‘Cha Cha Real Smooth:’ Cooper Raiff and Dakota Johnson Interview
- “Cha Cha Real Smooth” is a coming-of-age film starring Dakota Johnson and Cooper Raiff.
- Insider spoke with Johnson and Raiff about the movie, which hit Apple TV+ on June 17.
- Warning: Light spoilers ahead for “Cha Cha Real Smooth.”
“Cha Cha Real Smooth” takes its name from the most iconic part of DJ Casper’s “Cha Cha Slide,” an essential track in the party canon that’s all but guaranteed to bring anyone who can follow directions to the dance floor.
It’s fitting that getting people on the floor is the primary job of the film’s protagonist Andrew, played by 25-year-old writer-director-producer Cooper Raiff.
Twenty-two years old and fresh out of college, Andrew takes a job as a “party starter,” working the local New Jersey bat and bar mitzvah circuit while he attempts to figure out what to do with his life. After meeting Domino (Dakota Johnson), the mother of autistic teen Lola (newcomer Vanessa Burghardt), Andrew seemingly attempts to find himself through his relationship with them.
“Cha Cha Real Smooth” premiered in January at Sundance and sold to Apple for $15 million after a competitive bidding war among distributors including
and Amazon Studios. Produced by Dakota Johnson and her producing partner Ro Donnelly’s TeaTime Pictures, it’s Raiff’s second feature after his 2020 film “Shithouse.” After a run at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York earlier this month, “Cha Cha Real Smooth” hit Apple TV+ on June 17.
Insider spoke with Johnson and Raiff about producing the coming-of-age film, including Raiff’s reaction to meeting Johnson in person the first time and the movie’s defining shot.
Warning: Light spoilers ahead for “Cha Cha Real Smooth.”
Dakota, you produced this film in addition to starring in it. What about “Cha Cha Real Smooth” and working with Cooper as a producer really appealed to you from the get-go?
Dakota Johnson: I really appreciate the art of collaboration. I like to champion people and their ideas, like Cooper. And I really love being involved in making a movie from the very beginning to the very last breath. So I think “Cha Cha” just happened kinda organically —
Cooper Raiff: I came to you on my knees. I said, “Please make a movie with me.”
Johnson: Yeah, pretty much. He told me I was his favorite actress. And then we cast Leslie Mann in our movie and he told her that she was his favorite actress.
Raiff: That’s not true.
Johnson: Yeah it is, it’s on camera.
Raiff: I said one time, I was like, “Yeah, she’s my favorite actress.” And then everyone just decided to really run with it.
Johnson: That’s how he gets all the girls in those movies.
Cooper, you originally pitched Dakota’s producing partner Ro Donnelly on this as a concept, right? And then had to write an actual script in about a week. What was that process like?
Raiff: So I pitched an idea to Ro, and then Ro told Dakota something like…
Johnson: “I met this idiot.”
Raiff: “I met this idiot. You gotta meet him, see what an idiot he is.” And then I told them in the meeting with all three of us that I had a script.
Johnson: No, you didn’t.
Raiff: Yeah, I told you guys, I was like, “I have something that I’m working on.” You were like, “Okay, great, let’s see.”
Johnson: No, you did not.
Raiff: I was gonna go away and write something. I remember I gave you 50 pages.
Johnson: Yeah, but when we met, you didn’t have something. You had an idea.
Raiff: I didn’t have anything. Maybe you guys knew that I didn’t have an idea.
Johnson: He just said he had something. You’re lying.
Raiff: No no, I didn’t have an idea, but I had told you guys, I’d made it seem like I did have something. Remember, I sent you like 50 pages and I was like, “I don’t think the rest is good.” But I didn’t have the rest.
Johnson: You’re conflating the truth.
Raiff: But I did go away and I wrote 50 pages in one week and then I sent that to them. And then the next week after I wrote the next 50 of whatever pages, and I sent that to them. So I really wrote the script, the first draft of the script, in two weeks. It had a lot of work to be done.
Johnson: Then we worked on it for like eight months.
After going through that whole process of pitching and starting to collaborate, what was it actually like to meet in person for the first time?
Raiff: We met on
, it was really nice and lovely. And then we met in person and I looked like an idiot.
Johnson: Why?
Raiff: When I first met you, I acted super weird, do you remember that? You do remember, ’cause you described it as, it looked like I had never seen a human being before. So I met her in person and I immediately said something like, “I have to go to the bathroom.” And everyone was like, “OK.” And I looked in the mirror and I was like, “Pull yourself together.”
It was also right out of COVID and I wasn’t seeing a lot of people in person, right? And Dakota is really pretty.
Apple TV
Dakota, I also understand that you played a role in convincing Cooper to star in this film as well, and obviously you’ve collaborated across the course of this entire production both on and off screen. Was there any wisdom that you passed down to Cooper?
Raiff: Lots of wisdom exchanged.
Johnson: He’s so wise. I think from his first experience to his second experience, directing was very different. And perhaps he didn’t have people around him on the first one that really could have his back when he was on camera. And we really did when he was on “Cha Cha.” Also, you like, fully wrote Andrew for yourself.
Raiff: I did not, but it’s… I’m not a good writer. So when I write a 22-year-old, it sounds just like me and it’s the same sense of humor. Who else is going to have this dumb sense of humor? But I always like to write something and then someone comes in and really changes it. That’s what we did with every other character. But I think Andrew really didn’t evolve because I was playing it. He just kinda stayed the same dummy.
Vanessa Burghardt is wonderful in this movie, and she’s spoken about what it’s felt like to play, in her words, an autistic character who’s a “fully formed person.” What was front of mind for you when it came to writing an autistic character like Lola? Who did you consult with, and what role did Vanessa herself play?
Raiff: She played every role in it. What I say is that I don’t want to put the onus on her and be like, “Hey, can you write this for me?” But just talking to her, and the same thing with Dakota — having conversations with her and literally writing down what she says in those conversations into the script. And so they inform every part of it.
We had consultants at this place called Respect Ability and they were great to work with, but I had this extreme aversion at first when working with them. I remember we started having these conversations about who’s gonna be with the actor who’s playing Lola on set, when it comes time. I’m like, “We’re gonna ask her and her mom what’s gonna happen, and they’re gonna tell us.” It’s so easy to just have that be the intention. And I think there’s so much of, “Are we doing things the right way?”
Johnson: Just behave like it’s all normal, ’cause that’s what it is.
Apple TV
Dakota, one of your most intimate and tender scenes in this film occurs when Domino has a miscarriage while at a party. What was it like putting that sequence together and navigating that intimacy while shooting it?
Johnson: With situations like having a miscarriage, there are infinite possibilities for how someone can feel about that. So I feel like we had the opportunity to let silence speak for itself, to allow someone to have such extremely complicated feelings without having to spoon feed the information to the audience.
Raiff: I do remember one thing about that scene, when we were talking about filming it, was you just randomly had this vision of the shot of me on my knees. And that was a moment that really defines that scene. When I open the door, I’m just looking at her. It’s important to take your time. I remember that moment. That was just a really nice tableau.
Johnson: We were trying to shoot it at the end of the day really quickly. And they had already set up the rig in the bathroom stall and the side that they set it up on, the door swung open. And I was like, “No, we have to have the door swing inward because he has to lean on it so that it opens, like otherwise he would have opened the door and it wouldn’t have worked.” So we didn’t get to it that day. But it was absolutely vital that the door swung. Then we tried to undo the door and re-rig it so that it swung a different way, but it wasn’t gonna work.
Raiff: It’s the defining shot in my mind of the movie. Just like a kid realizing in the moment, this is not at all what I thought it was, with just the widest eyes. And then just growing up so much in just one second. And I think that is the plot of the movie.
This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
