It's a pleasantly startling moment when Emily Ratajkowski starts singing Chuck Berry, mid-interview, in the Ace Hotel. "It was a teenage wedding," she chants, dropping her voice to a lower bravado-worthy register, "and old folks wished them well..."
Hearing any glossy new actress reviving a 1964 radio hit for an impromptu live performance would be funny. This moment has an especially nice dash of irony, though, as the movie Ratajkowski is bolstering, We Are Your Friends, is known colloquially as "the EDM movie" or "the Zac Efron EDM movie."
In We Are Your Friends, Ratajkowski plays a go-between for Zac Efron's ambitious young Cole, a struggling laptop DJ in the San Fernando Valley, and James, a successful "sell-out" DJ jet-setting between fancy locations. The movie's soundtrack hinges on the Justice-Simian song of the same title; it's about killer tracks and friendship.
Now Ratajkowski (all limbs and beaming smile) is singing her preferred track next to the director Max Joseph (all silver hair and enthusiasm). Both are buzzing, ready to quote lyrics and list influential songs for their process, electronic or not.
But back to Chuck Berry, whose boppy enthusiasm was used for one of the happiest, most expressive sequences in the movie. "It was kind of the opposite of EDM," she says, "In some ways, I loved that."
Joseph hops in: "I tried to get them to listen to Donna Summer, 'I Feel Love.' They were both dancing to it and they were like, Max, this is just not doing it for us." Ratajkowski shakes her head and makes a case for Berry.
"We had talked about the Pulp Fiction dance scene and we just thought: This is the vibe." Nostalgia for a '90s scene that was all about nostalgia for the '50s: Welcome to 2015. Everything's a remix.