If there’s one writer/director whose work I’ve been consistently excited by and whose name at festivals promises a project both heartbreakingly raw and funny, it’s Cooper Raiff.
He was a SXSW breakout in 2020 with college comedy Shithouse, which snagged him the fest’s Grand Jury Award. And in 2022 took a step into more adult territory with the Sundance Film Festival premiere of Cha Cha Real Smooth, which won the Audience Award in the U.S. Dramatic category.
This year, he is back at Sundance with an episodic work, Hal & Harper. The series follows two codependent siblings (Raiff and Lili Reinhart) who, years after a traumatic event in their family, still haven’t quite recovered. That pain seeps into their messy present-day relationships, including the ones they have with their dad (Mark Ruffalo) and his new partner (Betty Gilpin). When we get flashbacks into their childhood, Raiff and Reinhart play their grade-school versions of the characters, forced to mature too soon.
Raiff is always highly involved in his projects, writing and directing as well as starring, and he brings a singular sensibility to the work that’s a bit hard to pin down—something about an awkward honesty, naturalistic dialogue, moments of emotional punch that feel familiar and real.
Hal & Harper is no different, but as an episodic, the story is a bit more freewheeling, interwoven with past and present threads that slowly unravel the family’s anguish.
Final Draft spoke with Raiff ahead of Sundance to learn what was different about his approach to episodic work, his methods for building characters that he might not fully understand in the beginning, and how the writing comes together on set.
The idea for the series has been in Raiff’s head for six years, and he made a proto-version as a web series when he was in college.
“It was my sophomore year at Occidental in Los Angeles, and I had this idea of, what if two siblings who were 7 and 9 years old just talked every night about their dad, who made them grow up too fast?” he said. “And the whole shtick of it is that it’s played by me and my friend, and we’re just in twin beds in our dorm room, and we’re just talking about the things that Dad said today.”
From that initial seed of an idea, Raiff took a step back and began analyzing why the idea came to him. He began writing scenes within the world, almost as therapy, he said.
“At some point I realized I had 100 pages of scenes that really meant something to me and were sometimes funny, but sometimes not at all,” he said. “And the tone was very much the same for all of it. It was this tone that everything on paper is objectively weird, but the tone was very, very inviting and warm and accessible, and it felt like therapy.”
While the starting point was about the children, Raiff wondered next how those characters would have matured into adulthood. More scenes came out, and in the end he had roughly 150 pages of material that “just came out of my body very viscerally,” as he described it. With that amount of work, the television approach made sense.
He began by laying out the pages and forming an outline. His approach there is unique, too.
“I’m usually trying to say something with a scene, but sometimes those scenes can be a montage, or a ‘scene’ can be three scenes that are trying to accomplish the same thing,” he said.
So his version of outlining involves taking the material he has, figuring out the scenes, then writing a cluster of words for what the scene is and what he’s trying to accomplish. His focus is first on the theme, and the message that he’s trying to convey to the audience.
“And then the second step is always, how do you make it an entertaining thing? You can’t make a show or a movie where it’s like, this character’s arc happens, and then this character’s arc happens,” he said. “But that is how I outline. So the second step is usually making it all into a soup, and then seeing how there are patterns with the characters, and being able to connect scenes.”
Raiff said that he started with the children’s perspectives, and the father was a bit unactualized in his mind. In his past writing, he has allowed characters’ understanding of others to be limited (in the case of Cha Cha Real Smooth, his protagonist never really knows or understands his older paramour).
“I was thinking a lot about when I made this, when I was starting to write this show, maybe that’s what Dad is,” he said. “He’s this person over there, we’re in the kids’ perspective. And then I realized a TV show is so amazing because you get to go into his experience.”
The series finale, it turns out, is from the dad’s point of view. But it was a point of view that Raiff was prepared to say he had no experience with—a father experiencing a tragedy and falling into deep depression.
“That episode I wrote basically trying to channel somebody who I don’t know in the very best way I could,” Raiff said.
He went into the project knowing that he would rely on whomever he cast to develop the character further, sometimes through very loosely constructed moments or scenes (it helps that Mark Ruffalo ended up being that actor.) Together, they worked on story and allowed for moments to develop on set.
“I left a lot of holes in the script,” he said. “I left a lot of, ‘I don’t know exactly what he’s going to do in this moment by himself, but I want to see it on camera.’ And that’s what I would write in the script is, ‘We’re going to watch Dad in his room, in his bed, and he’s going to forget to pick up the kids from school.’”
If you have the trust of a talented actor and the time on set, this experimentation could be a great way to allow scenes and characters to develop organically.
If Raiff ever hits a wall, he said he prefers to go on walks.
“When people are talking about what do you do when there’s a blank page and you don’t have anything to write, it’s like, stop writing,” he said. “I think that you’re not supposed to be in front of that computer right now. Do something else.”
But he also brought up the David Lynch quote about ideas being like fish (RIP to a true icon). At times, he said, there’s something not quite right in his writing.
“I feel like sometimes I’ve caught a fish, and I’ve killed the fish and prepared the meal, but sometimes I’m like, ‘I should have asked him more questions before I killed him.’”
I brought up the industry note execs often give—”I’m bumping.” Raiff said he appreciates the note, even if it’s vague.
“Everyone knows what bumps and doesn’t bump when someone says, ‘This is bumping,’” he said. “The writer is never like, ‘No, it’s not.’ They’re like, ‘Yes, I knew that that was bumping. I thought this and this was bumping too, but I’m glad to know it.’ When you get the note, ‘This is bumping,’ I’m like, ‘Got it. We’re all on the same page. I’m going to go on a walk now.’”
He said he actually prefers the nonspecific diagnosis of “a bump” rather than a more specific note because he as the writer should figure out what works best for the story.
“That’s what makes art great, is really leaning into those bumps and figuring out how to fit it back into the organism or take it out and add something new,” he said.
Hal & Harper premiered Jan. 26. It was made independently, and indie TV is an incredibly small market. I am manifesting, alongside Raiff, that a streamer or network buys the series, so more people get to see it.