MUSICAL YOUTH
WAVES I Trey Edward Shults’ radical drama redefines the teen movie…
This movie probably breaks every fucking rule they recommend you don’t break!” laughs Trey Edward Shults, writer-director of the searing new teen movie Waves. Centred on an African-American family from southern Florida navigating a terrible tragedy, Shults’ third film takes real structural risks, switching protagonists halfway through. “My goal,” he adds, “is to try and make movies we haven’t seen before.”
Shults’ starting point was crafting “a movie about kids and music” – a teen soundtrack film to end them all. “The music was always so much a part of the DNA,” says Shults, who lines up tracks as varied as Dinah Washington’s ‘What A Difference A Day Makes’, Frank Ocean’s ‘Godspeed’ and Radiohead’s ‘True Love Waits’. “I wanted it to function as a mixtape in its own right,” he says, “where if you listen to it in sequence it’s telling a story just like the movie is.”
With a cast including Sterling K. Brown (Black Panther) and Lucas Hedges (Manchester By The Sea), the script initially focuses on Tyler (Luce’s Kelvin Harrison Jr.), who tears a shoulder muscle, ruining his chances on the high-school wrestling team. Shults himself also wrestled in high school and suffered a similar injury. “I still have the scars,” he says, pulling his shirt open to show Teasers.
For Shults it was “a depressing year”. But for Tyler? “It’s utterly devastating.” What unfolds is a bleak but poetic tale as Tyler reacts violently against his sudden life change. For the darker elements of the film, Shults drew from his own life. “I’ve had some family members pass away and some friends pass away and some events I happened to hear about… it all combines into what this is.”
At least he had Harrison Jr. as his main man. They’d worked together on It Comes At Night, and the actor went through a “full immersion transformation” to train as a wrestler. And just as well, given his previous lack of physicality. “He couldn’t chop wood in my last movie! He was this skinny kid. He was terrible!”
ETA | 17 JANUARY / WAVES OPENS IN TWO MONTHS’ TIME.