I Saw the TV Glow director Jane Schoenbrun on fighting the ‘nefarious mechanism’ of story

polygon.com:

I Saw the TV Glow is a rare treat of a movie. It’s equal parts dense, complicated, funny, and sad, all while being an absolute joy to watch. Its story is equally concerned with the pain of loving a TV show that ended too soon, and the pain of letting your whole life slip by without ever truly knowing yourself. Finding ways to communicate all these complicated ideas while still making a watchable, entertaining film is a big task, but TV Glow writer-director Jane Schoenbrun has experience with that.

Their fantastic first feature, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, centers on a young woman who finds friendship online as part of a community obsessed with something called “the World’s Fair Challenge,” a viral ritual that supposedly changes the body of anyone who performs it. World’s Fair, and Schoenbrun’s earlier documentary about Slenderman, A Self-Induced Hallucination, are both deeply rooted in online communities, creepypasta, and how we find ourselves and our identities in the media we consume.

TV Glow takes that concept even further, following Owen (Ian Foreman and, as he gets older, Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), two loners who bond over a shared love of a late-night TV show called The Pink Opaque — a mashup of ’90s TV hits that lives somewhere between Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Twin Peaks. Ahead of the release of I Saw the TV Glow, Polygon sat down with Schoenbrun to talk about their inspiration for the movie, their distrust of narrative convention, and the subtle ways all their films connect.

This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.

Polygon: Where did this script start for you?

Jane Schoenbrun: My process is very weird. I say my process — I don’t think it’s the way people normally work when they’re trying to make a narrative film. Something will kind of get lodged in my brain. And that something could be just like a title or an image or an idea. That’s definitely not a movie. But it feels stuck, and it feels connected to