wanted it to feel like their was representation of different types of music throughout it. That was really important to us.
Guys, thank you so much. Best of luck with this.
KM: Thank you so much. Thanks for hangin’.
EW: Thanks, man.
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