Interview: Jane Schoenbrun and Anna Cobb on ‘We’re All Going to the World’s Fair’
Director Jane Schoenbrun wants you to know that We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, their feature-length narrative directorial debut which made its world premiere at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival on January 31, 2021, is not a cautionary tale.
Despite the inclusion of similar framing devices and elements that have made up many a cautionary tale of the internet age, such as Aneesh Chaganty’s Searching and infamous 2011 thriller Megan Is Missing (which recently went viral on TikTok), they all combine together here to create an entirely different beast: a haunting, disorienting yet ultimately empathetic portrait of a teenage girl trying to find herself in the age of the internet and social media. “At its deepest core, the movie is Casey’s movie,” explains Schoenbrun, referring to the film’s main character, who is played by actress Anna Cobb in her feature film debut. “The film has a lot of empathy for this young person. It’s a portrait of somebody who’s a frustrated artist, who’s maybe trying to figure out aspects of their personality that they can’t put into words as a young person through the internet and through storytelling. I read a lot of media theory and a lot of it talks about the internet as a place for identity play, where you can sort of discover yourself. So I know that, when you watch the movie, because there’s so many signifiers out there in the popular culture involving [the concept of] ‘stranger danger’ where the internet is this horrible place. I think it’s really easy to read the film or expect that you’re about to watch a film about the internet as a dangerous place, but I wanted to make a film that was much more complex than that.”
For a bulk of its runtime, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair consists of montages of Casey making strange, experimental YouTube videos, all part of an alternate reality roleplaying game inspired by “creepypastas” (horror stories that have been copied and pasted throughout the internet) known as the World’s Fair. Loud, disorienting and nearly nonsensical, the videos largely fly under the radar, amassing a total of 39 views, but they manage to capture the attention of a mysterious figure known as JLB (Michael J. Rogers). JLB hides behind a creepy illustrated avatar of a monstrous, wide-eyed creature but we can tell he is much older than Casey, his deep, gruff voice betraying his poor disguise. When we first meet JLB, we’re immediately put on edge by his eagerness to communicate with Casey and rightfully so. The optics of the situation spell nothing but trouble.
But much like everything else in the film, things don’t go the way we expected, with JLB attempting to shield Casey from the toll the World’s Fair may take on her, a dynamic Schoenbrun says was inspired by an actual online friendship they had growing up. “I would write these scary stories on the internet and I developed this relationship at the aggressive prompting of this older person, this man who was in his 30s when I was 13 years old,” they recall. “They would talk to me online, gave me creative advice and really encouraged me to write but our relationship very quickly became pretty intimate in a way where I was always very reluctant and sort of like, ‘I don’t want to actually be talking to you’ but I was too nice to block him. This person would message me at 8 p.m. to ask me to listen to him talk about his depression and his suicidal ideation. I don’t want to let him off the hook because obviously, that is inappropriate behavior and you should not be messaging a thirteen-year-old kid but reflecting back, I have a feeling that I was the more emotionally stable of the two of us and that he didn’t necessarily have the power. I mean, he did have power in a lot of ways, but I think he was emotionally looking for something as well but it’s impossible to know [for sure]. It’s just complicated and strange. And with the film, I wanted to avoid those easy tropes of ‘stranger danger’ online because there’s just no art in there. There’s no complexity. I wanted to make sure that JLB, even if he is in a lot of ways a cipher, felt really human. That we really understood that emotionally, he was someone looking for something in that space just like Casey was.”
Speaking of their lead actress, Anna Cobb, who makes her feature film debut with a phenomenal turn as Casey, delivering an intense, haunting performance that will stay with viewers for after the credits roll, Schoenbrun has nothing but praise. “[Anna] was so generous with her time and so hardworking,” they gush. “She was really indulging me in this sort of process of getting her into character. I think we both had this desire to, by the time we got on set, know what we were trying to do so well, that we would get to really experiment and play, and explore the character in an even deeper way than what’s on the page.” It’s a sentiment that Cobb more than shares. “For a few months before we started shooting, we were actually rehearsing and preparing,” says Cobb. “I don’t think that I would be able to give [the character of] Casey any justice if I didn’t get to have those few months that Jane gave me to prepare.”
The role of Casey is both a physically and emotionally taxing one, requiring its actress to delve into deep, dark places in order to chart the journey of a teenager attempting to find themselves and their place within an incredibly unwelcoming environment. Asked if she had difficulties getting into the character’s extremely complex headspace, Cobb responds in the negative. “I’m not really much of a method actor,” she reveals. “I think that can be very psychologically damaging. I can take in a small instance of pain or isolation and try to build on that so that at the end of the day’s work, I can put it away in its own little cabinet. I also didn’t want to drag everybody else down after filming. I didn’t want to take that out on anybody and I hope I didn’t!” “You didn’t,” reassures Schoenbrun. “It was just incredible seeing Jane go on and off from a scene. We would call cut and she would just be laughing and joking with us [afterwards]. I was just in awe of her the entire time.”
Throughout the duration of the film, we get to see the increasingly bizarre series of videos that Casey constantly uploads to her YouTube page, sometimes addressing herself, sometimes addressing a nonexistent audience and sometimes addressing JLB, the only person to actively watch her channel. One specific scene in the film, and probably the most memorable, involves Casey doing a tarot card reading specifically for JLB, practically eviscerating him and his character in the process. “It’s my favorite scene in the film,” reveals Schoenbrun. “That scene is 100% Anna. None of that was scripted. That all came from her. Anna studies tarot and knows it really well. We had a little bit of extra time in the schedule during one of our filming days [so] we set up the shot and the only direction I gave Ana was, ‘Do a tarot card reading for JLB and make it mean. It was a tour de force.”
“I think the cards just came out in my favor,” says Cobb modestly when asked about the scene. “I was able just to channel these messages out of nowhere. I was improvising and basically, with the cards, I was able to give pretty accurate meanings for each of the cards. It was a very fun scene to do and Jane in general kind of allowed me to be very free-flowing and allowed me to be vulnerable.” It is an unforgettable scene, one that highlights Cobb’s incredible screen presence and also manages to show another, more sinister side to Casey in the process. “We had done so much work preparing [for the movie], and finding and creating the character,” says Schoenbrun. “That we could do something like that on a whim without it breaking the movie, I think that’s just a testament to that. It also did quite the opposite; I think it adds a layer of depth to the movie that wasn’t there before Anna brought it there [with the tarot card scene].”
Another highlight is a little music video Casey films to a song called “Loving Winter in My Living Room”. An equal parts endearing and obnoxious, TikTok-style dance routine, completely improvised by Cobb, adds to the fun, irreverent nature of the song, which brings to mind the stylings of PC music and more specifically, artist and producer SOPHIE, whose recent passing casts a large shadow “hanging over the premiere of the movie,” says Schoenbrun. “There’s something that’s so internet-y about that genre of music,” they confirm, while also revealing that another, more surprising record also inspired “Loving Winter in My Living Room”. “There’s this record by Teen Mom star Farrah Abraham called My Teenage Dream Ended, which is an album that was made in this very internet way,” reveals Schoenbrun. “One person wrote all of the music and then [Abraham] sang the song completely separately. It sort of has this fractured internet-y vibe that I wanted the movie to have as well. I actually reached out to Frederick Cuevas, who was the producer of that album and one of the main creative forces behind it. He’s an incredibly talented, lovely and generous person. He sent me this backing track and I loved it so much that I just started singing along to it with the lyrics that I had written in the script. I sent Anna this embarrassing voice memo of me singing this song and asked her to learn it and prepare it. She approached it in a way that was so fearless.”
Fearless would also be the perfect description for the film itself, a non-linear and borderline experimental arthouse horror that will keep audiences guessing far after the credits roll. To prepare for the movie, Schoenbrun made an archival documentary titled A Self-Induced Hallucination, which chronicled the story of the Slender Man, the world’s most famous “creepypasta” and also Schoenbrun’s personal favorite. “I think what drew me to the ‘creepypasta’ community is that I was just somebody who related deeply to the desire to sort of role play and share a scary story with strangers on the internet,” explains Schoenbrun. “It also felt like such a beautiful metaphor and lens through which you could talk about a lot of the things that are true about the internet, you know? The way that it can be both a fictional and truthful space. The way that it can feel both very lonely and very intimate. The way that it can feel like something where you’re together with a lot of people but totally alone at the same time.”
Ahead of the film’s Sundance premiere, which Schoenbrun describes as “one of the most exciting moments of our lives,” Cobb says she hopes people will be able to “relate to it”. Schoenbrun thinks they will. “It’s a film about people who are using fiction to explore real things about themselves,” they explain. “And I think that’s the process of being online. That’s the process of being human. For as long as we’ve been human, we’ve been in this process of memetics, this process of trying to create fiction to create ourselves. That is what the film is exploring.”
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival on January 31, 2021.