Cooper Raiff is a filmmaker-actor from Dallas, Texas, now based in Los Angeles. His innovative drama series Hal & Harper, starring Lili Reinhart, Mark Ruffalo and Raiff himself, is now streaming on Mubi. His debut feature, Shithouse, had its world premiere at the 2020 SXSW Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury Prize for Narrative Feature, and his second film, Cha Cha Real Smooth, starring Raiff, Dakota Johnson, Vanessa Burghardt and Raúl Castillo, premiered at Sundance in 2022.
Three Great Things is Talkhouse’s series in which artists tell us about three things they absolutely love. To mark the current release of the new TV drama series from writer-director Cooper Raiff, Hal & Harper, starring Lili Reinhart, Mark Ruffalo and Raiff himself, the gifted multi-hyphenate shared some of the things he’s most passionate about at the moment. — N.D.
Romanticism
I’m in this phase of my life where I’ve been reading a bunch of romantic literature, especially a lot of William Blake. It started with this book Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, which is a modern study of romantic literature. It was a good launching off point, but it does leave out a lot of women authors from the Romantic era. The two women I keep reading are Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Charlotte Turner. Turner has a line that goes, “If conquest does not bind posterity, so neither can compact bind it,” and I just love that so much. We have the right to disregard the actions of our predecessors. I’ve never been very into poetry, but I’m really into romanticism. The way they talk about imagination and inventing identity, and trauma and sensibility, is just really exciting to me. It’s broken things open for me. There’s a peeling away of everything, all the preconceived notions, all the societal structures, that I really respond to. What’s left is this very passionate simplicity … that’s honest about the complexities of life.
“I shall but love thee better after death” sums up what I love about romantic poetry. It doesn’t get more romantic than that. And more open-ended. When I was in college, I remember a professor trying to show us some romantic poetry and I guess I just wasn’t ready for it then. It was too scary to not know what was real. But at this point in my life, it’s making me feel really alive.
Louisiana Power and Light
John Dufresne’s book Louisiana Power and Light is so good and so funny. I started reading interviews with him, and the first one I read was him talking about how stupid a term “Southern writer” is. I didn’t relate to the anger, but I just find him so hilarious. He’s a writer that I don’t think many people have heard of, but he’s still alive and he wrote this great book, Louisiana Power and Light, that I want to shout out. It’s a tragic comedy about a guy with this curse, who just tears his whole life down – unwillingly, but also willingly.
I love thinking about books as movies; it’s a really fun thing for me to visualize what these characters look like and how they move, without being told it in words. When I was reading Louisiana Power and Light, I didn’t have the thought to make it into a movie until, at the end, I realized, “Oh my God, this is so visual!” It feels very cinematic to me, but also I just really took to it as a piece of writing. The ending is profound, but right from the start, you’re struck by how singular his voice is . I love when you can just tell an artist is really wanting to get a feeling or an idea or a story into the reader’s body, but it’s literally based on nothing. They’re not playing a game of how to present something to you, it’s just, This is what I need to get in your body, and I’ll do it in a really funny way so that you can really absorb it. I love it when an artist does something like that which feels so fresh. He’s a writer that feels really fresh to me, in the same way that Emily Dickinson feels fresh!
Zion National Park
I’ve been thinking about Zion National Park a lot recently. I went there a long time ago, but I’m going to go back soon. Zion is just so beautiful, so special.
Before I was 24, I didn’t go anywhere apart from Dallas and Los Angeles. In the past four years, though, I’ve gone to so many different places, and it’s made me realize how special Zion made me feel and how unique the air is there. There’s a purity there that’s so palpable, and it really quiets me. When I started thinking about what my three favorite things were, Zion was the first thing that came into my mind, and it made me think I should move there, because it’s rare to feel so special in a place.
If I lived in Zion, I think I would change as an artist, too, but that’s really the same as saying I’d change as a person. I’ve started to become way more spiritual, and I didn’t realize before how grounding that is. For me, spirituality plants me more in my body. I think the reason I’ve been talking a lot recently about moving to Zion is because I feel light there. I feel more and more called to make things that are light, or are about characters moving toward a place of lightness. I’ve made three things that are all very relationship-driven and end in a place of lightness, but moving forward, I want to be more focused on what that lightness entails. I want more simplicity, which circles back to why I’m so drawn to romanticism.
I’ll start my move to Zion by making a movie there probably, because then I’ll have to go there to do research; that’s the beginning stage of my plan. I had an idea recently for a movie about a character who moves to Zion, and everyone around him thinks he’s busy, so he becomes closed off to the small town he lives in. When he realizes he’s not actually busy, he starts to ask for help, because he wants to be a part of this community.
