The first time Cooper Raiff felt like a writer was during his senior year at the Greenhill School in Addison, when the Dallas native penned and put on a play called ,“I Don’t Know,” about two teenagers falling in love and grappling with post-graduation unknowns.
“This is a play about the awkward, magical space between two people,” scrawled an 18-year-old Raiff on one page of the handwritten playbill.
Seven years later, that description holds true for all of Raiff’s projects to date. The 25-year-old filmmaker arrived on the scene in 2020 as the director-writer-star of S---house, which follows a homesick college freshman as he forges a connection with an aloof resident assistant.
Raiff is also a triple-threat in his sophomore film, “Cha Cha Real Smooth,” in theaters and on Apple TV+. “Cha Cha Real Smooth” is his first movie’s chronological kin: Raiff plays Andrew, a newly minted college graduate who, in lieu of getting a real job, moves back home to suburban New Jersey and starts working as a “party starter” at bar and bat mitzvahs. It’s during one of these hype-man gigs that he meets and forms a relationship with 30-something Domino (played by Dakota Johnson) and her autistic daughter, Lola (played by newcomer Vanessa Burghardt).
“The inciting incident for a lot of my work is transitional phases,” said Raiff, reached by phone in Los Angeles. His debut was “about someone who’s stuck in the past and hasn’t left home yet, and ‘Cha Cha’,” he said, “is about someone who’s trying really hard to get to the future.”
For Raiff, at least, the future is looking pretty bright. After “Cha Cha” screened at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, Apple TV+ acquired distribution rights for it for $15 million, more than double the budget of the movie, Raiff said. Initial reviews of the film - which takes its name from the seminal 2000 DJ Casper tune, “Cha Cha Slide” - are raves. He’s already preparing for his next movie, The Trashers, about a Connecticut businessman who bought his 17-year-old son a minor-league hockey team.
因此，这个故事是在赖夫（Raiff）在西方学院（Occidental College）的大二时制作了他的第一部电影56分钟版本之后，他在推特上向电影制片人杰伊·杜普拉斯（Jay Duplass）发了一条YouTube链接。独立大师成为赖夫（Raiff）的导师，帮助他将无预算的短片变成了一部完全起步的功能，在西南电影节（South West）的南部赢得了大陪审团最佳叙事奖。
赖夫（Raiff）在首次亮相时发现，他更喜欢在镜头后面 - 他指导但没有出现在“垃圾桶”中。最初，他也不打算出演“ cha cha”。约翰逊是把他说话的人。
“When I’m on set, I want to be the most emotionally available person in the room,” said Raiff. “People always ask, ‘How do you suddenly put on your actor hat and cry in a scene?’ I’m like, ‘When I make this next movie, I’ll be sobbing behind the monitor.’”
It was at the Dallas Young Actors Studio, where Raiff studied for four years with founder and teacher Linda Seto, that he learned the power of cultivating spontaneity. During these Saturday classes, Raiff and others improvised scenes based on a theme or dynamic. Sometimes, in the middle of a scene, she would stop the actors, saying something like, “It doesn’t feel very important,” recalled Raiff. “And by that she meant, ‘It doesn’t feel like you’re really offering a part of yourself right now.’”
可以肯定的是，Raiff在Cha Cha中没有太多个人经验。尽管露出了一些严肃的相机舞蹈动作，但雷夫从来都不是派对的首发球员（不过，他小时候爱上了一个名叫Natalie）。他不是犹太人，所以他从来没有参加过米茨瓦（Mitzvah），但他在中学时就参加了公平的份额（他决定不在达拉斯（Dallas）拍摄这部电影，部分原因是他认为没有人会买大量的犹太人人口）。他说，他的写作来自感情，而不是来自经验。
Raiff说：“这实际上只是想弄清楚我想在电影中说些什么，找出最好的角色要说这件事，然后从那里从那里做的角色就做了什么。”“疗法使我成为一名可怕的作家 - 我得到了这些更好的界限，我不必再通过书面工作了。”