Y2K, unlike its historic counterpart, is full of surprises, funny moments, and bloody endings
Kyle Mooney and Evan Winter discuss bringing their childhoods back to life on screen
Photo Courtesy of A24
Set on the last day of 1999, Y2K follows two characters, Eli (Jaeden Martell) and Danny (Julian Dennison), as they crash a New Year’s Party. What starts as a familiar story of two outcasts trying to fit into a party of popular kids takes a surprising twist at midnight, when the Y2K bug makes computers and household machines spur to life. CD players behead high schoolers and Tamagotchis assemble themselves into killing machines as Eli, Danny, and Eli’s crush Laura (Rachel Zegler) race to take down the computer network plotting to take over the world.
Y2K was Kyle Mooney’s directorial debut, best known for Brigsby Bear (2017) and his nine seasons on Saturday Night Live from 2013 to 2022. Mooney co-wrote the screenplay with close friend and producer Evan Winter, who formerly produced mostly short-form content like music videos and commercials through his production company Arms Race.
The Tech had the chance to sit down with Mooney and Winter to talk about their motivations for creating this movie, bringing the ‘90s era to life on screen, and the process of collaborating with each other and with A24.
The idea for Y2K came to Mooney in the hangover of a fateful New Year’s party five years ago. “I’ve always had a minor obsession with Y2K because it was just such a letdown,” Mooney explained. “It was this thing that was promised to be a massive event, and then nothing happened. So I think, for those of us who lived through that, it’s hard not to carry it on a little bit in the back of your mind.” After sending a text to Winter, a close friend and collaborator since college, the idea quickly grew. “Within a week, we had most of the major ideas for the movie,” Mooney said.
Over the course of the next year, they co-wrote the script in different cities. “Kyle was on SNL at the time,” Winter stated, “so we would talk through stuff, outline. I would write some pages, send it over to him in New York. He would work on them, rewrite them, send them back… And we went through that rhythm for about a year. And by the end of it, it was not too far off from what the final script was.”
Throughout their professional collaboration, Mooney and Winter enjoyed just having a friend by their side. “When you’re alone, making all these decisions yourself,” Winter said, “Even if you’re confident, there’s always gonna be moments you’re second-guessing yourself. Just having another perspective of someone being able to think of something that you didn’t, that can spark what the eventual final idea will be.”
“That also means you spend a ton of time with each other,” Mooney added jokingly. “So, like, you know, I’m learning what he smells like."
In addition to directing, Kyle Mooney also plays an awkward, stoner video store employee Garret, who ventures with Eli and Danny to take down the evil computers but ultimately meets a brutal end. Similar to the gangster, confident-yet-awkward roles he’s played in past SNL skits like “Inside Socal is Art Gangster” and “Kyle vs Kanye,” this persona is one he’s comfortable playing. It’s also one that’s accurate to the era, a popular stereotype that Winter frequently saw growing up in Oregon.
The cast features a mix of stars from both this generation and the previous one — computer-whiz, popular-girl Laura is played by Rachel Zegler, who won a Golden Globe Award for West Side Story (2021) and appears, more recently, in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (2023). Jaeden Martell, who plays Eli, has previously acted in It (2017), Arcadian (2024), and the TV series Defending Jacob (2020). Fans of “STAY (with Justin Bieber)” will be pleased by a surprise appearance by singer The Kid Laroi as Soccer Chris, a mean athlete competing for Laura’s New Year’s kiss. For slightly older watchers, Alicia Silverstone from the ‘90s classic Clueless delights in her brief role as Eli’s mother. Fred Durst, frontman of the nu metal band Limp Bizkit, plays a convincing character of himself.
For Mooney and Winter, one challenge of directing the film was convincingly portraying a bygone era on screen. “We went through old yearbooks of the era,” Mooney described. “YouTube has a pretty good collection of ‘99, ‘00 video yearbooks too, so you can just scroll through some random high school’s end of the year video and see all the styles.” Another task was getting the film’s actors, many of whom weren’t alive during Y2K, into character. For that, Mooney said “We gave each actor their own character playlist to sort of feel the vibe. Lachlan who plays Ash got a nu metal rap rock mix, and Daniel who plays CJ got an underground hip hop mix.”
Ultimately, Y2K, for Mooney and Winter, is the realization of a desire to see their childhoods on screen. “It felt like this era has not been fully represented on screen,” Mooney admitted. Part of it, too, is a sense of cultural preservation: Winter described how when they were teenagers in the ‘90s, the ‘70s and ‘80s were the “cool, retro eras” that they didn’t live through but whose fashion, music, and style still had a presence. “It’s interesting how for that generation who didn’t live through it, it gets distilled in a way… You guys have the fashion and you know the music, but there’s a lot more stuff that hasn’t quite filtered through.” Winter hopes watching the film will inspire the younger generation to learn more about “an artist or some sort of reference that slipped by them… and then learn more about the era.”
Is there a deeper message beneath the roller blades and blood-thirsty blenders? Thoughtful watchers might read the film as a humorized warning for what’s about to come with today’s technology and Artificial Intelligence boom, that one day, ChatGPT could plot to take us down in the same way that computers resembling bricks do in Y2K. Ultimately, though, the movie is more about evoking nostalgia for the past than trying to make a deep statement about the present.
Y2K has something fun for everyone. For those who grew up in the ‘90’s, Y2K is a chance to relive childhood on the screen, to see Tamagotchis, MTV, and AOL, which have all but disappeared in today’s culture. For those of us still crashing New Year’s parties and pining after our crushes, it’s a chance to briefly live in a cooler era, one that has inspired more of today’s culture than we think.
The link to the Trailer can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4f9gCTLhYs&ab_channel=A24