All you need is a laptop, some talent, and one track.
That\’s the well-known tagline of the 2015 movie \”We Are Your Friends.\” The movie, starring Zac Efron and Emily Ratajkowski, has been a hot topic in the EDM community for months. Elitists were quick to criticize the movie, and even the most mainstream EDM fans have been skeptical of the film after seeing its trailers.
The film is directed by Max Joseph, who you probably recognize as the grey-haired guy from Catfish. It\’s Joseph\’s directing debut, and while he didn\’t do an awful job, the movie disappoints on several levels. It fails to capture the spirit of the EDM community, and focuses on the negative stereotypes of the scene.
The film starts with Cole Carter (Efron) struggling to make it as a DJ in his college town. He can be found handing out flyers outside lecture halls while the rest of his crew of three friends try to make it in Hollywood in their own ways – club promoting, drug dealing, etc. The first portion of the movie focuses on this group of guys and their quest to be successful, which captured my interest. Cole eventually meets a headlining DJ outside the club he and his friends are at that night while smoking a joint outside the back door.
That DJ, James Reese (Wes Bentley), is a washed up club DJ who apparently used to be good but is now banking in on EDM\’s popularity. He brings Cole to a party at what looks like an art museum, and Cole unknowingly takes PCP after James spiked his drink with it. After this encounter, James lets Cole use his home studio and teaches him about music, but that goes awry once his girlfriend and secretary Sophie (Ratajkowski) develops a thing for Cole. Eventually, they find each other at a festival, where they take Molly together and realize their true feelings for each other. The movie gradually focuses more and more on this romance, in which Cole and Sophie are trying to hide their fling from James, who is an aging alcoholic.
This was a common theme in the movie; drug use and shitty people. One of Cole\’s close friends dies after a wild night at their place. The death plays almost no part in the story and seemed like a totally unnecessary part of the film. In the middle of WAYF, the storyline spends a significant amount of time focusing on the posse\’s adventures in the real estate business, where they work with sketchy businessmen and take home wads of cash in their first \”real job.\”
The ending scene finds Cole on the biggest stage of his career, where he\’s opening a festival for Nicky Romero, Alesso, and others. They both make cameos in WAYF, along with Dillon Francis, who plays an awkward DJ opening for Cole at one of his first gigs. As an EDM fan, these appearances were probably my favorite part of the film. The movie ends abruptly after Cole plays his first legitimate track, setting itself up nicely for a possible sequel in the future.
I went into We Are Your Friends with an open mind, and was rather disappointed. It started off on a strong note, and I was excited to watch a movie chronicling a young DJ\’s rise to the top. The characters were intriguing and I thought it would be an inspiring film in an age where truly anyone can make it if they work hard enough. However, after Cole took PCP at that party, the movie really took a turn for the worse. Over time, it became less about DJing and electronic music and more about Cole and Emily and the drama among their love triangle. In this interview, Joseph said that \”We didn\’t want to make a film that was a supposed tell-all expose about the world of electronic music…the experience of being a highly paid DJ travelling the world is not something a lot of people can relate to. We wanted to create something that was far more universal.\”
After the private screening at the Showplace ICON, I got to sit down at The Mid with Zac, Emily, Max and DJ Them Jeans (Jason Stewart), who taught Zac everything he needed to know about DJing (not Alesso). It was a a bit like a press conference, with several other reporters doing a roundtable-style interview. Here\’s the highlights:
What kind of feedback have you gotten from the community?
Max: I think there was a lot of fear and trepidation about this movie from the community, especially when the trailers came out. People felt like Hollywood was gonna \”sell out\” and water down the dance music scene. When people see the movie, it\’s not quite what they expect, and I feel like they\’re surprised by it.
Jason: The DJ friends of mine who have seen it have all been pleasantly surprised. It\’s a very feel good movie, and all of the DJ elements were nailed correctly. Everyone that I know who\’s seen it has given it a stamp of approval.
What was it about electronic music that inspired you to write this? And what attracted you guys to the script?
Zac: There\’s a lot of EDM scripts floating around the industry right now, and no one had really nailed it. It\’s just a really great coming of age story, and it\’s something that I would want to see. Even cooler than that, I can relate to it on a very specific level. I was interested in it, I enjoy EDM music [sic], I lived in the Valley for four years, and had very similar friends to this. I still have those friends. I felt that if Max and I met in the middle, we both knew we could make something great.
Emily: It\’s sort of become the \”EDM movie,\” since there hasn\’t been one yet. I think an important thing to keep in mind is that the EDM scene is kinda a backdrop to this coming of age story, like how disco was for Saturday Night Fever. You have this specific moment in time, specific place, that allowed people to see these characters and ideas play out. For me, I think it\’s really about the millennial, post-recession generation dealing with technology, and I think EDM is a perfect art form that\’s come out of that world. I like Sophie because she doesn\’t really know what she wants, and by the end she still doesn\’t know what she wants. It\’s not realistic for all movie characters to have these \”a-ha\” moments. I like that you see her sacrifice and shed things that make her feel comfortable, which really appealed to me.
Has your view of the scene changed after the movie? Do you look at it differently?
Zac: Absolutely. I have a lot more respect for it now.
Max: I feel like the scene is really community driven, and it\’s very supportive. In order to shoot that last scene in the movie, we threw our own block party, and the audience who showed up there came for free to see Nicky Romero and Dirty South. We totally surprised them by bringing Zac up and they played along perfectly and were obviously happy to be in the movie. I think that spirit of friendship and getting along and coming together at festivals and stuff is amazing. It has existed in other music movements before, but there\’s obviously something more relevant now about getting together in big groups and being positive and supportive.
The way the trailer positioned the movie, and all of the buildup around it, I was expecting to see a movie about EDM. I thought it was more of a personal story about Cole. What did you set out to make? A movie about electronic music, or a movie about a person that happens to be in that scene?
Max: We\’ve always wanted to make the movie that we\’ve made, and that\’s hard to do. That was always the intention – to tell a personal coming of age story, with the backdrop being electronic music. I think trailers can be deceiving, or they can only show a portion of it, and I oddly find that the trailers to some of my favorite movies don\’t capture the message of the film, like The Social Network or Birdman.
After the interview, the cast made an appearance on stage during Anna Lunoe\’s set at the official Chicago We Are Your Friends afterparty. They threw out some t-shirts and said hi to the crowd, and after they left around 11:30, the Mid emptied out pretty quickly. Hook N Sling played before Anna, followed by a DJ set from Keys N Krates that was enjoyed by probably around 100 people by the time it ended at 1:45 A.M. The Mid also premiered an impressive new setup, complete with a huge video screen I\’ve never seen before. I really hope they keep it and it\’s not just a prop for the WAYF tour; along with almost no VIP tables on the main floor, The Mid was an surprisingly nice environment that night.
To be honest, I wouldn\’t recommend this movie to anyone. Friends familiar with EDM and the music scene will be expecting to see the \”EDM Movie\” that it has been hyped up to be, but are sure to be disappointed when they watch a love story starring Zac Efron instead. Those with a limited knowledge of EDM will notice the glorified drug use and leave with a rather skewed and inaccurate image of the scene.
Hopefully, one day, we\’ll see an EDM movie that truly captures the happiness, togetherness, and positivity that Max was talking about. But if you like Zac Efron and wanna see a corny love story, then \”We Are Your Friends\” is for you. The film is set to be released on August 28th.
