Coolidge to honor ‘I Saw the TV Glow’ director Jane Schoenbrun as second annual Breakthrough Artist

Liking TV shows has been central to Schoenbrun’s life since they were young. Growing up in suburban Westchester County in the 1990s, the nonbinary filmmaker was diehard about shows like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “The X Files,” frequenting online message boards that excavated lore and analyzed story structures. Sometimes, Schoenbrun dabbled in fan fiction, or original stories featuring characters from the TV shows.

Those experiences were deeply informative for “TV Glow,” a technicolor drama set in ‘90s suburbia and costarring Ian Foreman as young Owen and Danielle Deadwyler as his mom. The story opens on Owen in seventh grade, when Maddy, an older classmate, introduces him to a young-adult monster serial called “The Pink Opaque.” Watching episodes on burned VHS tapes, Owen grows obsessed with the show’s escapist power. But things take a turn once Maddy suggests that she’s having trouble distinguishing the fiction from her real life.

Speaking on a video call, Schoenbrun described their film’s screenplay as “deeply personal, and trying to talk about trans experience in a way that hadn’t really been done before, at least in the popular American cinema.”

After attending high school in Westchester, Schoenbrun studied film at Boston University. But they struggled to get excited about the program, which “wasn’t pushing the art, it was pushing the technique,” they said. “It was so far from the ‘let me go grab a camera and be a maniac with it’ sort of style of making work that I had been doing growing up.”

So Schoenbrun found their film education elsewhere, including at many of Boston’s independent and repertory theaters. They once skipped class to see Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York” when it opened at Landmark Kendall Square Cinema. They remember an all-night movie marathon at the Brattle Theatre where the staff brought in Chinese food in the morning. And at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, they recall attending a midnight screening of Joss Whedon’s “Buffy” musical special “Once More, With Feeling.”

This Saturday, Schoenbrun will return to the Coolidge as the second annual honoree of the Coolidge Breakthrough Artist Award — an award that last year went to “The Inspection” director Elegance Bratton — coming full circle from their days as a Boston-based film student and fan.

“We were vetting titles for this award, and everybody just had this immediate, visceral reaction to it,” Beth Gilligan, the deputy director at the Coolidge, said of “TV Glow.” “We had the sense of, ‘I want to see this again. I want to see what this filmmaker is going to do next.’”

In 2021, Schoenbrun’s first feature “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” premiered at Sundance to acclaim. Made on a shoestring budget, it follows a young person’s uncanny journey through “creepypasta,” or internet horror clips.

Making the scrappy “World’s Fair” before the more commercial “TV Glow,” Schoenbrun said, was their plan from the very beginning: They believed that by proving themself with a microbudget, they could maintain creative autonomy with a higher one.

“I actually don’t know that I know that many young filmmakers who make their first movie within the system and then get to break rules from there,” the filmmaker said. “Once you compromise at the beginning, you will be expected to compromise for always.”

Fortunately, Schoenbrun didn’t have to make concessions in their work; and for viewers of “TV Glow,” the sense that you are absorbing Schoenbrun’s unadulterated vision is what makes the experience so special.

A candid and fluid conversationalist who talks about everything from Andrew Bujalski films to a recurring dream they used to have, Schoenbrun said that they see themself as “a weird mix of a pleaser and a little stinker, a little mischief maker.” They believe that this sensibility manifests in “TV Glow”'s blend of accessibility and agitation.

“I want to make work that little me would be proud of,” they said, “and little me loved popular cultural forms.” At the same time, they added, “as an artist, it’s very important to me to be undercutting or subverting or challenging as much as I am giving you a fun experience.”

Schoenbrun sees that subversive spirit as emanating from their trans and queer identity, which, they emphasized, is not just a label or a marker, but a perspective. “It is a gaze on myself, on the body, on normativity, on everything in the world around me,” they said. “And it always has been, before I even knew I was trans.”

When Schoenbrun was in the process of writing the screenplay for “TV Glow,” they took a trip up to their hometown armed with a disposable camera. It was early after Schoenbrun’s transition.

Growing up in Westchester “arguably kept me repressed in this quiet, subliminal way for a long, long time,” Schoenbrun reflected. But their hometown visit also conjured warmer memories of youthful rituals like hanging out at the video store or romping in the Burger King playpen.

One of Schoenbrun’s “dreamlike” childhood memories even made its way directly into “TV Glow.” The memory concerns an inflatable planetarium that their school would erect for the day in the gymnasium. “Entering this space that was like nighttime in the daytime in the middle of the school day,” they said, “was just very visceral and magical to me.”

In a pivotal scene in “TV Glow,” Owen returns to his high school and finds the planetarium constructed. Like James entering his giant peach, Owen crawls inside to find Maddy amid a canvas of revolving star constellations.

This scene relates to what Schoenbrun calls one of the movie’s “big ideas”: “the queer longing in childhood to enter spaces that feel imbued with magic and a sense of wonder and possibility,” whether that be a material setting, like a dome, or an invented one, like a TV fantasy world.

The idea also applies to Owen’s line of dialogue on the bleachers.

“In not quite being able to imagine the sexual possibilities in his own real life — which was certainly something that I struggled with at that age, in the wrong body — the TV becomes a safe space,” Schoenbrun said. “The TV can’t look you in the eye and ask you whether you’re a girl.”

“I Saw the TV Glow” will have a special screening at the Coolidge Corner Theatre on Saturday, May 11, at 8 p.m. Jane Schoenbrun, the recipient of this year’s Coolidge Breakthrough Artist Award, will be present for a Q&A after the screening. The film is set to open in Boston-area theaters on Friday, May 10, at the Coolidge, AMC Boston Common, Alamo Drafthouse Seaport, and Landmark Kendall Square.