Cooper Raiff is back in Sundance two years after Cha Cha Real Smooth, which premiered at the festival to glowing reviews and ultimately won the Audience Award. This time, he is here with Hal & Harper, a decades-spanning tale of a family grieving and learning to deal with life as it comes. This time also, Cooper takes on many hats. He not only stars as Hal but has also written, directed, edited and co-produced the eight-episode show. (Also read: Hal & Harper review: Lili Reinhart shines in Cooper Raiff’s absorbing and intimate family portrait)
Ahead of the festival, Cooper sat down with HT for an exclusive chat about creating the show, his love for the characters, his journey as a filmmaker and why he cannot stand the show Euphoria.
On making Hal & Harper
“I have been with these characters for about seven years now,” Cooper says over a Zoom chat. “I am in love with them and their loved ones. I have always been thinking about them and they are really not based on people that I know but in terms of the actual family that I know it feels like I just found them out of the blue really. Hal, Harper and their have not much to do with my life. It just feels like they landed in my lap. I really wanted to tell their story and get it right.”
Did he always know that this was going to be a series and not a film? “I did,” he says instantly. “I really wanted it to be a movie. I think making movies is easier than making TV. This was always a TV show because this was a story that was really trying to dive in to these three characters and also their family history. I knew it was going to take a whole series to dive into that. It was always a TV show even when I wished it wasn’t.”
On wanting to tell stories about a ‘specific thing’
Over the course of his two feature films S**thouse to Cha Cha Real Smooth, Cooper has created a space for himself to tell stories about young people, specifically about how there is no single way to tell how the entire ‘growing up’ happens. Cooper agrees. “Yeah, I think I always have the same sensibility of really just wanting to say a very specific thing. With Hal & Harper the specific thing was really about this house that has held so much pain. This eldest daughter who has held so much for these two men in her life for a very long time. All my projects want to say something very specific, that is also very emotional. The way I tell those stories will always be my way of grounding them as hard as I can in reality… even as we see adults are playing kids, but I still wanted to make it feel the most funniest, emotional in the way things are as rooted and deep as possible.”
In Hal & Harper, we see the adult characters playing themselves as kids, going back to school and seeing it in reverse. Cooper talks about this narrative decision and says, “That was really the first idea I had, seven years ago, of two kids who grow up too fast because something happened to their mom and their dad kind of shut down. So they kind of were left with no parents, but they had a house with a parent so CPS didn’t take them away (smiles) but they really had to take care of themselves. Harper had to be this maternal figure, and both of them could not really be kids. I wanted to show that visually with these characters that are so much taller than all the kids around. But I also wanted them to feel like kids in some ways… Hal more so than Harper. Harper doesn’t feel like a kid at all for the most parts, except for those little pockets, which are my favourite pockets.”
He adds, “But in terms of the adults playing kids it was two things. It was to show that they grew up too fast but it was also a way to emotionally land the fact tha these people going back to this year in their life and figuring out how this year led to very co-dependent relationships between them and the people in their lives. To know that, we need to know what happened that year. That’s where the three timelines came.”
On working with the cast
Hal & Harper also assembles a terrific ensemble of actors, lead by Mark Ruffalo and Lili Reinhart. Talking about how they got together to shoot the show, Cooper says, “Every actor was so ready to do rehearsals but we didn’t really do any. It’s actually funny in the sense I wanted to do rehearsals in the first two movies but no one wanted to do and I just assumed that no one would want to and to my surprise, everyone was really down to do it. We did actually read through scenes together but mainly it was a matter of Mark, Lili and I spend so much time together before we started shooting. We had dinners together, hung out… Lili and I went on a trip for four days! With the rest of the cast too, I did rehearse some scenes with Chris [Christopher Meyer], who plays Hal’s friend. Even Betty [Gilpin] , Mark and I spent a lot of time together talking about these characters. Betty even wrote this whole document about who Kate is to her, in first person. There was so much prep that I was not even prepared for, but it was so profoundly helpful and moving to me that everyone cared so much about the characters in this story.
Will Cooper work with another director or direct a script he has not written? “It is funny that I haven’t done it before,” he says. “I tried a couple of times to find a story that I am in love with and then rewriting it… My favourite thing to do is to find something that I am in love with and dive deeper into what that script is really trying to say. Not to make it my voice necessarily but to get it to where I think it is going. That’s what directing is, too. I would like to direct a story that didn’t come from my heart and soul. My favourite part of writing and directing is to get it to a certain spot. It is very meaningful when it is something that has come from me and I think it is going to be just as meaningful in different ways when I get to do that with someone else’s story. I think that distance really gives you that freedom to sleep easier at night.”
Why he hates Euphoria, and loves Normal People
When he is not a writer or director, and engages with a material just a viewer, what are some things he feels strongly about when it comes to representation of young people. Is there any recent show or film that he has seen and felt like this does not sit true?
“Great question,” he begins. “I hate Euphoria [the HBO show starring Zendaya, which will return for a third season]. I think there should be more stories lifted up that are the opposite of Euphoria. I think that in general, whether it is about young people or old people or whoever, stories should have something to say. I don’t understand why things are made that don’t have anything to say. It bothers me quite a bit, honestly.”
He then adds, “I love watching anything that is really trying to get something in my body that isn’t just fear. (smiles) Or engagement, or entertainment. All I ever think of as an audience is that I am just not an empty attempt. There was a time period- I don’t know when it was, where I was watching so many things and I was like, ‘What is going on with the world that this is the art that we are consuming?’ I have seen so many amazing movies, TV shows- Normal People [starring Paul Mescal, Daisy Edgar-Jones and released in 2020] is my favourite TV show of all time. It was a book by Sally Rooney that they made into a show and I think when I read the book I thought it was just a beautiful story, and the way it was put on screen was just as beautiful. It had so much to say and I wish there were more shows like Normal People.”
Santanu Das is covering Sundance Film Festival 2025 as part of the accredited press.