Bo Burnham gets teens right in ‘Eighth Grade’
Bo Burnham has been a stand-up comic, actor, YouTube personality, writer and director.
One thing he hasn’t been is an eighthgrade girl. But to see “Eighth Grade,” Burnham’s feature debut as a writer and director, you’d never know it. The film stars Elsie Fisher as Kayla, a girl suffering through the last week of eighth grade — and yes, “suffer” is the right word. It’s not some sort of dystopian-future kind of torture, it’s just the everyday torture of transitioning between junior high and high school, and Burnham captures it perfectly.
“It’s just having an ear and an eye,” Burnham, probably best known as one of Kumail Nanjiani’s stand-up comic friends in “The Big Sick,” said in an interview. “It’s all there. The kids all have it emanating from themselves just effortlessly, so my job was just to shut up and get out of the way, and recognize when things were right and natural and true, and cultivate it ... I told all the actors, all the young actors, this movie is coming to you, not the other way around.”
That comes through in the film — the kids talk about things kids talk about. And, this being 2018, they do it in the most-public manner possible. Kayla is a dedicated YouTuber, even though many
of her videos only get one or two views. Perhaps that’s not surprising, given Burnham’s experience with online video. He also mined other experiences from his life for material.
“I think I worked from my relationship with my parents, specifically my mother,” Burnham said. “I was interested in talking about a type of parent-child relationship that was kind of built on the wonderful privilege of pure, open, selfless love that expresses itself pretty kindly, and showing there’s still conflict in that.”
In the film, Kayla’s father is raising her by himself (Josh Hamilton, like Fisher, is perfect.) It would have been easy to overdo the challenges in their relationship — her dad loves Kayla, but just as clearly doesn’t understand her completely — but here again, Burnham underplays it to great effect.
“There’s been a lot of movies about very fraught parent-child relationships that are more overtly troubling,” he said. “I kind of wanted to show a relationship that really is someone just sitting there being attentive and loving and wanting to help constantly still doesn’t work perfectly. That’s sort of what my mother was for me all through my childhood. And I was sort of like, ‘I wish you were paying a little less attention to me or loved me a little less, so that I didn’t feel like I was disappointing both of us every time I failed.’”
Burnham has said that he wrote the film for Fisher — even though he wrote it a couple of years before meeting her.
“It wasn’t even how I initially conceived her, because in the script it was all about how she was the smallest kid,” he said. “Elsie is like average height, which I think is actually more correct. She can kind of just disappear in a crowd. So it wasn’t what I thought. I thought it was some small girl with glasses or something. But she had the soul of it, which was much more important than any weird, stupid superficial image I had in my mind.”
So Fisher, in fact, changed the nature of the character, not just the appearance.
“The whole point is that her struggle is interior, it’s not exterior,” Burnham said. “It doesn’t matter that she’s short and she’s going to eventually grow. It’s not about that. Elsie just has a very vivid interior life, that I think she communicates very well and very subtly, in a way that just no other actors that age are able to do, in my opinion.”
He’s also tickled at the way the studio is promoting the film.
“What’s very cool is that A24 chose to bill her above the movie. Her name is right on the front of the poster, which I think is correct. You know, act like she’s a star already, because it feels like that. She feels so monumental to us that, even if people aren’t familiar with her, we think that they’ll be familiar with her once they see it. We’re billing her name like she’s Brad Pitt. I love it.”