How the Director of Netflix’s EDM Film Used His Past as a DJ to Explore the Collective Joy of Festivals

EDM is dying, just ask anyone. Marquee clubs on the Vegas strip are finding it unsustainable to pay big name DJs exorbitant guarantees, attendance at some of the scene's bigger festivals is down, and moralist panic around drug deaths are forcing legislators to close clubs and attempt to outlaw raves nationwide. But worry not denizens of Tomorrowland, there are still true believers in our midst, those who fight for the collective ecstasy that can happen—drugs or no—when you choose to lose yourself to dance surrounded by tens of thousands of friends and strangers. Christopher Louie—the director of XOXO, Netflix's new film set at an EDM festival—is one such crusader.

As a teenager, Louie centered the whole of his identity around Southern California's vibrant '90s rave scene. He went to his first show at the age of 14, took his first pill of MDMA and had his mind opened to a whole new world that he never really knew was possible. "I was raised in an atheist household," he tells me on a Skype call just a few weeks before the film's August 26 release. "I'd never been to church, never connected before to a communal, group experience. That was the first time I did that."

Slowly he picked up DJing for himself, and at the age of 18 he started playing happy hardcore at gigs across the West Coast—even once flying out to Boulder, Colorado to headline a rave in a public high school. He eventually ended up at UCLA, working toward a sociology degree, where he met a film professor who hired him to assist on shoots and then eventually as a directing partner. Together they called themselves Walter Robot and handled music videos for the likes of Modest Mouse, Gnarls Barkley, Death Cab for Cutie, Kid Cudi, and more. That work dried up in the early part of this decade, right around when Louie first heard about the rumblings of EDM.

Regardless of the music the DJs played—much of which he says he didn't fully understand at first—Louie saw this new scene as the rebirth of the community that changed his life as a kid. A new generation of kids was going to these massive events and experiencing the feeling he's come to refer to as "collective effervescence"—a term he's borrowed from his sociology days to describe the group dynamics of experiencing this body-rattling music all at once.

It's this feeling that drives XOXO, a story of six strangers from different walks of life all colliding at a fictional EDC-like megafestival that gives the film its name. There's a teenage DJ with a viral hit on YouTube, his friend and manager who's working delivery shifts at his dad's restaurant, a hopeless romantic looking for love, a couple on the verge of a breakup, a cynical old head who's prattling about how things were back in the day to anyone who'll listen. Over the course of a fateful afternoon some are wowed, dreams are fulfilled and crushed and fulfilled, people are drugged—but everything sorta works out and the characters demonstrate communitarian joy that can come from events like these. If you can let your guard down, there's a big world out there that you can connect with—that's the power of EDM and of XOXO's better moments. THUMP caught up with Louie in early August to talk about how his history in electronic music shaped this strange warmth at the heart of the film.

THUMP: Tell me a bit about your background, how did you first start going to raves and getting involved in DJing?
Christopher Louie: I started going to raves when I was 14. My first rave was at an old warehouse in San Bernardino, California called the Masterdome and it was a transformative experience. I did my first pill at my first rave. It was a completely amazing experience. After that I got really into drugs, doing a little bit of everything. Eventually I kind of stopped caring so much about the party and it became more about the drugs, unfortunately. In my sophomore year [of high school] I got kicked out of all my AP and honors classes. So my parents said "Oh, we've got to send you to a different school and get you back on track." Because of getting sent to a different school and my parents taking note, I stopped doing drugs.

So from there you started DJing?
A counselor asked me what I wanted to do with my life and I said, "I want to be a DJ!" Prior to that point, it was not even a possibility. That idea had never occurred to me. DJs were just like gods. For all I knew they were just making music live on stage. I started doing whatever I could to get money to buy records. I met up with an old friend of mine who went by DJ Notorious. He'd be on one set of decks and I'd be on another doing multiple layers on our mixes. We kept hustling. We started playing all over SoCal.

What the most memorable show you played?
The biggest party we played was called Candyland, in Colorado. They literally threw a rave in a high school. We were the headliners because we were the kids in LA that were flown out there to play. It was in this massive gymnasium—they told us there were probably 5,000-10,000 people there. It became a really big deal with the city because it was a public high school and there was corruption. [The fallout] shut down that party scene in Boulder for the next year.

So this film came about as a tribute to that background, but where did the idea to set it at a contemporary EDM festival come from? Why not look back?
That's a tough question. When I think about the rave scene back then, it was way more like a punk scene. It was so underground, there was this element of danger. You'd break into warehouses and go get a checkpoint so that you could better hide the location from cops. But if I made a looking-back movie, it would be ignoring the fact that the scene is still being experienced now on a much bigger scale. It would have been too micro. At the biggest, that was for 10,000 people, but now we're talking 70,000 to 120,000 people a night.

When the Tomorrowland 2012 aftermovie came out, it got 100 million views. Everybody was talking about it, even people who weren't into electronic music. My mom fucking told me: "There's this guy, Dead-Mow-Five, he's doing EDM like you!" My mom had to tell me what EDM was because I didn't know.

I thought this was fucking crazy. I knew that I had to make a movie about my experiences in that world. The scene being rebirthed in 2012 gave me the unique experience to make a looking back film but set in present day, making it more relevant for the kids who are the age now that I was then.

You see the big festival circuit as an embodiment of the scene you were a part of?
Oh yeah, definitely. Without a doubt! In order to get our financing, I got access to a festival and I went and shot a teaser for the movie. It was the first time I'd been to a festival since EDC in 2010, and this was 2014. It was a crazy day and at the end of it I was sitting there and Calvin Harris was playing. I went out in the audience to dance with the actors. It was the first time I was able to breathe and settle in. I sat back and I looked and it was 60,000 people all singing his songs. I got that same feeling I had when I was 14, that unity or whatever. On top of that, I looked over and I saw a kid carrying a totem that said "Fuck her right in the pussy." This is the exact same thing as when I was younger, except way fucking bigger.

What's your relationship to the music and culture like today? It's easy, knowing your story, to see you as jaded old guy in the movie, but that seems like not how you really feel about it.
No, not at all. That's what allowed me to make the movie. There's Chris D'Elia the jaded old guy, there's the dreamer DJ kid who's making music but doesn't want to share it with the rest of the world, his hapless manager, the young couple in love, and Sarah Hyland as a hopeless romantic going to meet a dude she met online. They're archetypal characters that everyone can identify with and I wrote all of them because I had a piece in all those characters throughout my life from 14 to now.

The way you grapple with the cynic's viewpoint in the film is really interesting. You push back so hard on the idea that this music could be looked down upon.
I really wanted to show the contradiction in holding that idea. Everyone who's experiencing things now could have no idea how you felt back then? That's stupid.

This film is going to exist as one of the most mainstream depictions of EDM. Did you feel a particular responsibility to represent it accurately because of that?
At first, I felt an obligation to be as authentic as possible and convey my experiences. But it hits me so much harder now. When I saw that those kids died at HARD Summer, I didn't cry or anything, but I got emotionally upset thinking about their families. I feel that my movie is about the other side of that, but you can't ignore that that shit happens.

I feel very confident though. Yes, my movie depicts drugs, and yes, it depicts kids having a fucking good time on drugs because I did when I was young and I came out of it alive. But that said, it is not an irresponsible, debaucherous party drug movie like Project X or something.

I think that it's the opposite really—it suggests that these places and substances can be uplifting experiences, almost in a spiritual way.
It's so much more sexy for a newspaper to post a story about the kids who died there than the 59,000 kids who didn't and had an amazing time. I know my personal experience—drugs were a part of it. That's why the movie's like that. But it in no way says drugs are necessary to have spiritual or enlightening experience at a festival. The obligation was to the truth.