PITTSBURGH — When Cooper Raiff was growing up in Dallas, he thought everyone was Jewish. He even told his mom as much, at which point she set her son straight on how small the country's Jewish population actually is.
The 25-year-old writer, director and star of the Pittsburgh-filmed movie "Cha Cha Real Smooth" went to a K-12 school that he described as being about 40% Jewish. Though Raiff is not Jewish, he took part in traditions like the Shabbat dinners he attended with his girlfriend's family and the many Saturdays he spent at his seventh-grade classmates' bar mitzvahs.
"I had my first kiss at a bar mitzvah at an aquarium by stinky penguins," Raiff told the Post-Gazette. "I have clearer memories of that year than I do of every other year."
After bursting on to the Hollywood filmmaking scene in 2020 with his debut movie "S—house," Raiff decided to mine his respect for and knowledge of Jewish culture for "Cha Cha Real Smooth," out now on AppleTV+. The film's title is a direct homage to a line from the 2000 DJ Casper song "Cha Cha Slide," which has become a staple at bar mitzvahs, weddings and just about every type of gathering that involves dancing.
Raiff stars in "Cha Cha Real Smooth" as Andrew, an aimless recent college graduate working as a bar mitzvah party host who stumbles into an intense relationship with a young mother, Domino (Dakota Johnson), and her autistic daughter, Lola (Vanessa Burghardt). Both Raiff and Burghardt — an 18-year-old autistic actor making her feature film debut — recently sat down with the Post-Gazette to discuss shooting "Cha Cha Real Smooth" in the Pittsburgh area.
"[T]he crew there is exceptional," Raiff said. "Every single person who was on set and is from Pittsburgh was great, and I really enjoyed making a movie there. And I'd definitely do it again."
Self-written journey
Pittsburgh wasn't Raiff's first choice of locations for filming the New Jersey-set movie. He wanted to shoot somewhere in the Garden State, but it was too crowded to fit in his production. One of the line producers on "Cha Cha Real Smooth" also worked on the Pittsburgh-shot action-thriller "Sweet Girl" and suggested the Steel City as a place for Raiff to set up shop.
Though he came into Pittsburgh with "a bad attitude at first," Raiff was eventually won over by the quality of crew and locales at his disposal. He briefly thought about setting "Cha Cha Real Smooth" here instead of New Jersey before deciding that Pittsburgh felt "more charming and lovely" and less like the "holding zone after college" where he wanted the film to be set.
Much of the film was shot inside the Galleria at Pittsburgh Mills mall in Frazer. Raiff was aware that Pittsburgh has a Jewish neighborhood similar to the one he grew up around in Dallas. He enjoyed exploring Squirrel Hill, but he ultimately didn't end up shooting there.
It hasn't taken long for Raiff to establish himself as one of Hollywood's most promising Generation Z auteurs by using his own experiences as a springboard for his art. While "S—house" was about a character finding his place on a college campus, "Cha Cha Real Smooth" takes aim at young adults still stuck in that mode of fear and uncertainty.
"I feel so lucky to be making movies at a young age," he said. "I love making movies about times in my life where I still haven't shed the person I was. ... It was really great and freeing to play Andrew. It was easy because I related a lot to focusing on solving other people's problems and not always being able to solve my own. It was emotional to go on that journey that I have written for herself."
'It's just not represented very often'
One of the key things "Cha Cha Real Smooth" had to get right was the casting of Lola, the autistic teenager who forms a bond with Andrew. Raiff's sister is disabled, and he based the character of Lola on her and her friends. He was cognizant of the shellacking the 2021 film "Music" took for its poor autistic representation, so he worked with the disabilities advocacy group RespectAbility to ensure his film would do better.
"Everything changed" when Raiff saw Burghardt's audition tape. The New Jersey native had wanted to be in movies since she was a kid, using cinema as a means of better understanding people and social situations. After getting some stage acting experience under her belt, Burghardt knew she was ready to step in front of the camera after coming across the character of Lola.
"It was the first role I had ever seen that represented an autistic girl close to my age in a way that felt like my experience or like the experience of other people," she said. "She was a fully formed person, authentic and wasn't being used to serve someone else's story. She had her own personality and thoughts on things."
Like Raiff, filming "Cha Cha Real Smooth" was Burghardt's first time in Pittsburgh. She recalled being here during an exceptionally rainy summer but still having a good time. Burghardt was particularly impressed with The Andy Warhol Museum, the abundance of record stores and Wildcard in Lawrenceville, which she described as "the best little boutique I've ever been to in my life."
She always "felt very understood" by Raiff and never got the sense "I was singled out" or treated differently by him or anyone else on set. Burghardt's nerves about meeting Johnson dissipated to the point where "I always felt like I could talk to her" and "I never had to pretend to be comfortable with her" in a scene because they were actually that in sync.
There was a time when Burghardt thought there must be something wrong with her because she rarely came across anyone like herself in popular culture. She's hoping that Lola will help anyone in a similar situation realize that is simply not the case.
"Lola is like me when I was younger," Burghardt said. "I hope other people can see that, because it's not just them. They're not the problem, it's just not represented very often."
Great expectations
Both "S—house" and "Cha Cha Real Smooth" show how adept Raiff is at imbuing any scene with a palpable tension. His bread and butter is inventing "very interior conflict among two characters" and coming up with dialogue that authentically sounds like they don't know what to say to each other. Raiff was especially excited about crafting Domino for Johnson, who shares a lot of his cinematic sensibilities and "can flirt with a wall."
"I was so excited to write Domino knowing she was going to elevate it in such specific ways," he said. "It's just kind of letting her do her thing. It's allowing her room to do stuff that's smart and funny and dangerous and who she is."
"Cha Cha Real Smooth" made its debut at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival and was almost immediately scooped up by Apple, who paid about $15 million for the right to distribute it worldwide. Burghardt said that she wasn't really thinking about the notion of people actually seeing the film as she was making it. Now that it's publicly available on a streaming service like AppleTV+, she's keenly "interested to see what people think of it."
So is Raiff, who knows that some cinephiles may brush up against the film's gentle nature. He recognizes that there are a few striking similarities between "Cha Cha Real Smooth" and "CODA," another big-hearted AppleTV+ film that happened to win best picture at the 2022 Academy Awards. Raiff thinks it will ultimately be a net positive for "Cha Cha Real Smooth" if folks check it out because they think it could be the next "CODA."
"I can't control the fact that Apple did a great job marketing 'CODA' and it won best picture," he said. "I know that kind of does put a target on 'Cha Cha's' head. But it's all great. I can't believe so many people are going to see this movie."
