EIGHTH GRADE
The best coming-of-age movie of the social media age? #youbetcha #gucci
Real, relevant and riotously funny, Eighth Grade is the first great coming-of-age movie for the Instagram era, and a launchpad for two exciting new voices in American filmmaking. But, you know, NBD. Total Film gets schooled by writer/director Bo Burnham and the film’s breakout star Elsie Fisher.
My approach to the movie was, ‘I’m going to make The Wrestler for a 13-year-old girl,’” chuckles Bo Burnham, the debut writer/director behind Eighth Grade
– one of the finest films you’ll see this year, and the best coming-of-ager since Boyhood. Burnham may be best known as a comedian, but he isn’t joking (well, maybe a little). As seen through the eyes of Elsie Fisher’s Kayla Day, a student struggling through her last week of classes before graduating to high school, it’s an agonisingly authentic dispatch from the frontlines of contemporary American middle
school that treats the teenage experience with a gravity and empathy that’s not often seen on screen.
“Even though it is a coming-of-age movie, the impulse was: ‘I’m going to take her experience incredibly seriously,’” Burnham tells Total Film in late December, 2018. A few weeks later he will win the Writer’s Guild of America Award for Best Original Screenplay, besting Oscar heavyweights Roma, Vice and Green Book – just recognition for a film criminally overlooked by the Academy Awards. “We’re not going, ‘This is Fast Times At
Ridgemont High.’ We’re taking it as seriously as if it’s Saving Private Ryan.”
Simply put, Eighth Grade is far from your average high-school movie. For starters, it’s set in middle school (which American children attend from the age of six to 13). And, for once, it isn’t taking its cues from John Hughes. Ask Bo Burnham what his favourite comingof-age movies are and he cites Billy Madison and David Gordon Green’s George Washington before The Breakfast Club or Ferris Bueller. Nostalgia isn’t in the mix, either. This is a film that’s as blisteringly up to date as the fast-moving world of social media will allow. A hyper-specific snapshot of school life in the early 21st Century it may be, but the true brilliance of Eighth Grade is that its emotions and themes will resonate with men and women of almost any age.
Most notably, it’s a film about anxiety. Burnham found fame young. He was among the first wave of viral YouTubers in the mid-2000s, expanding into comedy albums and stand-up, all before he was 20. But performing for audiences of millions from his bedroom had consequences. His anxiety led to stomach problems that required hospitalisation. During a later live tour, he would experience panic attacks mid-performance while thousands watched, oblivious. In Eighth Grade, we’re introduced to Kayla recording the latest self-help video for her YouTube channel. She is confident, charismatic and well-informed. But in public her anxiety is so debilitating that she’s rather amusingly awarded ‘Most Quiet’ student during her school’s somewhat cruel end of term awards.
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Burnham, in part, set out to explore his own mental health with Eighth Grade, but it would be inaccurate to describe the film as autobiographical. Instead he’s made a defining document for the post-Snapchat Instagram age, where children’s ‘real’ lives are inextricably linked to their online presence, exploring how this affects the mental health of teenagers, relationships with their parents, and related issues surrounding sexuality and consent. But the question is: how did Burnham – the 28-year-old son of a construction worker and a hospice nurse with no children of his own – make a film that feels achingly honest to the experience of a contemporary 13-year-old girl?
“You use actual kids!” laughs Burnham, a not-so-subtle dig at the never-ending succession of high-school movies that try to pass off twentysomethings as teens. Burnham is downplaying his role here. An astute observer, he mined a resource that has gone bafflingly underutilised to date: YouTube. “If you want to know anything about this generation, they’re expressing everything about themselves online, all the time.” As Burnham explains, the script was written “mostly by trying to listen, and getting familiar with the way [kids] spoke and felt”. Including the unscripted, rambling quality that most off-the-cuff vlogs possess. “It was so unfiltered and raw and true. And it was just structure-less, because they’re just kids filming themselves,” Burnham recalls. “So it felt like, ‘Can I take the vibe and feel and honesty, and transfer this to a feature?’”
Influencers with subscriber bases in the millions and Insta models dominate the social media conversation, but Burnham specifically sought YouTubers putting themselves out there to audiences of single digits because “that’s most of what’s on the internet”. And the same is true of Kayla, whose videos rarely get views that can be counted on two hands. “That doesn’t
Bo Burnham ‘We’re taking it as seriously as if it’s saving Private ryan’
make it sad. It’s a beautiful thing to express yourself,” Burnham rhapsodises. “I’ve always found the common experience of the internet way more compelling than the lottery winners, that we, as a culture, only talk about.”
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Casting a young actress as emotionally empathetic as Fisher (she has been vocal about her own experience with anxiety online) paid dividends. For one, she was the only barometer of authenticity Burnham would need. Talking to
Total Film in early February, the now 15-year-old Golden Globe nominee no longer knows where Elsie ends and Kayla begins. “Bo did a lot of little stuff to make it feel like it was my own life,” recalls Fisher. “A lot of Kayla’s room is inspired by my own interests. She has some drawings, and those are my actual drawings.” But the connections went deeper than decorations. “I had the freedom to bring whatever I wanted to the character. [Bo] would definitely ask me a lot if it felt right, and ‘is this good?’ Then if something wasn’t clicking, and I couldn’t put my finger on it, he would find a way to make it feel more realistic.”
As should be clear, Fisher wasn’t just a conduit for Burnham’s writing. Having just been through eighth grade herself at the time of filming, she provided valuable insight into what life is like for a girl her age. “She’s authoring every moment by living it,” Burnham explains. “But one specific example is that, in the script, all of her messages were on Facebook, and she told me, ‘No one uses Facebook anymore.’ So I put that line in the film [Instagram is the current social media messaging service of choice, if you’re wondering]. But part of it was trying to understand her, and not trying to look at her anthropologically.”
Burnham had no particular desire to become a filmmaker before Eighth Grade. In 2008, Judd Apatow was set to produce a comedy co-written by the then 18-year-old that would be the “anti-High School Musical”. It fell apart. As did Burnham’s short-lived MTV show Zach Stone Is Gonna Be Famous. Burnham went back to stand-up, and started directing specials for the likes of Chris Rock. But it was the writing process that convinced him he had a story requiring the feature film treatment. “The first thing I wrote was the ‘being yourself’ opening monologue,” he recalls. “It felt really alive. And I was interested to see what this character was like in the real world, and the ways in which she’s different or similar. The videos were there right away. That was always the dynamic.”
The opening monologue, shot on grainy webcam-o-vision – one of several such interludes – was all Fisher had to go on for her audition. Though she was aware of Burnham from YouTube and “loved his comedy”, she knew little about Kayla or the film Burnham intended to make. “I went into this audition a little blind because the only thing I had was Kayla’s first little opening monologue – which is kind of a confusing thing,” says Fisher, who’s every bit as sincerely delightful as Kayla in conversation. “But I fell in love with the way she spoke. I really saw a lot of myself in that, because I’ve struggled to articulate sometimes, too. From there, I went to a couple more auditions, and then eventually I got the darn job!”