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Burnham on set with the film's star Elsie Kate Fisher
© A24
Film
Bo Burnham on the rebirth of high-school cinema
The first-time director and writer of Eighth Grade on making the Saving Private Ryan of high-school movies.
Written by Tom Guise
8 min readPublished on
American Graffiti, Dazed and Confused, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Boyhood - the best high-school movies embody the growing pains of their generation. Now, the current class of teenagers has a coming-of-age film of its own: Eighth Grade. The debut feature from comedian-turned-director Bo Burnham, it tells the tale of Kayla Day (played by Elsie Fisher), a socially awkward 13-year-old New Yorker who reaches out to a likely audience of no one via her YouTube channel.
In the real world, however, her story has connected with audiences and critics alike. When it was screened at the Sundance London film festival last June, Eighth Grade won the Audience Favourite award; almost a year later, as it finally goes on general release in the UK, the movie has a 99 per cent Certified Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes from nearly 250 reviews.
Molly Ringwald, star of classic ’80s teen movies The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles and Pretty in Pink, tweeted that it was “the best film about adolescence I’ve seen... maybe ever”. Bo Burnham – born Robert Pickering Burnham in Hamilton, Massachusetts – could be considered the most unlikely creator of a film about today’s teen anxiety. At 28, he’s positively ancient by Gen-Z standards; when he was the age of his protagonist, YouTube didn’t even exist. Three years later, in 2006, he became one of the online platform’s first viral stars with his homemade music video My Whole Family Thinks I’m Gay, which went on to receive more than 10 million views.
Burnham calls Eighth Grade a film primarily about anxiety
Burnham calls Eighth Grade a film primarily about anxiety© A24
By 18, Burnham was the youngest comedian to earn a Comedy Central solo special, and filmmaker Judd Apatow approached him to pen a script pitched as the “anti-High School Musical”. It never materialised. “I was not ready to write a movie at 18,” he said of the moment. Almost a decade later, he finally was. Burnham, it turned out, was the perfect person to bring to screen the anxieties of the Snapchat generation. "My anxiety blossomed during my stand-up, not before. It was weird in that way,” he says. “The movie is primarily about anxiety – it was written in a crisis of anxiety. The emotions resonated with me, but the specifics weren’t my own; what attracted me to the film was that I hadn’t experienced it. People who have never been cowboys or astronauts are able to write about them. I explored my own feelings through another person, another story."
That story, perhaps unsurprisingly, was easy to research. “The thing about this generation is they’re posting everything about themselves online. I just looked at videos that kids blog about themselves. You learn a lot about what their life is like outside of it, and how they want the world to see them. That’s the truth of the moment for me: not who we worry we are, but who we want the world to see us as." How the world would see –and judge – Burnham’s film brought back some of that anxiety for him. “I’m a man making a movie about a young woman, so I was a little worried about that, but [the younger generation] seem to respond to it,” he says.
Ironically, this audience can’t watch the film at the cinema: the Motion Picture Association of America, notoriously prudish about adolescent drama, slapped it with an R rating, and here in the UK it’s been rated 15. “I’m curious what they’ll say when they look back on it five years from now, and whether they’ll recognise their experience,” says Burnham. “It’s a lot to process when you’re actually in eighth grade.” Likely they, and everyone else, will. “The movie, as much as it’s about the internet and anxiety, really ends up being about being 13,” says Burnham. “Your body is exploding, your mind is mashed potatoes, pool parties are the worst. You’re having your first crushes and they feel super intense. Your relationship with your parents, even if it’s good, is still not working. You want your privacy, but you also want to be taken care of. Most of it is the same; we’re just now existing in a different space with different tools to feel the things we’ve always felt."
Bo Burnham began his performance career as a YouTuber in 2006
Bo Burnham began his performance career as a YouTuber in 2006© Bo Burnham
As for where Burnham ranks his work in the pantheon of high-school movies, he doesn’t. “I know this is a coming-of-age film, but I didn’t think of it as such,” he says. “I looked at visceral, subjective movies that follow people. I wanted to make The Wrestler with a 13-year-old girl; Saving Private Ryan, but about a pool party; One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest... The performances, the controlled chaos – those are the sort of movies I was reaching for.”
THE RED BULLETIN: What was your inspiration when creating the movie?
BO BURNHAM: I wanted to talk about living with the internet – that was something very urgent to me. Then I found this kid in my writing and realised that I could say everything I wanted to through her. I wasn’t trying to talk about being a kid; when you do that, you’re starting from a condescending place. I wasn’t 13, I wasn’t in eighth grade, and I was discovering her experience with her, rather than being nostalgic. It can definitely be viewed nostalgically, but I wanted to make a movie about kids that wasn’t attempting to conjure memories.
Were you worried about creating an authentic portrayal of Kayla?
Yeah, but I knew I was going to collaborate with an actor who would breathe life into the role – as long as I listened to her. I was lucky enough to find a very talented actor [Fisher, who was 13 at the time]. We saw a hundred kids after her, but there was never a second choice. Everyone else felt like a confident kid pretending to be shy; she played it like a shy kid pretending to be confident. She understood: don’t be the person that doesn’t speak, be the one that wants to speak but can’t.
How much of your own anxiety went into the film?
It was really just [a matter of] talking about it. [Anxiety] is not uncommon in my line of work: a lot of performers struggle with it, and that includes me. For someone who has that, it’s definitely not game over, because there are ways to gain control over it. A lot of it is just being exposed to the feeling – not because that will solve it, but so that when you get to those moments of panic, you know you don’t die, that you’re OK. I freaked out a bunch before and got through it. That’s true for a lot of things in life: expose yourself to what you’re afraid of.
What does the internet represent to a young person?
I still haven’t figured it out, but I don’t think it’s any one thing. It’s a medium through which they feel everything; a place where they live, connect, isolate, stimulate, objectify, express and numb themselves. It isn’t just surface, it functions on a ‘soul’ level. Adults see it as just cat videos and Snapchatting, not knowing it’s a really deep experience for these kids. It’s something existential for them. This movie is hoping to do justice to their experience online, but not explain it to them.
Are lifestyles changing quicker now?
I think so. I feel as close to people 10 years older than me as I do to those three years younger. The generational markers that used to happen every 15 years – the Walkman, the vinyl record – now occur every six months. Going through middle school with Twitter and without it is a very different experience, and that was the reality for kids just two years apart. Everything is changing exponentially. In theory, you’d have to do a new one of these movies every two years to represent every generation – there’s going to be the virtual-reality generation in five years, then the microchip-in-their-head generation five years after that.
Did you worry the movie would be out of date before it was released?
It already is. It’s recognisably a little more 2018 than 2019, but that’s OK. People get so afraid of things moving on that they strip the current moment of all its specificity, and then it means nothing. Even if a meme is old, the movie isn’t about specific references, it’s about the feeling. The movie is a time capsule, so it changes the more you step away from it.
What will people think when looking back at this time?
I’ve thought about that recently. They won’t look back. There will be so much content, so much media produced every day that there will be no time to look back at what was produced before. Or they’ll be looking through the rubble to find clean water and come across a broken iPhone, and they’ll build a canopy out of iPhones to shelter themselves from the radiation of the exposed sun. That’s probably closer to the truth... in a couple of hundred years.
Film