Across the various social media platforms, the term “Y2K” has become a popular catch-all for fashion and nostalgia kitsch from the late ‘90s and early 2000s: Tamagotchis, layered tops, Hype Williams videos, and so forth. To those who lived through that period, however, the term is evocative of a very real anxiety that society as we knew it might collapse as the calendar switched over from nines to zeroes (for a more in-depth summary of this would-have-been crisis, check out the HBO documentary Time Bomb Y2K, which I reviewed last year for IFFBoston). Both uses of the term are front and center in Y2K, the new film from Saturday Night Live alum turned director Kyle Mooney. In advance of the film’s premiere, I sat down with Mooney and his co-writer, Evan Winter, to discuss Soap shoes, Carson Daly, Parental Advisory stickers, and the acting talents of one William Frederick Durst. (This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and flow).
BOSTON HASSLE: This movie brought back a lot of memories for me, because it’s pretty much the age I grew up in. I was 15 when Y2K happened, and I assume you guys are about the same age…
KYLE MOONEY: What year did you graduate high school?
BH: ‘03.
KM: Me too! [high fives]
EVAN WINTER: [sheepishly] I was ’04.
BH: Okay, nothing wrong with that!
EW: ’04 was tight!
KM: Yeah, that’s cool! I knew some ’04 kids.
BH: So I guess my first question is, what were you guys doing on Y2K?
KM: I was at my house, hanging with my friend Mark, watching the MTV New Year’s countdown.
EW: Yeah, same, kind of. It was, I think, my final year hanging out at home before going out and meeting up with friends. So, yeah, I was also at home watching MTV New Year’s Eve. Kathy Griffin and Carson Daly…?
KM: We gotta confirm that!
BH: We’ll fact check it.
EW: I feel like all of those specials sort of blend together. I don’t know if you ever watched any of those, but, I don’t remember which one was which. [Griffin and Daly did indeed co-host that year, along with Christina Aguilera. –ed]
BH: Were you worried? Did you think anything was going to happen? Did you have that in the back of your minds at all?
EW: I remember being pretty aware of Y2K, but thinking, “Well, if anything happens, the adults know what to do.” I was way too trusting! It was like the year before I got jaded, I guess. I was like, “Yeah, whatever happens, they’ll figure it out!”
KM: I don’t remember being too scared. I know my mom picked up some jugs of water and some snacks and stuff like that. I think I felt like it was gonna be annoying more than anything. You know what I mean? Like, you wouldn’t be able to buy stuff at the grocery store for a day or something like that. But I certainly wasn’t expecting anything that would be fully earth shattering in any way.
BH: You were obviously teenagers at that time. Did you guys draw anything from your actual experiences for the movie?
KM: Oh yeah, absolutely.
EW: Big time.
KM: I think that all of the characters, to a degree, share some DNA with both of us, or one of us, or people we went to high school with or grew up with. So yeah, I’d like to think the characters are decent amalgamations of the folks that we knew, or are.
BH: There are so many references to things happening at that time, pop culturally. Was there anything that you guys thought of that you wanted to include, but then you had to check and realized that the timeline didn’t actually line up?
EW: Yeah. I’m sure there were events or things that existed in the world that that happened, but the thing that I remember a lot during the writing process was checking, like, slang and lingo. There would be borderline cases where we’d say, “We can get documented proof that this word existed in the lexicon in like 2002, but we can’t say for sure if it was a late ’90s thing.” So we would sometimes have to change some wording around.
KM: Yeah. And there also were definitely cultural things that we were like, “Oh, is that ’99?” It would be like, Heelys, or something like that.
EW: Or those shoes–
KM: Soap shoes?
EW: Yeah, Soaps.
KM: But those were pre-2000.
EW: But even when we were trying to figure out, like, what shoes Eli, the main character wears– the Kostons– there were a couple different ones where we were like, well, which model was it? Was this the one that came out in ’98, or was the one that came out in 2002? How are we gonna source these? How do you find a pristine pair of them? So there’s a lot of that kind of problem.
KM: Like anybody, I’m sure we screwed up. I’m sure there’s some some objects in the movie that don’t actually belong there, but we certainly tried to adhere to being as authentic and true as possible.
BH: I was impressed by the Mystery Men standee in the video store. I’m such a nerd that I started going back and thinking, “No, no, that would have been around the time that came out!”
EW: Well, also, something that we talked about is that the movie is supposed to take place in this kind of nebulous Anytown, USA– somewhere that could be anywhere in the country, not a major city. And so we thought a lot about certain things. There’s the forefront of culture in 1999, but where they are, they’re like a year or two behind. It’s like stuff that gets filtered down into malls. They’re living in the 1998 cultural space.
BH: Of course, a lot of your cast was not born at the time, or maybe were very, very young. Was there any sort of process to prepare them to get into that headspace? Was there anything you showed them, or had them listen to?
KM: We made each of them playlists, kind of in the voice of their character. I would say Julian [Dennison] and Jaeden [Martell] did a really good job. This isn’t necessarily about cluing into the era, but of just like hanging out with each other and putting in the time together to create that chemistry. But yeah, we made a rap rock playlist for Ash, and an underground hip hop playlist for CJ. It was sort of on the actor themselves to determine how much they wanted to invest in learning about the culture, but that was probably the main thing.
EW: Yeah, I think occasionally there’d be jokes or references where an actor would be like, “What does that mean? What is that?” And you give them the context so that they know how to deliver it the way that they feel is right
KM: I saw Rachel [Zegler] and Jaeden recently, and Rachel was saying that Tipper Gore was a reference where they had no idea who that was, but they knew that it got a laugh when we screened it. Even though I feel like that reference is so much older than the era. I feel like she peaked in, like, what, ’86 or something like that?
EW: Tipper Gore? I feel like she was doing that cleanup of movies and music and stuff. Was that not in the–
KM: Well, the famous Frank Zappa stuff…
BH: Yeah, that was in the ’80s, but I feel like I knew about all that at the time from, like, MAD Magazine reprints, so I’d get all these decades-old references.
EW: I thought she was specifically– I remember that ’80s thing, but I thought she was specifically making a charge for it while Al Gore was vice president.
BH: There might have been a little bit of that too.
KM: I mean, she was essentially responsible for the Parental Advisory sticker.
EW: Which looks baller!
KM: That’s when you know something is sick!
BH: I take it the kids were all aware of the Y2K bug in general?
EW: They had maybe the most vague understanding of it. I feel like Lachlan [Watson], for instance, was probably the most aware across the board of the time period.
KM: Lachlan is a Limp Bizkit fan! They were psyched that they were getting to work with Fred. It was really cool.
EW: But I think a lot of kids our cast’s age are really only familiar with Y2K as an era terminology that represents fashion and music from that time period. And a lot of them were not necessarily that aware that there was this computer thing.
BH: Going back to Fred Durst, what was it like working with him and getting him involved? Was he fully on board from the front? Did you have to convince him to play himself?
KM: We had him in the script from moment one. When we first started pitching this idea, within a week we knew, “Oh, we should put Fred Durst in there!” So he felt sort of foundational to some degree. And when we would try to pitch on other people that could maybe play that part, we could not come up with anybody that beat him.
EW: No one felt right.
KM: He was the first person we attempted to lock down for the movie. And it took a couple meetings to convince him, or to talk him through what the experience would be like. And once he was in, he was in, and then once we had him on set, it was awesome. I think his performance is really stellar.
EW: Incredible, yeah.
BH: I couldn’t tell, was he digitally deaged, or is he just naturally ageless?
KM: He looks good!
EW: He looks good, yeah. There was always a bit of– I think with any project, you kind of have to take some kind of leap to be like, “Well, we better hope this works out!” You know, no matter what scale or size you’re doing it at. And for us, it was including Fred from the very beginning and making him an integral part of the fabric of the movie. And we were just so fortunate that he got it and wanted to do it. And then, on top of that, his first day showing up to set– he’s definitely acted before, but we were like, “This is a lot! I hope he can do it.” And then he just nailed it.
KM: Yeah, his first day was his first scenes of the movie, and he’s got some pretty big chunks of dialog, and it has to be played with a level of sincerity, and subtlety, and reality. And he brought it. It was cool.
BH: Was before or after he was in I Saw the TV Glow?
KM: I think he had shot it somewhat recently prior.
EW: Yeah, I remember the studio saying they had just done it with him.
BH: Obviously, this is sort of a fantasy version of Y2K where things go down a little differently. I don’t know if you guys thought it through– there’s the flash forward at the end– but have you guys thought about how this version of the 21st century would be different, had all this stuff happened?
EW: I mean, we definitely talked about that for the epilogue sequence– like, what is the world like? And I think something that was funny to us, and honestly feels pretty realistic, considering, [is that] maybe a similar thing would be like how we went through COVID, and now it feels like the world is pretty much exactly back to how it was. It was funny to us to think about the only things that are different about this alt-version of 2004 is that Fred Durst is the world’s hero, and has gone into politics, and has a tech empire. But like, iPods are the exact same, everything else is almost the same, and everyone just uses technology like they used to.
BH: The music blog!
KM: Yeah! The 2004 Williamsburg, Brooklyn is still the hipster epicenter.
BH: You guys were obviously very immersed in this era writing the film, and all these references. If you could go back to something from that era that’s fallen out of fashion, is there anything that you guys would bring back to the forefront?
EW: I think the design of that era is way more appealing than what we have today. The sleek minimalism– it feels like it has just been that era for so long, and we wanted to fit in all of these clear plastic gadgets and stuff throughout the movie, because I feel like that stuff is very cool.
KM: You know, I liked the culture of TV in a way that I feel like we’ve shifted [from]. Do you know what I mean? I feel like everything was a little more, you know, eventized. Like, talking about that MTV special… I don’t know. Maybe it’s all nostalgia, but like, something about pop culture hit in a different way for me.
BH: Yeah, I’ve thought about that too. Like, Comedy Central is what I was watching at the time, and I feel like it was like, “There’s this 24 hour party! You gotta tune in for Dave Attell at two in the morning!”
KM: Yeah! Exactly!
BH: And now it’s just, like, seven hours of The Office.
EW: Because if you didn’t see it live, in that moment, it’s like there’s no way to see it after the fact. You know, unless you taped it. But now it feels like the second something happens anywhere you can absorb it to your heart’s content on the internet and get everyone talking about it in a way that makes it less fun.
KM: Yeah, if you missed it, you missed it. But you could still tell your friends, “Oh, you didn’t see that, man?”
Y2K
2024
dir. Kyle Mooney
91 min.
Y2K opens Friday, 12/6 @ Somerville Theatre, Apple Cinemas, and theaters everywhere
