Famous Canadian musical duo Tegan and Sara Quin have turned their memoir “High School” into a show of the same name (available on Prime Video in Canada October 28), featuring TikTok sensations Railey and Seazynn Gilliland, Cobie Smulders and made by But I’m a cheerleader star Clea DuVall.
In world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), High school tells the story of Tegan and Sara going to a new high school in the 1990s, and initially, seemingly adrift. They are both fiercely drawn to music, while exploring who they are in their teenage years.
Through High schoolall under the guise of that appealing 90s grunge nostalgia, there’s this great commitment to telling this story in a way that feels much more authentically raw, complicated but with a real sense of innocence that we all felt at the adolescence, where every day was an opportunity for us to change and change, and to understand ourselves better.
“Part of our teenage experience as queer teenagers who hadn’t officially come out yet was, yes, there were secret relationships, but there was also just chemistry with a lot of our friends,” Sara said. Yahoo Canada during the TIFF. “When we came of age a lot of queer people were saying it was a very unusual experience in high school, most people who are queer are in some way, especially in our generation, they kept it a secret , they certainly didn’t feel attracted to friends and having secret fondling, or getting drunk and dating a girl and not talking about it later. We were.”
“I think being able to capture that on screen is important, and I know we’ve done that with the memoirs but I think it’s even higher by the show because those unspoken gazes between women, which don’t have to not necessarily be romantic, they can just be arousing… For example, is Sara looking across the theater at this mysterious girl because she thinks her hair is awesome and she’s thinking about it? cut and dye them? Or does she want to date? We’re not sure… I’ve never seen that in a queer story before.
Sara also points out that’s very much the case in the first episode, where Seazynn as Sara watches a girl at school and that classmate’s response is, basically, what the hell you look ?
“It would happen to us all the time,” Sara said. “Not in a sexual way, just if you looked at the wrong person, someone would say, ‘don’t fucking look at me.'”
“I love that that moment happens in the pilot because you feel the tension and the danger of people watching, and what becomes so clear throughout the season is that Tegan and Sara find a world where they can watch and they can watch and be watched, and that’s for sure…Finding a group of friends where I was allowed to safely watch and be watched was transformative.
“We want women to be perfect”
Another authentic aspect of High school is that it actually shows these teenagers learning to play guitar and becoming musicians, and it’s not perfect, for example, as they watch Kurt Cobain play guitar on TV to try to learn.
“I wanted to see, what are the ways that we’re going to see Tegan and Sara struggle to become musicians that maybe the boys don’t have to do with,” Sara Quin said.
“There were definitely meetings early on where it was like, ‘can we see a guitar right now? Can they be musicians in the first episode?'” Tegan Quin added. “Clea was so bad at this subject she was like no, you have to believe they are learning and you can’t do that at first, you have to get to know them first,… you are gonna have to see them struggle and figure it out.
“I think when you see women playing music on TV, it’s often perfect because we want women to be perfect, … but we see men struggling and suffering, and we’re like, that’s hot to see them figure it out… We were like, let’s make it real and let them play for each other, and be amazed and let them do their thing. That’s how people reacted to us. It wasn’t perfect, you listen to our tape or you see the video of us in high school and that’s the energy that we give off, and a lot of the energy was like, ‘I can do this thing,’ and people would look at it and be like, ‘how do they do that?’
The Quin twins both praise Clea DuVall’s ability to truly transform their memoirs for the screen in innovative ways. Although it’s based on their real life, it doesn’t feel like a biopic (although we’d definitely watch one too), it definitely looks like a cool teen-centric show from the 90s, which just happens to be based on the lives of these Canadian musical sensations.
“We’re storytellers, but we needed someone who would actually be able to… imagine this, what does this look like? What is missing ? What can you keep? What are you fictionalising? Sara said. “We really needed a strong partner who could take us down this path.”
“The absolutely necessary thing was someone who would continue to let us participate in this process of creative collaboration because … it’s not just our real story and our life, and our friends and family, … the characters are called Tegan and Sara, so if it’s going aside, it’s kind of associated with something that’s also his. It’s our albums, it’s our legacy, it’s our foundation. So we needed someone someone we could trust, someone who would be collaborative, and also someone who had a vision of how to really elevate this.
“They’re actually so intimate with each other”
Railey and Seazynn Gilliland don’t just work like Tegan and Sara Quin because they’re also twins, they’re captivating to watch with an awkwardness that takes you back to watching shows like my so called life.
“They’re actually so intimate with each other,” Sara said. “When we started filming the musical scenes, I remember saying, ‘Wow, they’re really looking at each other’…they were like looking into each other’s eyes, it meant to me that there was trust.
“Railey and Seazynn are really great performers, I don’t think they like to rehearse but nobody does, but the second we got them into the studio it was so clear they were very, very talented and I really hope there are future seasons because it will be really interesting to see how they develop and grow,” added Tegan.
While the future of High school is unknown, the first season certainly invested us in these characters in a way where, it would be a shame not to see how Clea DuVall continues this story, as Tegan and Sara age and evolve both musically and personally.
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