{"id":819907,"date":"2026-10-31T16:10:15","date_gmt":"2026-10-31T16:10:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/819907\/"},"modified":"2026-10-31T16:10:15","modified_gmt":"2026-10-31T16:10:15","slug":"jane-schoenbrun-is-one-of-cinemas-brightest-talents-now-theyve-attempted-their-own-game-of-thrones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/819907\/","title":{"rendered":"Jane Schoenbrun is one of cinema\u2019s brightest talents. Now they\u2019ve attempted their \u2018own Game of Thrones\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Earlier this year, Jane Schoenbrun met with the estate of late horror icon Wes Craven, to pitch a reboot of A Nightmare on Elm Street. It was, on paper, a perfect marriage of author and subject. Schoenbrun, the buzzy 39-year-old filmmaker<\/a> behind the modern trans classic I Saw the TV Glow<\/a>, knows the genre inside and out: their savvy handling of horror nostalgia was on full show in this year\u2019s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma<\/a>, which cast Gillian Anderson<\/a> as the reclusive star of an Eighties slasher. Schoenbrun knows every crack in Elm Street\u2019s pavement. <\/p>\n

\u201cBut they didn\u2019t choose me,\u201d Schoenbrun says, \u201cwhich is fine. I kind of saw that coming. I mostly just talked about hauntology, the concept popularised by [the late cultural theorist] Mark Fisher.\u201d (I Google \u201chauntology\u201d after our interview. It means roughly what it sounds like \u2013 the notion of our socio-cultural past haunting our present.) Their pitch for a new Nightmare would have shifted the timeline back to the incongruous ending of the 1984 original, \u201cremaking the first movie, but as if these people are stuck in this dream and haunted by the memory of A Nightmare on Elm Street\u201d. <\/p>\n

Schoenbrun laughs at how this sounds. \u201cI don\u2019t know. I have a reputation, I think, for being a little \u2018po-mo\u2019 [post-modern] on these pitches,\u201d they say. \u201cThey didn\u2019t want to hear a 20-minute lecture on hauntology.\u201d <\/p>\n

This, in a nutshell, is Schoenbrun\u2019s whole deal. They are an enthusiast \u2013 about horror; about cinema; about television; about The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer \u2013 with the vocabulary and perspicacity of a leftist academic. Over the course of our video call, Schoenbrun throws around terms like \u201clate capitalism\u201d and namechecks people like Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan \u2013 most impressive, though, is that they do it in a way that never feels lofty or affected. It shows too in their films, which tackle knotty postmodern ideas about media and identity with a deceptive lightness of touch. The same goes for their latest work, Public Access Afterworld, a novel. <\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know quite how to summarise Public Access Afterworld. Schoenbrun has taken to describing it as \u201ca novel about television\u201d and \u201ca beach read for intellectuals\u201d. In the most basic synopsis, it is a book about a televisual netherworld into which people disappear, and a trans woman working as a content moderator for a video platform who uncovers an inter-dimensional conspiracy. (Schoenbrun is trans and nonbinary, having come out in 2020 around the release of their micro-budget breakout film We\u2019re All Going to the World\u2019s Fair.) \u201cI\u2019m not writing something deeply experimental,\u201d they insist. \u201cI\u2019m not writing Ulysses. It\u2019s my attempt at a Game of Thrones, or a Harry Potter, or a Sandman \u2013 something of that scope, that is its own world.\u201d <\/p>\n

Public Access Afterworld pings between timelines, perspectives, and forms \u2013 one brilliant late chapter is told from the perspective of a monster in a over-sequelled horror franchise, forced to live through his own increasingly crappy oeuvre, film by film. There is, I mention, a bit of Infinite Jest about this \u2013 particularly one of David Foster Wallace\u2019s endnotes, which obliquely tells the story of a man through a fictional filmography. \u201cIt\u2019s funny,\u201d Schoenbrun says. \u201cIn film, I get [compared to] David Lynch<\/a> and David Kronenberg constantly. When I was first taking meetings with some publishers about this novel, I was getting David Foster Wallace and David Mitchell. I was like, \u2018Okay, well, I know my film Davids; now I\u2019ve gotten the book Davids.\u201d Schoenbrun grins. They have a great smile, incidentally \u2013 wide, unguarded, warm, wry \u2013 though speak today with a head cold, sounding \u201ca little more baritone than I should\u201d.<\/p>\n

Work began on Public Access Afterworld in 2021, shortly after Schoenbrun finished the script for TV Glow. They spent three months writing alone in their room, and emerged with 1,600 pages of TV scripts \u2013 two full seasons of a planned TV show. \u201cThen I was like, \u2018No one\u2019s gonna ever let me f***ing make this, because it would cost $100m, and I\u2019ve made one $100,000 film.\u201d So they reworked the first season into a novel, with two further books planned. \u201cIt was,\u201d they say, \u201cthe first time I felt a sense of control that you don\u2019t have when you\u2019re making a film \u2013 when you don\u2019t have final cut most of the time. Your baby, this thing you\u2019re putting your very heart into, is in constant danger of either not existing, or being corrupted.\u201d <\/p>\n

This novel was, in other words, a welcome respite from the \u201cbusiness\u201d side of show business. \u201cIt sucks,\u201d they say, of the mounting interactions with the suits and moneymen that are unavoidable in film production. \u201cIt\u2019s the worst part of my life. And the higher up you go, the worse the feeling gets. It really is pretty simple. To be successful in this rotten system, I don’t think you can have a soul. Or if you do, you were born with a lot of privilege, which, you know, will sap your soul in other ways.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"JaneJane Schoenbrun, Anderson and Einbinder attend the LA premiere of \u2018Camp Miasma\u2019 in July (Getty)<\/p>\n

Born and raised in New York, Schoenbrun started out as a production assistant, working on short films by the Safdie brothers during college; after moving back to New York, they began working for the Independent Filmmaker Project, a nonprofit organisation where their job was \u201ctrying to help young filmmakers navigate the capitalism\u201d side of things. \u201cI came out of that decade of work with this essential understanding, by my mid-twenties, of art and capital as the two forces.\u201d<\/p>\n

I am surprised when Schoenbrun says they did not get final cut on TV Glow or Camp Miasma \u2013 both are idiosyncratic, deeply personal pieces of filmmaking; art that only they could have possibly made. \u201cI begged for it, you know, but no,\u201d they say. \u201cI mean, both movies are the movies I want to exist. Within the power structure that I was working, I was able to not have it be corrupted, at least in my mind, although I imagine it\u2019s corrupted in lots of invisible ways. I believe in a notion of soft power and hard power \u2013 there\u2019s hard power of, \u2018We’re taking the movie away from you and recutting it.\u2019 And then there’s, like, the soft power of, like, \u2018Huh, I kind of know what these guys want.\u2029Maybe I should give it to them a little bit so that they get off my back and let me make the thing.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n

There aren\u2019t many filmmakers who talk about their own art like this \u2013 and Schoenbrun knows it. \u201cI think it\u2019s almost considered crass,\u201d they say. \u201c But I really believe in being honest about these things, because I\u2019ve always seen it as a dance \u2013 or fight \u2013 between capital and art. And I don\u2019t view myself as some pure figure in that. I\u2019m trying to do good work within this fundamentally toxic relationship.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"InIn the pink: Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine in \u2018I Saw the TV Glow\u2019 (A24)<\/p>\n

Public Access Afterworld is, like all of Schoenbrun\u2019s work, acutely interested in the screen as an idea; it is a book that knows exactly what it means to be chronically online. It is both surprising and not that Schoenbrun quit social media in August, retiring the popular, sardonic X\/Twitter account they had run for 17 years. The decision was spurred partly by a snarky online smear, but is also the result of a long-gestating unease with the way social media had metastasised. \u201cThese platforms on the internet in 2026 are designed to make us angry,\u201d Schoenbrun says. \u201cThey are fracking our attention.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cSo much of the promise of the internet,\u201d they continue, \u2018\u201cis a world that is illuminated. The promise of a world that had a future. As a young trans kid on the internet, it was like, oh, I can enter this portal where I don\u2019t have to be beholden to these boring rules of this boring town and body that I live in. But it\u2019s been so polluted by the forces of capital.\u201d What\u2019s more, they add, social media platforms are \u201cmaking us more powerless because they create an illusion of power\u201d.<\/p>\n

Success in my mind isn\u2019t like, now we have five trans filmmakers making Hollywood movies instead of one or two<\/p>\n

The problem, Schoenbrun adds, isn\u2019t unique to social media, but rather part of a broader corruption of all media; the entertainment industry is no less a tool for maintaining the status quo of late capitalism. \u201cSociety is becoming more and more dependent on entertainment because it allows this thing we all know is not sustainable, or logical, or healthy, to continue to exist,\u201d they say. \u201cBecause if we thought about actually radically changing the world, maybe we wouldn\u2019t get the next season of Widow\u2019s Bay, you know?<\/p>\n

\u201cI also think that in a hundred years people will look back at this unregulated period of capital-driven entertainment in the same way that we look at the opium dens of the past.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"HannahHannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson in \u2018Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma\u2019 (PA)<\/p>\n

Schoenbrun\u2019s next project has already been announced: a serialised adaptation of Charles Burns\u2019s dark, sexy graphic novel Black Hole, produced for Netflix<\/a>. Schoenbrun has written two episodes so far, with six more to come. It is, from the sound of it, a loose adaptation, \u201cquite different\u201d and \u201cwarmer\u201d than the book, \u201cwhich at times is pretty despairing\u201d. <\/p>\n

The hope, for fans of their work, is that Black Hole might propel Schoenbrun further into the mainstream \u2013 at the very least, in the eyes of studio financiers. Schoenbrun is already arguably the most prominent trans filmmaker working today: TV Glow and Camp Miasma are the only two films by a trans filmmaker to be released in more than 100 US cinemas since The Matrix Resurrections half a decade ago. <\/p>\n

Despite the paucity of opportunities for trans artists in mainstream Hollywood, there is still \u201cplenty of optimism\u201d, Schoenbrun says. \u201cI don\u2019t think systems are unchangeable, and this system we\u2019re all stuck in is far from the only force driving the world, and culture. Success in my mind isn\u2019t like, \u2018Now we have five trans filmmakers making Hollywood movies instead of one or two.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n

\"\u2018Public\u2018Public Access After World\u2019 is out now, published by Hodder (Hodder)<\/p>\n

\u201cTransness is political. By living as a trans person, I am envisioning a world that is in opposition to the world the normative forces of power want to convince us is the only possible world. And so it will always be inherently oppositional,\u201d they say. \u201cAssimilation into a system is not necessarily the goal, or a sign of progress.\u201d<\/p>\n

Schoenbrun quotes a line from the end of Public Access Afterworld\u2019s prologue. In the book, Schoenbrun\u2019s narrator writes: \u201cThey don\u2019t give people like us the Sunday night time slot on HBO. They put us in hospitals. They send us to hell.\u201d This, they say, \u201cis at the center of the work I try to do. I don\u2019t measure success in how much money I grift off the system. It\u2019s like the grifting of the money off the system is hopefully a means to an end \u2013 an end that is in some way, anti-assimilationist. It\u2019s trying to open portals that don\u2019t exist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Portals and screens, and screens-as-portals: these are the images that suffuse Schoenbrun\u2019s world. And there are few artists out there quite so eager to open them up.<\/p>\n

‘Public Access Afterworld’ is available now, published by Hodder<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Membership today.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":819908,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[269116,96,2839,3334,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-819907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-download-reviews","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-showbiz","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/819907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=819907"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/819907\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/819908"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=819907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=819907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=819907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}