‘The Cell’ Turns 24: ‘Y2K’ Director Kyle Mooney Looks Back at His Harrowing Encounter with the Jennifer Lopez Classic
This article is part of IndieWire’s 2000s Week celebration. Click here for a whole lot more.
In the vast pantheon of hidden gems of fantasy and sci-fi from the early 2000s, “The Cell” comes highly recommended. Take it from “SNL” vet and director of the forthcoming horror-comedy “Y2K” — when we asked to interview Kyle Mooney about a movie from that time period, he knew exactly which one he wanted to talk about.
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“I feel like ‘The Cell’ as a title is ambiguous enough that you don’t necessarily know what that implies,” Mooney said, video chatting with IndieWire from his backyard in Los Angeles. “And I’m not trying to be hyperbolic here, but it was one of the most sensational movie-going experiences of my life — one where I didn’t know what the movie was and got fully caught off guard by something so wildly different from what I could have ever expected.”
Mooney remembers seeing “The Cell” for the first time in San Diego, California, where he grew up. Almost 16 then (and close to 40 now), Mooney is pretty sure he and his buddy Mark were driven to the theater by Mark’s mom. If they were allowed to play “their” music, Mooney says, it would have been Jurassic Five or Mos Def. As for his skate-surf threads, the then-aspiring filmmaker was likely wearing a Billabong t-shirt, corduroy shorts, and maybe a pair of Adidas.
Somewhere between the parking lot and their seats for the movie, Mooney and his pal took a bunch of Coresatin cold-and-cough medicine. They knew nothing about “The Cell,” only that Jennifer Lopez was in it and that she looked otherworldly on the poster. The “Selena” star was still breaking out as a rom-com sweetheart back then. That summer, Lopez was fresh off releasing her first studio album and just a few months shy of starring with Matthew McConaughey in “The Wedding Planner.”
Inside the theater, the boys got their snacks, selected their spots, and almost definitely sat through a trailer for “Charlie’s Angels.” Then, in a haze of self-inflicted too-muchness, they saw the doors close and the lights dim. It took a minute to understand the reality of their circumstance, but when Mooney understood what they had done, nothing could save him from “The Cell.”
“The pills took about a half hour to kick in,” Mooney said. “So right as the movie was starting to get fully demented, I was getting really high. That experience of going and the immense power of the visuals — they’re fairly striking — was enough to last me for years on memory alone.”
Directed by Tarsem Singh Dhandwar and written by Mark Prostosevich, this mostly forgotten multi-genre affair is as gorgeously gothic as it is gruesome. A moody police procedural told as a dark fantasy in the age of Evanescence, “The Cell” earned $104 million at the box office against a $33 million budget. It had a mixed reception with critics but soon found its cult audience. The hybrid horror flick celebrates its 24th anniversary on Saturday, August 17 (just in time to round out 2000s Week!), but Mooney can’t remember the last time someone mentioned this formative fever dream of a film to him.
“I don’t know that anyone’s ever initiated a conversation with me about ‘The Cell,”‘ Mooney said. “But I still vividly remember waiting to be picked up and the way the light shone outside of that theater. It was all golden and my pupils were still fully huge. I wasn’t really sure what I had just come out of. For some reason, that lighting has stuck with me.”
In “The Cell,” Lopez leads as Catherine Deane, a child’s psychologist who is recruited to help Special Agent Peter Novak (Vince Vaughn) interrogate an especially creative serial killer (Vincent D’Onofrio). A victim of childhood abuse desperately in need of some therapy, the sadistic murderer Carl Stargher abducts women, abandons them in a glass cage, and leaves them to think there is hope. There isn’t, of course. The airtight enclosure will fill with water in a matter of days and, when Stargher returns, there will be no screaming victim — just a peaceful doll, ready to dry, dress up, and make play.
“The imagery is almost too literal at points. It’s like worms and snakes and vultures and fucked-up dolls and stuff like that,” said Mooney, simultaneously oozing with praise for the costumes and production design. “After the fact, I realized that the director did the ‘Losing My Religion’ music video and I feel like the Wikipedia says this, but you can feel that immediately. It’s a very specific Y2K-era music video aesthetic — that sort of Nine Inch Nails, industrial rock, Marilyn Manson vibe. It feels very specific to that era.”
The F.B.I. agents successfully hunt down their suspect in the first act of “The Cell,” but not before a violent capture puts Stargher into a coma. Somewhere across town, another missing woman (Tara Subkoff) — whom the police can’t find but think was kidnapped by Stargher — is running out of time. In a classic “Silence of the Lambs” setup, they’ll need Catherine’s help to save the killer’s last victim. The mental health professional (See?! Therapists can work with cops!) is conducting trials on an experimental, high-tech neural network that lets her both diagnose and treat from within her patients’ dreams.
Get inside Stargher’s mind and they’ll find the cell. At least, that is Catherine’s hope.
“I don’t know how many people that idea has resonated with, but for me it definitely did,” said Mooney. “I feel like I felt that what ‘The Cell’ was doing was revolutionary at the time. Now, I might not feel the exact same way, but I definitely respect it and enjoy it as a snapshot of this alternative and unique specific vibe that just blew my mind as a teenager.”
Screenwriter Prostosevich’s bonkers premise erupts into a terrifying dreamscape where nothing is real and no one is safe. Mooney’s “Y2K,” which was co-written with Evan Winter, is more grounded than that. The revisionist sci-fi flick reimagines the “year 2000 problem” — a notorious computer glitch incurred at the turn of the century — as a hard-coded Armageddon that activates killer robots across planet Earth.
Despite the difference between Singh and Mooney’s films (and there are many), fans of Lopez’s batshit psychological thriller will see its legacy back on screen if they read “Y2K” closely enough. Stars Jaeden Martell, Rachel Zegler, and Julian Dennison appear in Mooney’s first major movie as the exact types of 2000s teens who would get high before watching “The Cell.” Mooney, who is a well-known appreciator of physical media (he told Seth Meyers all about his VHS library), makes a cameo appearance as Garrett. He’s a video store clerk who, fittingly, seems like he’s on drugs and gives a special rental to our young heroes. It’s not “The Cell,” but Ivan Reitman’s “Junior” from 1994 — because that’s what Mooney could get the rights to.
“‘Junior’ was something that was not in the original script,” said Mooney. “With things like that, you eventually get these options of what you can get from whatever studio and that was one of them and it just felt so perfect. I’m not sure another choice would play as well.”
Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito, Reitman’s oddly touching disaster-piece about a cutting-edge fertility drug sees the former governor of California literally giving birth through his ass. The slapstick comedy might seem worlds away from “The Cell,” but not to Mooney — who saw the opportunity to make references in “Y2K” as a means of also making recommendations.
Not everyone wants to watch a movie they heard about during another movie, but Mooney knows that strategy can work. An early scene in “The Cell” helped him discover a niche that the former “Saturday Night Live” actor still champions to this day.
“There’s this scene where Jennifer Lopez is watching a video and it’s ‘Fantastic Planet’ by René Laloux, which is this animated film from the early seventies that I would not have been aware of had I not seen ‘The Cell,'” said Mooney. “That kicked off a whole library of types of movies that I got really into, all this experimental avant-garde and adult animation.” He also recommends Laloux’s “Time Masters.”
“Shouting out ‘Junior,’ I think it was truly me in my head mirroring that experience of seeing ‘The Cell’ and through one movie being introduced to something else that I would not have been aware of,” the filmmaker said. “Who knows, maybe ‘Junior’ will have a renaissance now.”
In that same scene from “The Cell,” marijuana use is shown positively on screen — a cinematic phenomenon that was rare then and is still uncommon now. That’s another element that matters to Mooney and can be felt throughout “Y2K.”
“I’m not super into drugs, but I’m also fully cool with whoever does whatever in a safe way,” said Mooney. “Jennifer Lopez’s character smokes a joint in ‘The Cell’ after a sort of long and stressful day, and I actually think it was a really powerful thing to see as a 15-year-old experimenting with drugs because she wasn’t stony or weird. She was just smoking a joint and chilling out. I had never seen that.”
“Y2K” premiered at SXSW in March and won’t hit theaters until December 6. In the interim, Mooney says he’s become something of a reluctant expert on the pivotal year when his film takes place. After the clock struck midnight on the second millennium — and doomsday didn’t come — the director remembers a sense of malaise settling over the country.
“When anybody brings it up, the first thing you say is how disappointing it was and how much of a letdown you thought it was,” Mooney said. “We thought it was going to be this massive thing and it wasn’t. With ‘The Cell,’ maybe you feel that in some sort of transitional way.”
Neither the late ’90s nor the early aughts, Y2K created a fleeting moment in film that’s worth celebrating in its own right. As any proper prepper knows, the year 2000 was a singular moment — caught between all the pop culture potential of 1999 (see “The Matrix,” “Fight Club,” “Office Space,” “The Sixth Sense,” and more) and the sobering societal shift that came after September 11, 2001.
Music, fashion, and movies blurred together to create a kind of dark optimism in 2000 that’s (1) still sold at Hot Topic, and (2) captured well in both “The Cell” and “Y2K.” Each film is appropriately stylish, surprisingly romantic, and warmly complex. Like Mooney’s new movie, “The Cell” shines brightest when it’s considering its characters from all sides. That’s true even of D’Onofrio’s unfathomable serial killer.
“Not a lot of people talk about this, but there is a lot of range in what he’s doing,” said Mooney. “He is playing this obviously fucked-up serial killer, but then also all of these really weird, kind of dreamy jesters and kings and monsters in all the fantasy parts. He’s a crazy dude but there’s something special there, right?”
In keeping with multidimensional performances, no one should miss nu-metal icon Fred Durst in “Y2K.” The Limp Bizkit frontman plays a mysterious part in the upcoming movie brilliantly. IndieWire’s Christian Zilko gave “Y2K” a rave review out of its world premiere and praised Durst for “a hilariously self-deprecating performance as a fictional version of himself that’s unaware of the influence his nu-metal beats have on emo teens and senior citizens alike.”
“There was a moment in the making of the movie where I was on a stage and there were several background actors in front of me and Fred was present as well,” said Mooney. “It was that surreal moment where something feels circular, like, ‘Oh, I am living the dream. I don’t even know if I ever dreamt this in 1999, but I’m experiencing it and it’s incredible.'”
“Y2K” has been on Mooney’s plate for more than five years and he’s eager to see his film find its fans. In the meantime, for those who just can’t wait for something new from the year 2000, the director hopes you’ll try “The Cell” — with or without the cold-and-cough medicine.
“I just don’t know if a massive studio would get behind something so strange today,” said Mooney. “And I get the idea of being nostalgic, even for something you weren’t there to experience.”
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