Does EDM Get A Bad Rap? An Interview With ‘We Are Your Friends’ Director Max Joseph

It’s a big ask to make people interested in electronic dance music (EDM) when they’re not on a sweaty dancefloor — but this is exactly what director Max Joseph has set out to do in We Are Your Friends.

Known best as the co-host and cameraman of Catfish, Joseph has used his first feature film to explore the life of 23-year-old Cole Carter (Zac Efron) as he tries to make it big as a DJ in Los Angeles — a strange decision coming from someone who’s more accustomed to struggling behind a camera rather than a deck.

“As someone who’s been trying to make it for the last ten or twelve years in Los Angeles, it takes certain life experiences to make you realise that your own experience is enough to pull from — and in fact, that’s what makes you unique,” he tells me.

Perhaps as a result, the film takes a broad approach. It explores artistic growth, as Cole moves away from the mindless imitation of his favourite musicians to a better understanding of his own artistry. It explores mentorship, as Cole struggles with a misanthropic older DJ who helps him (played by stand-out Wes Bentley). It has forbidden love, as he’s drawn to the mentor’s girlfriend (Emily Ratajkowski), and it revolves around friendship.

In this sense, We Are Your Friends may be too ambitious — trying to cram too much sentiment into too short a blockbuster. But it at least achieves what it initially set itself up for: to make a film about the music.

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“Dance Music Is The Soundtrack Of Right Now”

EDM has become a bit of a swear word for the more electronically-snobbish among us. For some, the buzzword is synonymous with formulaic and unimaginative commercial anthems that forego artistry in favour of cheap drops.

Joseph is more forgiving. In We Are Your Friends, he embraces the unabashed party vibes of the divisive music like Avicii enveloping a crowd with his Christ-like wingspan. He reminds us that EDM not only denotes a popular subgenre that encompasses artists like Calvin Harris and David Guetta, but that it can also be an umbrella term for the many different types of electronic music in general (techno, house, etc) — a broad scope he felt was essential to the film.

“The story of the young adult coming into their own and finding their way into the world is always best set to the music of that moment, and I really think that dance music is the soundtrack of right now,” he says. “We didn’t want to just focus on one genre … We wanted to create a balance of everything.”

As a result, the soundtrack of We Are Your Friends is a bit bizarre: ranging from the titular Justice v. Simian song to tracks by Hayden James, Holy Ghost!, The Rapture, Dillon Francis and Will Sparks.

“At first I wanted this movie to be an excuse to put in all my favourite electronic music, but then you have to be true and authentic to who [the characters] are and what they would be listening to,” says Joseph. “One of my favourite tracks is actually the ‘Sister Saviour’ dub which Zac plays at the pool party, but DFA [the label that produced the song] also has a very New York, almost European sound to it which didn’t always mesh with the Southern California early-20-something, festival-going vibe which is where these guys are coming from — so we also wanted to be really authentic to the world that they’re from.”

These (perhaps conflicting) ideas are all woven through the life of the doe-eyed DJ protagonist, and shot wonderfully. Though there’s cringe — at one point he’s encouraged to access the true artistry of music production by “listening to the world around him” — it’s made surprisingly entertaining with attempted insight into the craft itself. At one point, Cole runs us through the different beats per minute that one needs to cycle through to get the party going, and it’s scenes like this — so unabashed and unaware — that give the audience that so-bad-it’s-good, hate-watch fodder they may have been hoping for when it set out to see a movie about EDM.

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Is There A Bigger Point Here?

With this confusion about the music itself, the film is perhaps less about EDM than it is the culture around it — one which is often criticised as mindless or shallow. Directly opposed to this, We Are Your Friends has high emotional hopes — but it struggles to reach them. There is a tragic familial backstory for Cole that gets hinted at but never revealed, a dramatic but poorly built-up death, and a vague sense of socioeconomic disadvantage. Sometimes relatable, sometimes laughable, We Are Your Friends collects the pieces of a traumatic profile in the hopes of attaching us to its largely vacant protagonist, but ends up mashing them together to create a lumpy whole, not dissimilar to a rushed jigsaw puzzle.

While the ambition might have been too far-reaching, it’s not entirely lost — the soundtrack draws you in to the narrative despite its lack of depth, and it’s hard to resist rooting for Cole (who isn’t completely devoid of growth) graduating from an obsession with his ‘one track’ to a deeper respect for his craft.

“Where the movie begins — and even where Zac’s character begins — there is this feeling that it’s easy because ‘I can do it on my computer, and all I need is one track and then I can be living the life’,” Joseph says. “But if you want to be an artist and make something that means something to yourself and other people, you have to dig deep and find something inside yourself that you then express through the medium.”

“One thing I really wanted from the movie was to illustrate how artful it really is — how artful a DJ set is. I hope that people come away from it who might have judged EDM as something frivolous or simple, and feel like they get what goes into it, and how complex and artful it can be.”

All of this begs the question: is there any point in intellectualising something that deals in the commercial realm of EDM? To me, those festival anthems aren’t made to be dissected — they’re made to be danced to and enjoyed in the small hours of the morning when you forget your pretence and fist-pump to a Calvin Harris song.

Appropriately, We Are Your Friends can be enjoyed in the same vein. When you scrutinise it too hard, the film will fall apart, but with a little mental disassociation, it becomes a fun and bright revelry: an ode to growing up on dancefloors.

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We Are Your Friends is in cinemas now. You can read our full review here.

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Ali Schnabel is a writer and film critic from Melbourne who has written for theMusic, Overland, 4:3 and various literary magazines that live under the PS3 controllers at her dad’s place. She tweets @alivonschnabel.