The oddity of grief is a subject well-explored by See You Once I See You, written by Cayton-Holland, directed by indie legend Jay Duplass, and starring ascendent actor/director Cooper Raiff because the Cayton-Holland insert character “Aaron Whistler.” The movie, which screened on the 2026 SXSW Movie Competition & TV Competition this March, is predicated on the occasions of Cayton-Holland’s life and particulars Aaron’s wrestle to return to phrases with the dying of his youthful sister Leah (Kaitlyn Dever) through substance abuse, experiments with remedy, and sure, a wholesome dose of early aughts rock music.
After Cayton-Holland first recounted his painful, private story within the touching 2018 guide Tragedy Plus Time: A Tragi-Comedian Memoir, he noticed writing a screenplay as a approach to additional articulate his expertise.
“I used to be processing lots of the ache within the writing of the memoir,” he says. “I didn’t sit down to put in writing it as a result of I had my ideas gathered; I gathered ideas whereas writing it. Seeing the response to the memoir, figuring out how private the story was, however how common the themes have been and the way individuals reacted to it, I believed extra about ‘what’s a approach to inform this that everybody can relate to whereas retaining my true story?’ That helped put it on the display.”
The ensuing script drew the eye of producers Kumail Nanjiani, Emily V. Gordon, and Jay Duplass, the final of whom simply so occurred to be seeking to get again within the director’s chair after spending a lot of the earlier decade shepherding different artists’ visions as a producer.
“It’s simply heartfelt and humorous, which is form of what I’ve been doing my entire life,” Duplass says. “Clearly these previous few years I’ve been opening as much as different individuals’s tales. This one is actually like the most important, purest, most emotionally unwieldy story but in addition tremendous humorous. I felt like I couldn’t say no.”
It additionally acquired a significant buy-in from Raiff, himself a director of be aware (Cha Cha Actual Easy) who doesn’t all the time love performing however was keen to make an exception upon studying Cayton-Holland’s script.
