Kyle Mooney and Evan Winter Go Back in Time with "Y2K"

A gleefully gory homage to coming of age in the '90s, “Y2K,” the directorial debut of "SNL" vet Kyle Mooney, is as much a love letter to a specific period and also a warning against the trappings of nostalgia.

Taking place on New Year’s Eve in 1999, the film takes its elevator pitch of “What if the Y2K bug was real?” and spins it out with violent abandon. It follows Eli (Jaeden Martell) and Danny (Julian Dennison), who crash a New Year’s Party with the hopes of not being without someone to kiss by the time the clock strikes midnight. Eli is smitten with the much more popular Laura (Rachel Zegler), and before he can make a move, the Y2K bug transforms all of the appliances at the house they’re at into killer machines. It’s Skynet come to life in the era of Tamagotchi to Tipper Gore (at least for this writer, it conjures up a similar death-by-home-appliance sequence courtesy of “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen”). Eli, Danny, Laura, and others band together to fight against the mechanical takeover before they become humanity’s new overlords.

While Mooney and screenwriter Evan Winter don’t shy away from pumping their script with '90s Easter eggs, what drew them both to telling this story was using a different period’s aesthetics to tell a universal story. After all, teenage life is hard on its own; fighting against our technological devices is just more engine oil on the inferno of growing up.

“That transition period from the end of high school to the early days of college … it’s that time of your life where you’re so ready for change and then you cringe at who you used to be. … That’s why I think the teen movie/coming of age genre is so cool … It naturally raises these introspective questions for people regardless of when they grew up,” Mooney shared.

RogerEbert.com spoke to Mooney and Winter in person on the first snow day in Chicago, oddly fitting given the film’s premise revolves around a chilling apocalypse of a kind. They shared how 1999’s “Virus” served as a creative influence, how they viewed the film’s premise in light of the A.I. boom, and the catharsis of seeing yourself die on-screen. 

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The opportunity to explore the real-life implications of the Y2K problem seems rife with cinematic potential, it’s surprising it hasn’t been done yet till now. Was it daunting to think that you were breaking new ground?

Kyle Mooney: I think our excitement overrode any daunting feelings we might have had.

Evan Winter: The idea feels like a layup!

Kyle Mooney: Yeah, the most fun was the writing and research process for Evan and me. We would spend a lot of time asking each other “Do you remember this? Did you watch this YouTube video during that time?” We would ping pong references back and forth and tried to include as much as we could. The idea to do a movie based on this does feel obvious and it is surprising that nobody has done it before.

Evan Winter: Now more than two decades after the event, we can see people relate to this idea of technology taking over even if it may not be as dramatic as we see in the film.

John Bruno’s film “Virus” came to mind especially when the robopocalypse happened. I’m wondering if that film or any other '90s films came to mind or inspired y’all?

EW: That was certainly something that came to our mind when it came to actually designing the look of the machines. When Kyle and I were first working with A24, we put together a sizzle reel for them to communicate the tone we wanted to work with and we included shots and scenes from “Virus” on that reel. I know that movie is somewhat maligned, but it looks visually stunning, and the cast is awesome. The creatures are also great, so I think that was a good starting point for us when we were thinking about the scope of this film and the way these things would move.

Out of the film’s SXSW premiere, the people I watched it with were surprised at how these gnarly kills would bookend these earnest moments of sentiment and kids trying to come of age. From a script perspective, what was it like to balance those varied wavelengths?

EW: For us, we love mixing the grotesque and sentimental. I love movies where there are these bigger tone shifts and it ends up working. It’s a hard thing to achieve and I hope our film is successful at it. At the risk of being too high-minded, I feel like life itself is just one big tonal shift. We have these really sad and intense moments of anguish and frustration, but then something can happen that makes you laugh. I like writing into the gamut of experiences and I think it’s a fun narrative challenge to write into the way life can swerve and move and communicate that on-screen in a way that’s natural and not jarring.

KM: From the first moment we started working on this, our goal was to make a movie that would be fun to watch with your friends. That’s why we tried to have fun with the kills.

Yeah, I think the guy who was getting his crotch shredded by a smoothie machine got the biggest reaction out of the people I was sitting with.

KM: (Laughs) That’s the goal. It’s exciting to try and elicit reactions from people. But to that point, we had the laughs and the kills but we also wanted to tug at people’s heartstrings too. I imagine that the feelings of vulnerability of being a teenager, the isolation you can feel and this idea that life moves too slowly and too fast are still relatable today.

Without spoiling too much, the ending does tap into a melancholy that’s both ubiquitous but also its own thing. There’s a unique form of isolation that comes with the burst of instantaneous and far-reaching connection that the Internet provides; the film represents a sort of monoculture where communities and friendships derive their power from a sort of proximity and localization.

KM: That’s for sure real. I think people of that time and even today can relate to this sense of going off to college and maybe thinking “Was high school the peak? Are we not going to get any better than that?”

EW: Or even this question of “Is who I am in high school who I’ll always be? What does change look like?” There’s a fear and excitement of not recognizing yourself which can be amplified by the sort of life acceleration that a place like college can provide. I remember in high school when I was 16 or 17 and saying “My body is changing in a way that I can’t keep up with.” I experienced things so deeply and my emotions were so outsized that I thought that’s how it was going to be forever. I remember thinking “I’m always going to care about these things, this music, these movies, these friends.”

KM: I feel like then it takes a week and then you move on to new experiences and you form an identity based on new loves and interests. That transition period from the end of high school to the early days of college … it’s that time of your life where you’re so ready for change and then you cringe at who you used to be. Inversely, people can look back on those times fondly but there’s still this sense of “I can’t believe I used to be like that.” That’s why I think the teen movie/coming of age genre is so cool … It naturally raises these introspective questions for people regardless of when they grew up.

On the note of timelessness, watching this hit a little too close to home the way technological advancement is threatening the Earth’s natural resources. It made me think of the generations whose futures and livelihoods are threatened as a result. 

EW: I remember grabbing dinner with our cinematographer, Bill Pope, while we were shooting, and it was the first time the new AI, or at least AI as we think of it in the contemporary sense (ChatGPT, etc.), was announced. While we were shooting, there was an uptick in AI news, and I remember being skeptical of it. We weren’t attempting to say anything super relevant about these contemporary, breaking news issues, but I think we’re continuing in this great cinematic tradition, whether it’s a film like “Virus” or “The Matrix” of interrogating the role and place of technology in our lives. Obviously, on one level, the movie is about technology and how it “took over” in a way that didn’t happen in our real lives, but tech still has taken over our lives, even if it’s not as dramatic as we see in the film.

KM: The takeover is a bit more subtle, maybe. Throughout the process, the relevancy showed itself more and more. Even as late in the edit, Evan and I were doing some rewriting to address some of the new technological developments. But at the same time, speaking for myself, as much as we may want the audience to feel those metaphors, back to what we were talking about earlier about tonal shifts, we want people to also just have a good time.

An aspect that contributed to the film’s enjoyability was the design of the machines themselves. What was it like working with WETA to bring these machinations to life?

EW: There’s a couple of different things at play. For some of the creatures we designed with WETA, they built full-body suits. Kyle and I had ideas for what we wanted some of the more notable ones to look like, such as the ones with the laptop head or the lawnmower leg. We worked with the team to see what was possible, and when the time came, our performers got a full body scan so WETA could build the suits to the specifications exactly. It was an amazing process that probably took the better part of a year to see. It’s a leap of faith because you can show concept art or sketches and have all these conversations, but you have to factor in budget, material possibility, etc. But the WETA team smashed it.

KM: They’re truly artists in the realest and best way possible. We had some initial concepts that we gave to them and pitched guidance on and what they ended up making was so close and spot-on to what we wanted. It was this cool merger of artistic intent with the real-world logistics of making it happen. They weren’t afraid to get into the weeds with us and share details. I think we wanted one of the creature’s arms to move in a certain way and they told us “Well okay but to do that, we need to put a joystick in this part of the model so the performer can control the other arm. And then to do that …”

EW: The explanation kept going on and on. It was truly remarkable. There were other practical puppets that we had thanks to our production designer, Jason Singleton, and his team. The Tamagotchi creature was one that we puppetered for example.

They exuded main character energy for sure. I read that during production you also named the most notable creatures.

EW: Kyle and I both love practical effects and creatures. The movies of that era were really fun to see and so there was a lot that we could draw from when it came to giving the creatures a personality even if they don’t have scripted dialogue. We thought of the “Predator” films for example. It’s not the same but the monsters in that franchise are technology-based in a way.

KM: The sounds of the robots were another thing that we mostly discovered in the edit. We’d just go up to the microphone and start talking gibberish into it and distorting it until we felt like that was roughly what a robot might sound like.

EW: We were freestyling. We’d take dial tones from the Internet, like the AOL login and modem sound, and warp it to sound like a growl. It was an interesting exercise to try and create something “organic” from these mechanical tones.

Kyle, [RogerEbert.com Assistant Editor Clint Worthington] wrote how a lot of your past projects from “Brigsby Bear” to “S.M.A.S.H.!” mined “'90s nostalgia for postmodern laughs.” '90s music plays a major role in this film which culminates in a cameo I won’t spoil, but it’s made me think about what the “postmodern laugh” you might be getting at with these needle drops.

KM: That era was fascinating for music and pop culture because it was so teen-centric. "TRL" (Total Request Live) was seemingly the most popular show on TV. I felt like most persons around our age were going home and watching that and there was this collective sense of “There’s a new #1 video this week.” The music felt like a force that connected us. You could probably say this about any generation, but specifically in this period, the superstars were pretty ubiquitous and in your face.

I don’t want to call out one of our actors, but I made playlists for the actors to listen to to get into the spirit and mindset of their characters, and one of them told me “This music sucks.” (laughs) I could see how some of that music that was super popular back then would not be appreciated on a critical level because it was so pop-focused to some degree. But I think hopefully what we're doing with it is reintroducing it to people in a new way so they can appreciate it in this new context.

"Y2K" opens this Friday, December 6th.