Twenty-five years ago, millions of people were nervously looking ahead to New Year’s Eve.
When the clocks struck midnight, they wondered, would they lose power? Would planes fall from the sky? Would banks collapse and the world order crumble?
Such nightmarish fantasies were never truly based in reality, but the public genuinely feared that the computer systems society had become increasingly reliant on would fail at the stroke of midnight, ushering in a dark beginning to the year 2000.
For years, computer engineers and government officials had worked on what was then called the Year 2000 problem, also known as the Millennium Bug. Starting in the 1950s and ’60s, programmers stripped the first two digits of the year from code in order to save time and money. The assumption was that the code would be replaced long before the turn of the millennium.
But in the following decades, engineers began to sound the alarm that if computer systems switched from 1999 to 1900, it would cause massive disruptions, affecting the electric grid, nuclear power plants, hospitals, supermarkets, government agencies, and home computer users.
In the final months and weeks of 1999, officials expressed optimism that the crisis would be averted, and that the countless hours and billions of dollars invested in the problem had minimized its impact. But that didn’t stop people panicking and stocking up on food, water, and weapons. Celebrities weighed in on whether they were freaking out or not. The Simpsons episode “Life’s a Glitch, Then You Die” parodied the fears.
But New Year’s Eve came and went, and the impact turned out to be relatively minor. As a result, Y2K has become somewhat of a punchline and an exaggerated threat, despite the unsung heroes who worked diligently behind the scenes to prepare.
In 1999, actor and recent Saturday Night Live cast member Kyle Mooney, then 15 years old, felt somewhat let down by the anticlimactic ending to the Y2K panic.
Twenty-five years later, he has directed his debut film, Y2K, which imagines a nightmare scenario far beyond what anyone had predicted. Sean Rameswaram talked to Mooney about his memories of Y2K and what it was like revisiting late ’90s culture with a cast that was mostly born after the event he depicts.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts.
Tell us about the thing you made.
I made a movie called Y2K, wrote it with my pal Evan [Winter], and it’s somewhat based on our lives. I was 15 when Y2K happened. He was 14. And for those of us who were alive during Y2K, it was a letdown and nothing really happened. And I think I’ve always been sort of minorly obsessed with that. So one day the idea struck me to make a movie about “teenagers go to a party and Y2K actually happens.” I pitched it to Evan and we started working on it.
Amazing. Can you tell us what you were doing on New Year’s Eve, 1999?
I hung out with my friend Mark. We watched the MTV New Year’s Eve special. So I would have, I guess, been enjoying Carson Daly riffing with Kathy Griffin. I don’t know that I was particularly super nervous or frightened as to what could happen when midnight arrived. But my mom prepped and she got some goodies just in case, I guess, the world was destroyed in some way or another.
In the moment, it just sort of came and went. I don’t know what thought I gave to it until I just started, again, minorly obsessing over it. It would just hit me every once in a while. But I don’t really know that I put much immediate thought into it in the moment.
And of course, you cast your movie with a bunch of teenagers. I wanted to ask whether something about this buildup and this letdown felt sort of essentially teenage to you.
I’m sure that is true. The story we were always interested in telling was, to a degree, a riff on teen culture of the era, specifically, like, all of these movies were coming out that were geared toward us. It was She’s All That, Can’t Hardly Wait, American Pie, 10 Things I Hate About You.
To a degree, I don’t know that I thought in terms of, like, this is speaking to teenagedom as much as like, this is sort of like the culture that was being blasted to me, and I wanted to return to that.
Unlike all those movies you just named, this movie takes a fairly dark turn. As much as you’re willing to share with people, what happens when the clocks strike 12 in Y2K, your movie?
At midnight, the machines go crazy and start killing people, essentially. It’s weird. I don’t feel like I’ve ever made anything that has maybe been so violent, but I was really excited by just taking left turns and doing something that elicits reaction. I really hope that if people see it, you know, there are some laughs, there are some tears, and there are some moments of like, “Oh my shit, that’s fucking crazy.”
Did I say, “Oh my shit”?
Oh my shit. I kind of don’t hate that.
We’ve also got a long lineage of movies in which technology turns on us and terrorizes us. And Y2K, your movie, is the latest. Why do we love to watch technology try and kill us? Did you think about that while you were making this movie?
I think that fear is constantly present. I feel like with the introduction of electronics and robotics, there’s always been that thought that, like, when is the point that these things are going to turn on us? And even in the course of working on this movie, we started in 2019 and now it’s 2024 that it’s coming out. We’ve seen an evolution of AI and it’s seemingly become more threatening and more real than even it was when we first started talking about this.
A lot of the actors in your movie weren’t even alive on New Year’s Eve 1999. Did you have to have, like, Camp Y2K, where you kind of gave them the essentials of what life was like back then?
We made playlists for them. We sent them lists of movies to watch. And, you know, any phrase or reference they didn’t know, obviously, we’d fill them in. It was really on them to decide how much they wanted to invest in learning about the culture and the time.
I think the characters, even though they are these archetypes of the period and some of them are very distinctly late ’90s, early 2000s, there is a universal quality to them I think that even our young actors could relate to — the vulnerability of being this age.
Y2K, beyond your movie even, is having a moment. I mean, there are Y2K vintage clothing stores. Charli XCX, who had a huge year, has a song on her album called “Von Dutch.” Did the fact that Y2K is back in so many ways — you know, kids using digital point-and-shoot cameras again — help you sell this movie to A24?
I think so. I mean, I can’t say that I’m like the king of the zeitgeist by any means, you know what I mean? But you kind of got a sense that Y2K as a fashion aesthetic was coming back. But it’s grown in the time from the conceptualization to now. And now I feel like I’m just lucky that we’re getting it out in time because we’re probably at a moment where people will be sick of it after this, you know what I mean? And we could be like a month or two away.
Do you think we can learn anything from Y2K, from your experience making this movie?
You know, Y2K was something that we were overprepared for. And, like we said, nothing happened. There were people working on these computers and making sure that we were ready. So there are these unsung heroes. Who knows what would have happened if they hadn’t done the work that they did?
But I think we’ve seen in our fairly recent culture and history that there are moments that we were not prepared for and that then kind of shifted our lives. And so there is something to always be thoughtful about, like, “Okay, we should maybe take this somewhat seriously and think about it and make sure we’re all good if something bad were to happen.” Let’s not be super obsessive about it, but let’s be smart about it.
