‘Mid90s’: Jonah Hill and Cast on Shooting in 4:3, the Casting Process, and More
After talking about wanting to direct a movie for over a decade, and getting to work with a diverse group of filmmakers that includes Judd Apatow, Martin Scorsese, Nicholas Stoller, Ricky Gervais, Bennett Miller, Evan Goldberg, Seth Rogen, Joel and Ethan Coen, and Gus Van Sant, I figured Jonah Hill’s directorial debut, Mid90s, was going to be something cool and unexpected.
I was right.
As you’ve seen in the trailers, the film follows a 13-year-old (Sunny Suljic) over the course of a Los Angeles summer as he makes friends with a group of neighborhood skaters in, you guessed it, the middle of the 1990s. Cast with real skateboarders and non-professional actors, Hill’s film takes all the gloss off the time period and throws you into the room almost like a bystander on the wall. The characters smoke, drink, and act like real teenagers without any sense of inauthenticity. In addition, Hill shot the film on 16mm using a 4:3 aspect ratio, so you almost feel like you’re watching a video that was shot by the very people you see on screen. It’s a great debut feature and I can’t wait to see what Hill does next.
A few hours before seeing the film, Jonah Hill and some of his cast (Sunny Suljic, Olan Prenatt and Na-kel Smith) came into the Collider studio at TIFF. During the interview they talked about why Jonah choose Mid90s as his directorial debut, the aspect ratio and convincing A24 to make it that way, if he felt any studio resistance to casting non-professional actors, what it was like for the cast to work with Jonah as a director, how Mid90s was born out of an idea for a different film that had flashbacks to the main character when he was 12, and a lot more.
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