Cooper Raiff radiates charm. On screen in his second film, Cha Cha Real Smooth, but also during a conversation by Zoom, where the rapid flow of the director, screenwriter and actor of 25 years betrays his impatience to tell everything very quickly. Spotted at the Sundance festival, where he won the coveted Audience Award in January (which revealed Steven Soderbergh, David O. Russell, Lee Daniels, Ryan Coogler or Damien Chazelle), bought in stride by Apple for 15 million dollars , Cha Cha Real Smooth is an indie candy that chronicles Andrew’s (Cooper Raiff) tumultuous coming of age. Two films in two years, therefore (the first, Shithousehad already been crowned with the Grand Prix at the South By Southwest festival in 2020), for a boy who grew up in Dallas, Texas, a priori very far from a Hollywood destiny.

His childhood, ” very happy “, Cooper Raiff spent it playing basketball, before the movies came along, for practical reasons. “In one summer, some of my friends got bigger and faster, and I stayed the same, he said. So I fell in love with cinema. » At home, the father is a lawyer, the mother a psychologist, and daily life revolves around her little sister, who is severely disabled. In the final year, on the advice of a theater teacher, the high school student begins to write. “On what he knows”, he said. His sister, his mother’s devotion to this different child…

emotional authenticity

So many elements that are found in Cha Cha. Intimate material reworked with Freudian sauce: in the film, Andrew falls in love with Domino (played by Dakota Johnson), a thirty-year-old who, having had her daughter very young, seeks to reconcile her obligations as the mother of an autistic child and her woman’s life. “My mother fascinates me, candidly confides the director, but I quickly realized that I was only able to tell a story from my own point of view. »

Rather than a film about disability, Cha Cha Real Smooth is therefore a meditation on the twenties, this decade when the transition to adulthood must take place, often in trouble. It is this moment told at the height of the protagonist, by a filmmaker of the same age, which gives the film its emotional authenticity.

“Today, as soon as I have an agent on the phone to discuss a project, I tell him to look for my name in his e-mail box and he finds my series there”, Cooper Raif

In the middle of the 2010s, the baccalaureate in his pocket, the young Texan enrolled in college in Los Angeles, decided to get into the cinema. He loves Cameron Crowe films and is obsessed with the Duplass Brothers series, Togetherness, about the adventures of a middle-class Californian family. At the end of his first year, he spends the summer holidays at his home in Dallas, driving Uber Eats while writing a series that he sends to all the agents in Los Angeles whose contact he manages to find. . Embarrassed responses follow. “Today, as soon as I have an agent on the phone to discuss a project, I tell him to look for my name in his e-mail box and he finds my series there”, he laughs.

Oddly immodest

The following summer, Cooper Raiff convinces his best friend and his girlfriend to make a medium-length documentary about their lives, which he sends via Twitter to his idol, director Jay Duplass, with the comment: “I bet you won’t click on that link. » But Duplass clicks and offers him lunch. The master of mumblecore, this cinematographic wave of the 2000s which gave pride of place to naturalistic, talkative and fresh independent cinema, took Cooper Raiff under its wing. The young man loves filming the daily routines of his characters. Duplass teaches him to reveal them through conflict, to find the little trick that will hook the viewer.

Pour Cha Cha, Raiff had the idea of ​​making his main character a “bar mitzvah starter”a sort of master of ceremonies who must get the party started. “When I found that detail, the fact that Andrew is good at starting other people’s parties but has trouble throwing his own, that was a great feeling,” he said. There is Xavier Dolan in his house (less harsh), Miranda July (less whimsical), New Wave too, even if Raiff proclaims himself a late cinephile – “ I was 24 when I saw The Godfather for the first time ! “. Charismatic, delicate and oddly shameless, Cooper Raiff has the charm he imparts to his films. A melancholy lightness that independent cinema needs.