Director drew on standup “panic”
The man behind “Eighth Grade” at Q&As in Denver
Now in theaters, “Eighth Grade” charts a few fraught weeks in the life of a graduating middle schooler played spectacularly well by Elsie Fisher. The film’s writer and director, Bo Burnham, had zero experience as a female adolescent. But “what the film’s about, really,” Burnham says, “if I had to be honest, is how I felt like her when I was on the road doing standup.”
Within the same 20 seconds, Burnham describes the traveling comedian’s life as “miserable” and then, more generously, “50 percent fulfilling and 50 percent terrifying.” Either way, he says, “getting laughs every 10 seconds made me anxious. I really did feel like Kayla in ‘Eighth Grade.’ I was backstage at the Vic (in Chicago) having a panic attack, instead of being at a pool party, but I was just like her, telling myself: ‘OK, pretend to be confident.’ My anxiety renders me young and helpless. That’s why I felt like I could relate to the 13year-old in the movie.”
Burnham, who turns 28 next month, made “Eighth Grade” in 29 days, a fairly generous shoot by contemporary low-budget indie standards. But they were
shorter-than-average shooting days (nine hours per), as legally required by a cast made up largely of minors. Fisher’s Kayla leads the ensemble, which includes many other young professionals in addition to an array of day players and day-player extras new to professional moviemaking but not new to a camera.
Most films, Burnham notes, focusing on teenage or preteen performers feature individual camera set-ups “rarely more than 10 seconds in length, since you’re cutting around the child performers so much. But with Elsie, anything was possible.” An early, tense dinner scene between Fisher and her dad (Josh Hamilton) was designed initially for a few short setups. “But they carried the scene together, in the frame, so beautifully for more than two minutes,” he says. “I always prefer seeing actors actually working together in real time.”
Burnham notes also the film’s interest in lots of slow zooms, an “underutilized” shot, he feels. “It was our way of playing against the flatness of all the screens in the character’s lives and making that into some sort of visual idea.”
A later scene finds Kayla slyly coerced by an older boy, in the back seat of a car, into an uneasy game of Truth or Dare. “We had 2½ to film it, the whole thing,” Burnham recalls. The director was surprised at the intensity of the final version, and though he worked hard to avoid any after-school-special clichés or didactic impulses with “Eighth Grade,” Burnham appreciates how the sequence reminds the audience that sometimes it’s the “sensitive, quiet boys” who end up manipulating situations like this. Or trying to.
When Burnham was in eighth grade, what was he like? “A hammy loser, you know. I wasn’t as internalized as Kayla. It wasn’t until sophomore year of high school when I started to turn into myself.” His standup comedy success, virally and in real life, came early, shaping his sensibility and making him famous. Now, he says, “I feel like an elder of the internet generation, and all of my expertise has led me to complete confusion. Which is right in sync with this entire cultural moment.”
The movie isn’t primarily about Kayla’s online personae, but the theme of the digital maw is always there. “When this generation grows up and becomes social scientists, I’ll be very interested in reading their dissertations on the subject. Until then, we just need to take emotional inventory about what’s happening. We haven’t really even properly described what the internet is doing to us and how it makes people feel. It makes me, and a lot of other people, uncomfortable, anxious. Or at least it interacts with our anxiety.”
Now that “Eighth Grade” has graduated to theatrical release, Burnham is “taking time to read and watch things, do a little writing on the side. There’s this other script I wrote when I was 21 that’s getting going at Paramount.” Amy York Rubin will direct. “I don’t know. More should probably be happening, but I need a few months to think of ideas. I’m not really great at a huge amount of multitasking. And reading a lot helps me write.”
For 10 years, he says, he toured his standup shows, roughly two years per show. “With filmmaking there are many rough days, and so much stress. But performing standup live was true anxiety. I now know the difference between stress and panic is night and day. And I know that I can fully enjoy the process of making a movie. It’s not all on you; it’s collaborative.”