You’re in for an awkward good time
Elsie Fisher is junior high in “Eight Grade.”
NEW YORK – Take it from Elsie Fisher: The movie “Eighth Grade” is a lot like the real thing.
The young actress started shooting the film a week after graduating from middle school, which made the ups and downs her insecure character, Kayla Day, endures in her last week of junior high all too relatable.
“Kayla’s experience is not actually autobiographical for me, but emotionally it is,” Fisher says. “It all felt very real. A lot of movies for kids by adults feel disingenuous.”
“Eighth Grade” (in theaters Friday in New York and Los Angeles, expanding nationwide throughout the summer) is written and directed by stand-up comedian Bo Burnham, who wanted to capture what it’s like to grow up in the social media age.
After seeing so many movies set in high school, “I wanted to talk about anxiety and what it feels like to be alive right now, and what it is to be unsure and nervous. That felt more like middle school than high school to me,” Burnham says. “I think the country and the culture is going through an eighth-grade moment right now.”
Burnham, 27, and Fisher, 15, break down some of the film’s most authentic and cringe-worthy aspects.
Fisher was shy at her audition.
Kayla appears in virtually every frame of the film as she anxiously navigates trying to talk to boys, make friends and keep the eye rolls to a minimum when her awkward but well-meaning father (Josh Hamilton) tries to have a conversation with her. More than 50 girls auditioned for the role, but Burnham was immediately drawn to Fisher, who had voiced youngest child Agnes in the “Despicable Me” movies. “She was the only one who felt like a shy kid pre- tending to be confident – everyone else felt like a confident kid pretending to be shy,” Burnham says. “Kayla is really performing all the time. She’s trying to be someone she’s not.”
Burnham didn’t hide her acne.
One of the most strikingly relatable parts of the film is Kayla’s acne, which glistens in the light from her laptop screen as she diligently watches makeup tutorials on YouTube. Burnham didn’t try to either accentuate or cover up Fisher’s real pimples during the shoot: “That’s just how I am,” says Fisher, whose skin has since cleared up. Adds Burnham: “Yeah, we were just like, ‘Whatever – it’s what kids have.’ ”
Those are actual middle-schoolers and teachers onscreen.
The film was shot on location at Suffern Middle School in Suffern, New York, using actual students and teach- ers as extras. “We got the school to leave up all their stuff – the art in the hallway was made by kids during that year,” Burnham says. Kayla’s “band teacher with the rat tail (haircut) was the school’s band teacher. That scene wasn’t even in the movie, but we scouted the (location), he showed me his tubas, I saw his rat tail and was like, ‘You’re in the movie.’ ”
Burnham watched YouTubers to learn how Gen Z talks.
Kayla often records exuberant selfhelp videos for her little-followed YouTube channel. Writing the film, Burnham dug deep into YouTube to transcribe and study actual advice videos by middle-schoolers, inserting “ums,” “likes” and pauses into the script. “I was just trying to capture the staccato way they spoke,” he says. “You’re watching someone try to articulate themselves and think out loud while their brains are still growing.” He also got some advice from Fisher, who had her own shortlived YouTube channel dedicated to the video game “Minecraft” back in sixth grade. “There’s still videos up on there,” she says. “It’s bad.”
All of the Instagram accounts in the movie are real.
For the many scenes of a glassy-eyed Kayla scrolling through her phone, Burnham was adamant about shooting her actual phone screen in real time. That meant the production team was tasked with creating dozens of Instagram accounts for Kayla and her classmates: uploading and “liking” posts for each one, and standing off-camera to send texts and direct messages whenever Kayla was corresponding with them. “Her interacting with the actual internet changes the scenes, emotionally and visually,” Burnham says. “I hate (in movies) when someone tweets and it just shows up in a bubble on screen. That feels so not real.”