Cooper Raiff spoke with The Globe and Mail about growing up with the whole indie-film world watching
Cooper Raiff had big plans for his breakthrough international press tour. The 25-year-old Texas-raised multihyphenate is currently riding a wave of buzz for his second feature,, a romcom that follows aimless college graduate Andrew as he finds love with an older woman while working New Jersey’s bar-mitzvah party circuit.
Andrew wants to be older, and your films have the do-it-yourself confidence of someone much older than you are, too. Do you feel like you’re trying to constantly get ahead of your own age? No, because when I’m 32 I’ll want to be 32 forever. It’s not about not being present, but not being afraid of feeling. With, I was trying to get to a place of making that age, your 20s, joyful. The original idea was just Dakota’s character, the mother of a young disabled daughter. But then I thought it would be nice to show this 22-year-old about to enter this phase that her character just didn’t get because she had her child so young. So they’re helping each other get strong.
The concept of home is central to these films. In your first film, Alex is reticent about leaving home for college. In, Andrew is forced to return home after college. You’re now making your temporary home in Los Angeles. Do you miss your own nest?about two months after I’d gone home during COVID. And going home after leaving is this specific feeling of having to relate in entirely different new ways that are not comfortable at all.
The original idea I had was to just find a way for this 22-year-old guy and 32-year-old mother to keep coming into contact with each other. The bar-mitzvah idea was a bit silly, but I did have a lot of experience. I went to a small school in Dallas that was heavily Jewish, from kindergarten to 12th grade. That didn’t mean anything until I walked into my first synagogue service, which I went to for every Saturday in seventh grade for all these bar and bat mitzvahs.