The language of cinema
Bo Burnham made this, like, incredible, um, movie
When I meet Bo Burnham, the writer/director whose first feature, Eighth Grade, follows young Kayla (Elsie Fisher) through the final week of Grade 8, I want to compliment him on the natural, halting speech patterns of his characters, so different from most films.
But here’s what I end up saying: “That struck me from – from the get-go, that a lot of times in movies, uh, the kids speak in – in ways that adults sort of – adults remember the – the way they wish that they spoke when they were younger, and then that happens in the movie!”
Burnham’s reply: “You – you – you know what? You can never remember yesterday, you wished – you can – you can just remember the way you just spoke. Like truly. But but but no, but I – people are very surpri– like – I don’t think people realize – we realize how inarticulate we actually are in our – in our normal lives.”
It’s true!
It’s also why journalists never quote their subjects (or themselves) verbatim. But you’ll hear a version of this kind of stumbling speech dribble from the lips of Kayla and her contemporaries in Eighth Grade, starting with the self-help videos she cranks out on topics that weigh on her young mind; things like being yourself, and putting yourself out there.
“If social media is so much a performance, it’s very important to portray the failure of that performance,” says Burnham. “And that starts with thought.” Kayla and her friends are full of deep thoughts, but putting them into words can be excruciatingly difficult, and twice as hard when you have a crush on the listener.
Burnham watched a lot of videos of 13-year-olds, and consulted others offline, while writing the screenplay for Eighth Grade. But the 27-yearold director also had his own experience to draw from; as a teenager, he wrote satirical songs – think Weird Al with lyrics by George Carlin – and posted them to YouTube, which was then brand new. The exposure led to his first career as a standup comic.
Eighth Grade is a very different beast from Burnham’s standup, which you can (and should!) watch on Netflix. In the latest, called Make Happy Tour, he roams the stage, spouting carefully crafted non-sequiturs, like a young Steve Martin. He may seem to stumble, only to have it lead into a song about that very “mistake.”
The “um, like, er”-filled screenplay for Eighth Grade was just as carefully constructed, but to different ends. “I was tired of the tricks I had used ... cleverness and irony and satire and taking things down by sort of dissecting them,” he says.
“I was much more interested in exploring something from the inside by being inarticulate. In standup I presented things that I had figured out. I was interested in presenting things I was struggling with. Not only that, but to present the process of struggling, the process of trying to articulate something.”
Giving life to that writing was Fisher, who had herself just finished Grade 8 a few months before filming began. You may not recognize her face, but she has been the voice of Agnes, youngest of the three orphaned sisters in the Despicable Me movies.
“I found a clip of her being interviewed,” Burnham remembers. “And I was like, ‘The vibe of this is so right.’” Nevertheless, he screen-tested her seven times before committing, “to make sure she could deliver day after day.” But it soon became clear: “The thing was alive when she was doing it, and it was just pages being read by people when it was anyone else.”
Burnham worried constantly whether he was doing justice to the character; here was the inner life of a 13-yearold girl as imagined by a 23-year-old man – he wrote the first draft in 2014 – in a movie where kids define a “generation gap” as five years. (One scene in Eighth Grade shows high schoolers amazed that Kayla has had Snapchat since Grade 5.)
“That was the fear all the time but then I also had to go, this is resonating with me ... I feel connected to it. I just tried to be sensitive and honest and communicative and collaborate with the women around me and make sure I wasn’t being irresponsible. But I was very aware what I was doing, that I was on thin ice.”
Burnham speaks eloquently about “the deep questions that we all have access to,” whether as an eighth grader, her Gen-X father – Josh Hamilton shines in the role of Kayla’s well-meaning single dad – or someone in between, like Burnham himself.
“I’m an anxious person; it’s about my anxieties,” he says of Eighth Grade. “I relate to it very personally. I don’t relate to it circumstantially personally; I relate to it emotionally personally.”
He’s put standup on hold for now, and isn’t sure he’ll go back to it, since he suffers from stage fright and worries he’s run out of material. But “I’d love to make another movie if I can. I’ll have to come up with another idea. But this was the most enjoyable thing I’ve ever done in my life, for sure, making this movie.” Tellingly, there isn’t one pause or stumble in those words.