LOS ANGELES – Working behind the camera for a while didn’t appeal to Cooper Raiff.
“I never wanted to be a director,” he said. “When someone says they want to lead, I say, ‘Who do you think you are?’
But at the age of 25, the actor, writer and, despite his previous feeling, director, has made two bittersweet personal traits that have garnered the attention of critics and industry.
“I didn’t like the idea of directing because the directors have to bring everyone together and gain trust between the team and that’s not my comfort zone,” he said. “But I’m very good at making sure people want to be around me. I think it’s about not wanting to be alone.”
Now Raiff has made a film with which it seems that people want to spend some time, and where he confirmed his vocation. His second-year effort, “Cha Cha Real Smooth,” won the Audience Award at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival and was purchased for $ 15 million by Apple. This company led a previous acquisition of Sundance, “CODA,” to the Oscar for Best Picture earlier this year.
“Cha Cha Real Smooth” (in film and on Apple TV +), a comic drama about coming of age, focuses on Andrew (Raiff), a recent college graduate hired as a party initiator for bar mitzvah and involved in a flirtatious friendship with Domino. (Dakota Johnson), a 30-year-old mother of an autistic teenager.
Wearing a dark green hoodie during a recent interview at a restaurant in the Westwood section of this city (casual attire in contrast to the luxurious atmosphere of the establishment), Raiff breathed the same charming melancholy that permeates his work.
As he repeatedly ran his hands through his hair, the young narrator spoke with an anxious eagerness to avoid small talk in favor of vulnerability.
“If you had asked me, ‘Where will you be when you’re 25?’ I think he would have said, “I hope to be happy and be doing what I want to do,” Raiff said, adding, “There have been times this year when I’ve been very unhappy with certain things in my life. . The two movies I made were objectively successful because we made money from them, but being successful doesn’t help with my dad’s problems. It doesn’t make me spend the day. “
Before reluctantly, the Dallas native spent many of his teenage years in a local acting studio. He then hoped that acting would become his main way of participating in cinema.
Writing only came into play when he was a high school student when a new theater teacher, Catherine Hopkins, encouraged him to do so, providing suggestions and comments until he completed and assembled his first play. the school with your help.
“Bless his soul, he read some of the shitiest things ever,” Raiff said. “But she really helped me become a writer.” Hopkins, she recalled, had kind words to say about her feature film debut, but she believes she would secretly want her former student to be a playwright.
Eager to enter the industry, Raiff moved to Los Angeles to attend Western College. Still in her acting career, she regularly attended casting calls until an audition for a UCLA short film, which required a stereotypical Texas touch, broke her. “That’s when I said, ‘I can’t do this anymore. It’s not good for my morale, “he said.
Then Raiff wrote again. He put together an entire season of an episodic series, which he still wants to do someday, and sent it to every agent whose email he could find online. Not in vain, his unsolicited presentation had no traction.
“I realized that no one would read my stuff. That’s when, in my sophomore year of college during the spring break, I made this shitty movie thinking that people were more likely to see something than to read something, ”he explained.
That amateur company, titled “Madeline and Cooper,” with him and his girlfriend as protagonists and filmed with equipment borrowed from the university, followed the daily setbacks of a freshman. A fan of the television series “Togetherness,” Raiff tweeted his co-creator, Jay Duplass, and dared to watch his student project on YouTube.
“I said, ‘I bet he won’t click on that link and then he’ll email me.’ He sent me an email saying he had won the bet and then we had lunch,” Raiff said. “He was at such a low point when I tweeted him because he had shown the film to my parents and they really didn’t like it.”
Duplass saw potential. “In a couple of minutes, I was able to say that his sensitivity to making movies was very natural,” Duplass said in a telephone interview. “There was an emotional maturity, which I think is really what characterizes Cooper’s work more than anything.”
Over the next nine months, the two met regularly, as mentors and mentors, to polish Raiff’s screenplay for “Madeline and Cooper,” as part of an accelerated informal course toward independent, economical filmmaking. . As the project took shape, Raiff proposed nearly a dozen directors to take over, but eventually had to take on the role. That would mean not finishing college.
“I lied to my parents and said, ‘Jay thinks it’s okay to leave him.’ That wasn’t true, but he was confident we’d finally make the movie. And we did, but Dad wasn’t happy.” .
The resulting film, “Shithouse,” a professionally made version of his original student film, won the Grand Jury Prize at the South by Southwest Film Festival in 2020 and was sold to IFC Films. Given the economic cost that was achieved, Raiff earned a substantial amount of money, enough for his father to see his path as economically viable.
For “Cha Cha Real Smooth”, Raiff was against the idea of starring in his own film again. But his TeaTime Pictures producers Dakota Johnson and Ro Donnelly were confident that no one else was better suited for the role. “He wrote to Andrew for himself,” Johnson said by telephone. “Then I wanted someone else to play it, which really can’t happen.”
Unbeknownst to the production team, Raiff hadn’t written a page when they met. He sold them with the concept of an endearing drifting young man who stands out for encouraging other people’s parties, but has no idea how to start his own life.
“Cooper is incredibly observant. She notices little details that anyone else makes about someone’s personality or body language,” Johnson said of what attracted her to co-producing the film and co-starring with Raiff. “I think it’s a very valuable trait when someone is making a movie.”
Shortly after the film’s world premiere in January, it was announced that Apple had secured worldwide distribution rights. “Cooper captured our imagination at Sundance with his screenplay on the beauty of relationships in all their appearances,” Matt Dentler, chief executive of Apple Original Films, said in an email.
Raiff’s two feature film scripts have so far focused on transitional cases in the nascent understanding of the self-determination of its protagonists (and its own).
“Change is a great way to say something about people,” Raiff said. “With my first film, I wanted to talk about the pain of leaving home and growing up. And ‘Cha Cha’ is about your twenties this time around, if you’re lucky, where you can find out who you are. “
Reflecting on when he felt he had finally started his own inner party, Raiff revealed what happened when he decided to take charge of his conflicting emotions towards his parents.
“My party started when I sat my ass on therapy like a month and a half ago,” she said. “I made a movie about what your twenties should be like, but I had no idea what they should be like. It was easy to make that movie because it finally didn’t respond.”
Having accumulated enough confidence in his leadership skills, Raiff is cautiously optimistic about where he stands today, personally and professionally.
“Management is now my favorite thing, almost more than writing. Although I feel very inexperienced because I only did it for a total of 40 days “, he said laughing.
With that in mind, I asked him when or how he feels about reaching adulthood? “When you find out who you are, that’s when you become an adult. When you can take responsibility for yourself and others, ”he said, and proceeded to pull out the phone to look for a quote on the maturity of a character in the movie“ Lars and the Real Girl. ”It reads:
“There’s still a kid inside, but you grow up when you decide to do it right, okay? And not what’s right for you, what’s right for everyone, even when it hurts.”
The upcoming release of Raiff, a father-son saga based on a true story set in the world of hockey, will continue to address the interpersonal dynamic of asserting itself. But things are slowly taking shape, making time to find fulfillment away from the whole: around loved ones or writing alone.
“When‘ Cha Cha ’did well, the first feeling I had was a relief: I’ll be able to make another film,” he recalled. “It seems to me that the success of which I achieve is something, because I know that for the next one, no matter how long, I will feel comfortable doing what I love to do.”