“I have a feeling for a lot of people, especially men, the sex scenes will be like, ‘What am I looking at?’” says the Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma director.
Photo: Sameer Al-Doumy/AFP via Getty Images
Last night, Jane Schoenbrun opened Cannes’s Un Certain Regard sidebar with Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which has quickly become a consensus choice for best of the festival so far. It’s the writer-director’s third feature about queerness, gender, sex, nostalgia, and transformation, following 2021’s eerie We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and 2024’s moody gut punch of a horror film I Saw the TV Glow.
Miasma stars Hannah Einbinder as Kris, an up-and-coming indie director tasked with reviving the “zombie IP” of Camp Miasma, an ’80s horror franchise fashioned lovingly by Schoenbrun in the image of slasher flicks like Sleepaway Camp, Halloween, and Nightmare on Elm Street (among many other delicious references). Once beloved, Miasma fell from grace over the years thanks to a series of shitty sequels plus later generations’ reappraisal of the films’ blatant misogyny and transphobia. Kris, an anxious, sexually repressed queer woman in a poly relationship who admits she uses her work as a distraction from herself, decides that in order to crack the “woke reboot,” she needs to meet Billy (Gillian Anderson), the original film’s “final girl.”
Billy now lives alone in the woods, in the same remote summer camp where the film was shot, smoking weed and eating lots of candy (Sunset Boulevard’s Norma Desmond is mentioned more than once). The two women don’t quite know what to make of each other — or what, exactly, they’re doing with one another — until it becomes clear they’re both in need of extreme sexual and personal catharsis. Miasma features some of the most surprising, vulnerable, playful, and deeply moving sex scenes I’ve ever seen; the most powerful are long close-ups of Einbinder’s face as she strives desperately to stop dissociating during sex and learn to stay present enough to orgasm with another person. Schoenbrun has called the film their most personal yet, and the day after the film’s premiere, I caught up with them at their hotel to talk about, well, sex and death.
Last night, you quoted Drake at the premiere: “Started from the bottom, now we’re here.” What was the bottom for you?
I made my first movie in the woods with ten other people for $100,000. And the folks who gave me that $100,000 were in the audience last night, which was so moving. And when I was directing We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, I was not on hormones. Half the people on set knew that I was trans and the other half didn’t, because I hadn’t come out to the world yet. I directed it from a place of not feeling like myself and not expecting that movie to go anywhere. I’d been around the independent-film world for a long time, and I knew the normal trajectory of a slow, difficult movie like the one I wanted to make.
That’s the bottom, and wherever I am now, the difference between them is that I got to a place where I just feel so lucky to be myself and alive and doing what I’m doing. I just feel tapped into my purpose and self. Obviously, the fantasy and dream is to eventually be playing your movie opening night at Cannes and feeling like yourself.
You were here previously doing another job, right? What was it?
I shouldn’t say, because I’ve shit-talked it [laughs]. If you really want to go and Google, I’m sure you can find it. I was here twice on a corporate card, in the industry and taking meetings. I went in 2015 and 2016, and I remember in 2015 really feeling like, Oh my God, I’m at Cannes. My life is as good as it gets. I’m eating seafood, and someone else is paying for this! The second time, all of the allure had worn off. I was just like, Wait, I’m really depressed. I’m not happy in this body, and I’m not happy in this job. I’m not happy in Cannes. And If I’m unhappy in Cannes, it’s not the place and the festival. This is where I want to be. But I’m not here in the right way.
And how did that contrast with how you felt last night at the opening party? Was it what you had envisioned?
Hannah and I were talking a lot about the struggle to stay present during it all. We were walking to the red carpet yesterday and she said to me, “It feels so viscerally like we’re already in the past. This is the night we’ll always remember.” On nights like that, it’s really easy to feel overwhelmed. I’ve built myself a meditation practice that helps me recenter in the simplicity of all of the good things going on around me — love and people who I love in my life. I was surrounded by so much of that last night. It was really emotional and deeply overwhelming to share the film with an audience and have people respond to it and have the internet like it for the most part.
I always leave your movies thinking, This movie is about me, this movie is for me.
I love when people say that.
Many people who I talked to last night at the party after your premiere were saying the same thing, even though these movies are so deeply personal for you and specific to your experience. I know the personal is universal, but what do you make of that when it comes to this movie, specifically? Are we all just extremely sexually repressed?
Yes. That is what’s going on.
But not all of us. There are plenty of people who don’t say that about my work. There are plenty of people who are like, “Wow, you made a movie where Gillian fingers Hannah.” No, fuck you! I made a movie about sexual violence and repression. The thing that I’m doing is listening to myself and my experience as a queer and trans person — someone who isn’t a man — and looking at the people around me — who, generally speaking, also fall under that umbrella — and trying to make things that culturally have been made invisible, for reasons that are really nefarious, a little bit more visible in a way that’s beautiful and imbued with romance and desire.
There’s so much in the film. I’ll give you an example: There’s a sexual assault in the film. Half the people on set when I described it that way didn’t know what I was talking about.
Really? It felt clear.
Not half the people. Many. But it’s meant as a litmus test. Because it’s such a common experience that most girls have in high school or middle school or college — that fuzzy area of consent. Where it’s like, I know I’m supposed to do this, but they’ve so clearly been softly coerced, even if not objectively out-loud coerced. Culturally, there are so many things, especially with regard to sex and gender, that are so clearly toxic but so normative. And any expression otherwise is so taboo or deemed uncouth, and we aren’t allowed to talk about it in our art and media. I’m trying to make the invisible visible and put language to it. That’s what cinema is about for me.
I want to talk about the sex scenes, because they were so genuinely different than any I’ve seen. Can you tell me about writing them, where they came from?
They came from a time when I was starting to understand myself. When you transition in your 30s and for the first time start to feel the slightest hint of healing — or what cis people experience naturally, which is the feeling of being right in your body and gender — it allows you to have pretty formative experiences that I think most people have during their first puberty, when they’re actual teenagers. And some of those experiences suck. Finally, I was like, Oh, I understand why everyone was so messy in their 20s! You know?
I had learned this process with World’s Fair and TV Glow where, instead of trying to say something from the outside and explain an experience, I was trying to invite people into my own exploration of these various mysteries. This movie came from the years when I was figuring out who I was sexually and how to not be traumatized and dissociated during sex, but to actually be present. And that required really clear boundaries around consent. That required a lot of gummy candy to eat before and after. That required playfulness, starting and stopping, and being able to wind your way through the experience. And the undoing of the normative tropes of, like, Sex is this act that starts with foreplay and ends with the male climax! I had to learn it. I was having a bunch of sex with a bunch of people. And I was like, This is research. But it was! And I do feel like I reached a much more healthy and liberated place, and by extension, I’m a happier and fuller person.
I think in all of our cultural narrative, our boomer and Gen-X finger-wagging at millennials and Gen Z for being sex-negative, for having less sex — why are we having less sex? It’s so obvious. The world is so nasty, and our relationship to sex is so dysfunctional. Of course we’re having less sex. Sex is horrific. It just takes one visit to YouPorn and you’re like, Jesus Christ. The American sexual psyche — the worldwide sexual psyche — is in a really fucked-up place and needs a lot of healing and interrogation.
There really is a deep sense of healing in the sex in this movie, particularly in the scenes that are just close-ups on Hannah’s face as she tries to orgasm. What direction were you giving her?
One really important thing was, in the first draft of the script, you see [a spoiler-y detail that has to do with a phallic weapon]. My partner Melissa, who always reads my drafts first, was like, “I love it. Totally. But I don’t think you should show that. Because that’s the phallus. And the penis should not be present in this moment. It can be there abstractly, and you see it afterwards, but it shouldn’t be centered, because it’s always centered.” I was like, “100 percent right.”
It’s a movie where the most emotional and intense moments are during the sex scenes. I always imagined the last one being the deepest emotional point in the film. The equivalent of Owen in the birthday room in TV Glow.
Yes!
There’s something Hannah says to Gillian in that moment, and then you have this song “Pain Is the Heart of Love.” These are the only hints that there is this deep, painful underbelly to sex. I mean, they’re certainly not the only hints — there are plenty of other hints about the darkness of sexuality in the movie. But when you are able to reach this kind of catharsis — where you’re actually present in yourself during sex instead of dissociating or hiding or performing — for me, at least, it’s like you see the baby version of yourself. And you see the baby version of whoever you’re with. You see the most vulnerable, aching version. I saw that moment at the end being almost surprisingly emotional. You don’t expect it. It could be played as a sex joke. And it is! But it felt like, yes, it’s a sex joke, and also, there’s no way for that moment not to have the most vulnerability.
What was that like for Hannah?
Hannah just nailed it. She has this thing that not all actors have. I certainly don’t have it. She found her way to get to a true emotional state. Between takes, she couldn’t stop crying. Gillian was like, “Do you know how to regulate?” And she was like, “I don’t!” And then we smoked a cigarette after. It was the first cigarette I’d had in six years. She was like, “I need a fucking cigarette after what I just went through.” One of the best compliments anyone has ever given me — I was like, “How do you do that?” And she said, “I feel safe here. That’s how I do that.”
Did Gillian have tips on how to regulate?
I think it’s a thing actors learn to do, right? I’m slowly becoming an actor nerd. Acting, obviously, is one of the gifts of cinema; at the heart of what you’re doing is working with other humans who are putting themselves in front of the camera and embodying a character. I’m really learning the difference between performance and presence. There are studied performers and then those who learn to relinquish control. To be embodied and present, both as themselves and the character. I think the distinctions between the two dwindle in great acting. The acting we’re drawn to, that feels indelible, is a relinquishing of control from a safe place.
And that’s what Gillian was talking about. I don’t think Hannah had quite relinquished control and gone to such an emotional place before. I think all great actors learn how to chase that without it becoming unhealthy.
You did an interview where you talked about how you wanted the sex scenes to be “wrestled with culturally” like the ones in Blue Is the Warmest Colour. [Ed. note — Schoenbrun actually referenced Blue Velvet in that interview, and I misremembered it in a way that Freud would probably find interesting.] What did you mean by that? So you see the scenes as controversial?
Certainly I think the scenes don’t have that much in common with Blue Is the Warmest Colour. [Laughs.] But the movie is meant as a provocation. Putting sex onscreen in a way that is … how do I put it? I think it’s a really interesting question to be asking: “Do you find this movie sexy? And if so, why?” We have a lot of different versions of sex in the movie. The first scene we see is a sexual assault. The second is maybe sex that looks a lot like how sex usually looks in movies, but there’s something a little wrong. That stops, they make s’mores, eat a bunch of candy, and start having sex again. But it’s good now. It’s fantasy play that isn’t dissociative but being presently shared between two people. And through the fantasy play, they’re able to unwind together instead of unwinding and going really far away. And then you have this painful, ritualistic catharsis.
It’s a lot of stuff I haven’t seen in movies before. Whether you’re having good sex or bad sex or no sex, whether you want to have sex or don’t want to have sex — no matter how you identify — I really think the way through is to talk about sex in a complex way. And talk about different forms of sex, and sex that feels inherently “problematic,” and try to find a deeper language for how to heal this part of ourselves that, as a society, is clearly so sick and not in a good place.
That’s the hope for the movie. I have a feeling for a lot of people, especially men, the sex scenes will be like, “What am I looking at?” or, “That wasn’t sexy.” I’m really interested in the debate around it. The movie is so confrontational in its vulnerability that it might force some conversations that I think we really should be having.
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