Kyle Mooney on Limp Bizkit and the Death of the Monoculture in Y2K

When Kyle Mooney was looking for one artist to embody the spirit of his directorial debut, Y2K, it could only be one man: Fred Durst. “He was truly iconic of the era,” Mooney said.

In the period sci fi horror comedy set at the birth of the millennium, the threatened Y2K technological disaster happens, and the machines start to take over the world. When a group of partying teens, including nerdy Eli (Jaeden Martell), loudmouth Danny (Julian Dennison), and cool kid Laura (Rachel Zegler), need saving, who comes to the rescue but that backward-baseball-cap-wearing frontman of mega-selling rap rock pioneers Limp Bizkit? And why Fred Durst? Because, if you were alive in 1999, Fred Durst was everywhere. Writer/director Mooney said, “Over the course of writing and leading into production, we were like, 'Well, if Fred can't do it, who else can fill his shoes?' We pitched several people but truly nobody ticked all the boxes like Fred did.”

Out of all the bands of the era, Limp Bizkit became symbolic of the times because of how, well, simply damn strange they were. Get past the knuckle-dragging nu metal reputation, and their music was a mixture of rap, avant garde guitar, and jazz-funk fusion. “[Durst] sees it more as an art project than anything else,” Mooney said.

“He personifies the era, but he also transcends it, in a way,” added the SNL star’s longtime creative partner and Y2K cowriter, Evan Winter. “Everyone, whether you liked Limp or not, knew who he was and had a relationship with him. His persona got something out of everybody, so it was rad to have him.”

The turn of the century was a weird time to live in, not least because everyone was convinced that the world was going to end because of a programming glitch known as the millennium bug. Doomsayers forecast that, because of how software kept time, at the stroke of midnight on 1/1/2000, planes would fall from the sky, nuclear reactors would explode, and the banking system would collapse. Mooney recalled, “The day before, my mom went to the supermarket and grabbed a bunch of water and some granola bars, but it was a letdown, for sure.” In fact, what would have happened would have been much more mundane – maybe some luggage would have been lost – but companies and governments still spent billions Y2K-proofing systems to avoid some minor disruptions. Mooney laughed at that alternate world. “I like the idea of that version of the movie – a deflating Y2K.”

Maybe that disappointment about who Y2K underdelivered on the disaster is why there hasn’t been a Y2K movie before – much to the surprise of Mooney and Winter. “This is when we grew up,” said Mooney, “and we've not really seen a ton of representation of it on screen.” Writing the script gave them an opportunity to look back on what it was really like to be a kid back then. For Mooney, this was when “pop culture was so ubiquitous and in-your-face, it was hard to escape.”

After all, this was back when every kid ran home to watch Total Request Live (Mooney admitted he definitely did), and that led to what Winter called “the last era of the monoculture, before the internet fractured everything into subgenres and micro-cliques. .... There was a frame of reference that everyone had. Even the CJ character (Daniel Zolghadri) who hates everything, he's so aware of it because you couldn’t escape it in that time period. Now, today, everyone can find what they like and you can really easily ignore everything else, and not be aware of the big culture.”

So how did the duo spend their own Y2K? Being part of that same monoculture. Mooney said, “Evan's from Eugene, Oregon, and I'm from San Diego, California, and we were both separately hanging out at our homes, watching the MTV New Year’s Eve show with Carson Daly.”

The downside of the loss of common cultural touchstones for Mooney is that the turn of the millennium was the last time when there was a definable sense of fashion tied to the era, that you could really look at something and place it to a time and a scene and a sound. Winter added, “It used to be that there's a 20- or 30-year-cycle, where something would come back in fashion from 20 or 30 years earlier and that would inform a new style. It does feel like, since the mid-aughts to today, it's no longer new style or fashion is emerging. It's just a cannibalization of older sounds and older looks, and it's getting faster and faster, the kind of stuff we're returning to.”

Mooney and Winter weren't simply cannibalizing their youth but recreating it, and they wanted it to be as accurate as possible - not just finding the right skate shoes from the era, but finding a pair that looks just worn enough. "It's something we care about a lot," Winter said. “Those details are important, and that's the kind of color and the fabric that makes the era feel lived-in.” He had particular praise for the design team (costume designer Katina Danabassis, production designer Jason Singleton, prop master Michael Aitken) for helping them source the precise period details that they'd written into the script. Take the camcorder used by alt kid Ash (Lachlan Watson), which is “the kind of camcorder we'd shoot dumb skate videos with our friends when we were 16-year-olds. Then we'd scour the internet to find working versions, and we'd have to have multiples, and then we get them and we test, and we have one for the stunt scenes, and then you have the working one that our actors are using when we're shooting.”

Once they built that world, they then had to populate it with a cast that - for the most part - wasn't even born when Savage Garden were on the charts, Bret Hart was still wrestling, we were only on the eighth Final Fantasy, and no one knew what a goblet of fire was. “We let them go wild a little bit,” said Mooney, adding that the cast members were given playlists and movies to watch to explain their characters, and then some of them went deep into research rabbit holes. “I think other people didn't touch the playlists that we gave them.”

Y2K is in theatres now from A24. Find listings and showtimes here.