The director and star sit down for a fun conversation
Comedian Bo Burnham has turned his attention to the big screen and created one of this year’s most compelling movies with Eighth Grade. Elsie Fisher plays Kayla, a normal middle schooler drowning in social media and anxiety. The two were kind enough to spend a few minutes talking with Cinapse about the film.
Cinapse: Is the audience for this film parents or eighth graders, and you can’t say both.
Bo Burnham: Can I say neither? [Laughs] Truly, I’m not an eighth grader, and I’m not a parent. I wrote a movie that I wanted to see. I’ve never divided movies demographically. I tend to connect with movies I don’t align with. I was definitely setting out to make a movie for everyone. I was really focusing on making a movie about the human experience through the eyes of a thirteen year old. I certainly wasn’t setting out to make a movie for eighth graders or for their parents.
Hopefully the movie can withstand different perspectives. Hopefully everyone can watch it in their own way. And that’s the fun about it. You watch it with young people or older people or parents or non-parents, you can see parts of the crowd reacting to different things.
Cinapse: Speaking of reacting, I wonder which groups cringe more at some of the cringeworthy scenes–the banana scene and some of those?
Burnham: We showed it to a bunch of high schoolers, and they were literally screaming at the top of their lungs.
Cinapse: Elsie, I’m not sure how much time you’ve spent in public schools, but I’m wondering how you compare Kayla’s world to your own, especially this aspect of non-stop social media.
Elsie Fisher: I’ve gone through public school my whole life. The constant social media has pretty much been the norm for me, at least since elementary school. A lot of her life compares to mine. Definitely the social media aspect, and just the way it’s not a prominent part of our lives, but it’s always there, if that makes sense. It’s just another thing that we breathe in.
Cinapse: The “mean girl” aspect to this, I felt was pretty toned down. In movies, there’s a tendency to have those catty rich girls just be horrible, but here they’re more apathetic.
Burnham: I can kind of feel for Kennedy. If my mom invited someone to my party that I didn’t want to come, I think she’s pretty nice to her. She doesn’t humiliate her. She lets her sing karaoke. We didn’t want to demonize that type of person at all. I think you can tell the movie from that point of view as well. Currently, I don’t think there’s as much physical bullying and heads being shoved into lockers. It’s much more you’re either ignored or you’re paid attention to.
Cinapse: Elsie, you very much captured the highs and the lows of Kayla’s experiences, from the excitement of being with high schoolers to the burning of her dreams. Was it important for you to show these as extremes or were you trying to keep them closer to a normal baseline?
Elsie: I don’t know. I just tried to empathize with Kayla in every situation. Truly, about this role, as with most things, I didn’t think too hard about them. It was more important to me just do it.
Burnham: It’s very intuitive for her. The just throws herself into it. I think the best actors do that. When they’re in it, there’s just this feeling. We didn’t talk a lot about this.
Eighth Grade opens in Austin and several other cities on July 20, 2018.