Back to school
Director Michael Lehmann and writer Daniel Waters on the enduring legacy of Heathers
IT IS ENTIRELY fitting that Heathers, a movie about school misfits and toxic cliques, was slow to make friends. When it was released in 1988 it was liked by a passionate few but broadly ignored. Three decades on, it’s an undisputed classic of the genre, the star pupil that set the template for almost every teen movie that followed, from Clueless to Mean Girls. Its writer, Daniel Waters, and director, Michael Lehmann, look back on three decades of learning the hard way.
The First Day
Heathers was a misfit from the day it was conceived. Waters imagined it as “a teen movie for Stanley Kubrick, because he loved genre and he’d never done teen”. He wrote a screenplay that focused on Veronica, part of the popular crowd, who hates her friends. A new boy in school catches her eye and leads her down a path of murdering the school’s most douchey pupils and making it look like suicide. They make topping yourself the hottest trend. It never reached Kubrick’s desk, but instead landed, heavily, in the lap of first-time director Michael Lehmann.
“The original draft was maybe as long as 250 pages,” remembers Lehmann, “It was sprawling, but it was laugh-outloud funny.” And it had a voice like nothing that had come before it. “This was at a time when John Hughes movies were popular and people thought those movies showed how teenagers really spoke. This was way ahead of that.” With a cast of soon-to-be stars — Winona Ryder, Christian Slater, Shannen Doherty — Lehmann knew he had something good from day one. “Our first days were spent shooting the croquet scene, with all the Heathers and Veronica,” he says. “Everyone was nervous, but I knew from that moment that we were [getting it right].”
The Big exam
It would take a while longer for everyone else to see what Lehmann saw. The movie made just $177,247 in its opening weekend, and grossed a total of
$1.1 million in the States. In the year when Dead Poets Society became a monster hit, audiences apparently preferred their classroom-based entertainment a bit more on the wholesome side. “Heathers was released in a ton of theatres in LA, which was stupid,” says Waters, “but only a couple in New York, where it sold out every showing. I didn’t come out of opening weekend thinking it was a disaster. People were talking about it.” They started to talk about it more loudly when it hit VHS and its following ballooned. “People who worked in video rental stores, if they liked it, they’d put it in their ‘cult picks’,” says Lehmann. “It grew from there.”
Three decades on, and Heathers’ popularity is, if anything, increasing. “It’s still crazy,” says Waters, “I love Heathers, but it’s not the greatest movie ever made. Try telling that to certain people under 30. They think it’s Casablanca or Doctor Strangelove. Who am I to argue?”
The New Class
Waters sees Heathers’ influence in the dialogue of Joss Whedon and Kevin Williamson, and in Mean Girls (directed by his brother, Mark), but you could draw a line to the likes of Easy A, Juno, even Lady Bird or Love Simon.
The film’s themes of school violence and teenage disenfranchisement remain distressingly relevant. “In a way, the