Kyle Mooney on his directorial debut film, ‘Y2K’

Go back to 1999 with Kyle Mooney‘s new film, Y2K.

The A24 release, which arrives in theaters on Friday, is Mooney’s directorial debut. He told ABC Audio the actual Y2K was kind of a letdown, but he “was sort of kind of minorly obsessed with it.”

The phenomenon “always was in the back of my head,” Mooney said. “One day, New Year’s Day 2019, I had the small seed of an idea of this movie about teenagers who go to a high school party and Y2K actually happens.”

From that seed of an idea the film was born. Mooney wrote it with his collaborator Evan Winter, who was just as excited as he was to bring their adolescence to the big screen.

“I think the premise of our movie feels like such a sort of obvious idea. It’s sort of surprising that nobody’s done this. Nobody’s explored Y2K and that sort of alternate history where things do go bad,” Mooney said. “There’s not a ton of stuff where you get to see 1999, 2000 era in the movies. So it was fun for us to relive that.”

Did this disaster comedy come from Mooney’s actual real-life fears about what would happen on Y2K? Perhaps subconsciously, he said.

“My mom, I remember she was a little fearful. She bought a bunch of jugs of water and some Kudos bars and stuffed them in the pantry just in case anything awful went down,” Mooney said. He imagined “maybe the supermarkets would be closed for a day or something like that.”

“And then when nothing happened, it was like kind of life goes on,” Mooney said. “I was probably just trying to, you know, instant message my crush or whatever.”