Dallas Native Cooper Raiff Unpacks His Poetic New Series Hal & Harper

Cooper Raiff has a unique gift for bottling the lightning of human emotion. The Dallas-native filmmaker, known for his Sundance-winning features, Cha Cha Real Smooth and Shithouse, crafts stories that feel less like movies and more like memories you’ve lived. His work is a delicate balance of heartache and humor, capturing the messy, beautiful and often unspoken truths of growing up, falling in love and finding your place. Now, he returns with his most ambitious project yet, an eight-episode indie television series titled Hal & Harper.

After a celebrated premiere at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, the series was acquired by the streaming service MUBI. The story follows siblings Hal (Raiff) and Harper (Lili Reinhart) as they navigate a sprawling family history marked by abandonment, fear and a fierce, protective love. The series also stars Mark Ruffalo as their father, alongside Betty Gilpin and Addison Timlin. It’s a project that Raiff has been nurturing for years, a deeply personal and poetic exploration of how families heal—or try to.

Before the series found its home, the Dallas Observer spoke with Raiff about the challenging journey of bringing this intimate epic to the screen. He opened up about the painstaking editing process, the weight of storytelling and how his Dallas roots continue to find their way into his art, from a character’s Greenhill School shirt in a previous film to a timely mention of a certain former Mavericks superstar.

The process of creating Hal & Harper was, by Raiff’s own admission, an arduous one. He speaks of the project with a mix of exhaustion and profound affection, like “a parent who has poured everything into raising a child.” The story of Hal & Harper, he explains, has been with him for a long time, predating his other acclaimed films.

“[The characters Hal and Harper] literally came out of nowhere so long ago,” Raiff tells us. “For so long, I have been trying to tell their story. And it’s been so challenging to do that, even though it feels like it should have been so simple.”

The challenge wasn’t just in writing the sprawling narrative but in fighting for it at every turn, too. From securing a modest budget to navigating the bewildering conversations around selling the show, the experience tested his resolve. 

“It makes you want to hang it up and go make Superman or whatever,” he admits with a weary laugh. The struggle mirrors a lyric from an Alex G song he quotes: “How many more songs am I supposed to write before I should turn it off and say goodnight?”

Initially conceived as a 10-episode series, Raiff made the difficult decision to cut it down to eight after early screenings. He found that the longer format, while filled with scenes he loved, diluted the story’s core themes of fear, love and abandonment.

“Every scene in this thing is about being in fear versus being in love,” he explains. “It’s about abandonment and being guarded, or [the idea of] who are you safe with and when are you unsafe?”

When early viewers asked, “Why do I care about this family?” Raiff was taken aback. For him, the question itself felt foreign.

“That’s not the question I ever ask when I’m watching something,” he says. “I’m usually watching things, and I’m feeling the nod of the creator to feel like I’m safe, and this person’s trying to tell me something.”

The feedback forced him to condense the story, to sharpen its focus not on if we should care, but on the emotional mechanics of why we do. He trimmed away beautiful, lived-in moments to better connect the parallel emotional journeys of his characters. The result is a more potent, focused narrative that drops the audience directly into the family’s unusual and unhealthy closeness, unraveling it piece by piece. The editing became a tool to guide the viewer, to ensure the emotional stakes were undeniable. 

“The editing was my way of [saying] this stuff is really hard for them, and it’s serious,” Raiff says.

This process of “killing your darlings” is a painful but necessary part of filmmaking. Raiff describes cutting scenes he was obsessed with, like a five-minute opening that beautifully established the relationship between the father (Ruffalo) and his girlfriend, Kate (Gilpin).

“I would have loved for people to have seen it,” he says wistfully. “But it was taking away from all this other stuff. And at the end of the day, you tell yourself, ‘I’ll put this in something else.’ It’s really easy to not be precious at this point. It was hard at the beginning, but it’s not anymore.”

What remains are the moments that serve the story’s deepest truths, even the small ones. He points to a fleeting scene where Harper sniffs her ex-girlfriend Jesse’s hair during a hug.

“I needed that,” he insists. “You needed to know that it wasn’t just, ‘Oh, I love this person.’ It’s like, to lose this person is to lose so much.”

Moments that punctuate small, sensory details like that pay off later in the series, giving emotional weight to a future line of dialogue. These carefully chosen moments create the show’s rich, emotional tapestry.

Though the series is set in Los Angeles, Raiff’s Dallas identity remains a subtle but constant presence in his work. In Cha Cha Real Smooth, his character sported a Highland Park Cheerleading sweater, a nod to his Greenhill School alma mater’s rival. In Hal & Harper, the Dallas connection comes via basketball. In the pilot, a character suggests a move.

“We should go to Dallas,” she says. “They have that white boy.”

Of course, the “white boy” is Luka Dončić. The line was written and filmed before Dončić was traded, a twist of fate that adds a layer of unexpected comedy.

“It’s, like, almost too perfect,” Raiff tells us with a laugh, noting the city’s electric energy around the Mavericks star. “Have you felt it in the city, in the air?” he asks, genuinely curious about the vibe back home. It’s a small moment, but it showcases how Raiff weaves pieces of his own world into his fiction, grounding his stories with authentic details.

Ultimately, Hal & Harper is a profound meditation on parenthood and the near-impossible task of raising children while grappling with one’s own unresolved trauma. Raiff, who is not a father himself but is surrounded by it, approaches the subject with immense compassion. He believes that while a parent’s job is to provide unconditional love and to truly hear their child, it’s also vital to acknowledge the parent’s own life, their own set of heartbreaks and disappointments.

The series gives Ruffalo’s character the space to “really watch him and feel for him and hear his feelings,” Raiff says. But it is also “unflinching about the effects.” The story becomes a journey of a man realizing his own failings, not with shame, but with a sense of calling.

“He’s finally in this moment, and it’s not a sad realization,” Raiff explains of the character’s arc. “It’s this amazing calling where he realizes, ‘Oh, I wasn’t a dad. I just wasn’t a dad.’”

This complex emotional maturity is a hallmark of Raiff’s storytelling. He creates characters who operate from what he calls a “higher self place,” an egoless state of trust and love. He points to Gilpin’s character, Kate, as the embodiment of this. Her unwavering trust in Ruffalo’s character, despite his flaws, empowers him to finally grow.

“To see it is, to me, the reason why I wanted to be a filmmaker,” Raiff concludes. “To show what it is to be without that ego and to be without that fear.”

With Hal & Harper, Cooper Raiff has once again shown his mastery of emotional nuance, creating a world that is both heartbreaking and hopeful. It’s a story about the words we’re afraid to say and the healing that begins when we finally say them.The first two episodes of Hal & Harper premiere on MUBI on Oct. 19, with new episodes releasing weekly on Sundays through Nov. 30.