Bo Burnham gets awakward and goes back to Eighth Grade

Multi-hyphenate talent Bo Burnham isn’t an old man, but he might as well be retirement age when compared to his closest collaborators on his debut feature film as a writer-director, Eighth Grade (which opens in Toronto this weekend and expands to additional Canadian cities in the coming weeks). Keen on tapping into his own awkward upbringing and perpetual anxieties, twenty-seven year-old Burnham’s first feature is told from the perspective of a thirteen year old girl who’s experiencing the most formative and cringe inducing period of her young life. And since Burnham jokes that he’d never want to direct himself due to a complete lack of objectivity, Eighth Grade might be the closest look inside his creative mind yet.

Elsie Fisher stars as Burnham’s emotional surrogate, Kayla, an eighth grader being raised by a doting, somewhat embarrassing single father (Josh Hamilton). She spends most of her free time browsing the internet on her phone and producing unconvincing YouTube tutorials on how to be confident and happy. Her barely viewed video blogs are as far from Kayla’s personality as one could get. She’s socially stunted, having few friends and getting voted “Most Quiet” by her peers as they make their way from junior to senior high school. She has a crush on a boy, but doesn’t know how to properly tell him, and budding teen sexuality doesn’t make coming out of her shell any easier. After striking up a friendship with an older teen assigned to guide Kayla (Emily Robinson) around her future school, shy Kayla starts to think things might get better. As we all know, however, things might end up getting worse before they start turning a corner for Kayla.

Burnham, who started his career as one of the first bonafide superstars of YouTube before branching out into a successful stand-up comedy career, freely admits that he’s one of the last people one might expect to make such a film about a young woman going through the most emotionally fraught period of maturation. He also admits that the world has changed so rapidly that everything he knew as a kid has suddenly become irrelevant or archaic to thirteen year olds today. Driven by the desire to capture emotional realism and to collaborate after years of working in relatively solitary comedic mediums, Burnham jumped at the chance to tell a realistic story from the perspective of an often underserved and misunderstood age bracket. There’s a lot of himself in his main protagonist, but Burnham hopes that everyone – young and old – will see elements of themselves in the characters via his stripped down, emotionally raw filmmaking approach. And if the film’s many early rave reviews and festival reception have been any indication, audiences definitely see the similarities, making Eighth Grade another remarkable evolution in Burnham’s career.

We caught up with Bo Burnham during a promotional stop in Toronto – appropriately on a set at the YouTube Creator Studio at George Brown College – to talk about all things awkward, his desire to branch out, and never shying away from looking and sounding ridiculously out of touch as long as there are people there to set you straight.

Coming from a YouTube background where you worked on a fairly ambitious level for that medium, I’m sure you were used to some level of collaboration. A feature film is obviously a lot more focused on collaborating with others. Did you have to change your approach to collaboration when you decided to make a feature film on this sort of scale?

Bo Burnham: I don’t think so, really, but there is definitely a difference. When I was first working online, I wasn’t collaborating with anyone, really, unless I absolutely had to. Then I went and did stand-up for a long time, which is very much NOT a collaborative medium or process. I would approach mostly tech people to help out with some of the more elaborate specials and things like that. The D.P. who shot my specials shot the movie, and the producer of those was one of the producers of the film. This movie was made largely with people that I had already collaborated with in some way helping to guide this along the way.

You mostly just try to find people that work with what you’re trying to do and find the people that make the most sense. I’ve always approached collaboration on a project by project basis. I want to surround myself with people I just want to spend time with. For me, that’s always been at the heart of what I want to do. You just want to be around people you get along with and that you can talk to for a decent amount of time about what you’re feeling and what you want to do. You want to be able to do that without feeling like you want to die. (laughs) That’s actually priority number one. Then hopefully they’re smart and understand the project. But mostly you just don’t want to die talking to them.

After working on something as solitary as stand-up, I was really desperate to collaborate again. I was tired and burnt-out working by myself, so collaboration and having those kinds of discussions about the material was a real joy for me. But there was some overlap here with what I learned doing stand-up, particularly when it comes to conceiving something and then trying to stage it. I’m definitely confident in my comedic timing abilities, so when we got into the editing room I was able to discuss how we could futz a line a second or two in either direction to make sure that it hits. If someone has to make a fart noise, I’ll know immediately where that would work. (laughs) But these kids came with their own sense of timing that was really helpful. But outside of pulling from my experiences being able to stage comedic moments effectively, this was really different from anything I had ever done, and it couldn’t have been done without truly great collaborators like I had here.

Bo Burnham on the set of Eighth Grade.

I think most people wouldn’t immediately think of you as someone who would make a film about a girl in eighth grade. Was there anything that made you want to tell a story about growing up from this specific perspective?

Bo Burnham: I really just wanted to talk about my feelings. I was always an anxious person, but at that particular time in my life, I was having sort of an anxiety crisis. I had a lot that I wanted to get out. I also wanted to really write about anxiety and the internet, because I feel like no one has been talking about the internet correctly.

I was honestly just tired of writing clever shit. I wanted to make something more granular and aggressively un-clever. It all came together with this idea. Popular culture wasn’t doing young people or the internet any favours. Neither were being portrayed correctly. Since the internet means a lot to me, I was almost advocating for myself, in a way. The internet is a lot subtler and stranger than people talk about. It’s not all hashtags and cyberbullying, which is how it’s usually talked about. I always felt that the truth about growing up, and particularly growing up with the internet, is a lot more nuanced and stranger than it’s usually depicted.

And you’re also working very closely with people who are the age of the characters being portrayed who are living in this world. Was it a challenge to find young actors who would play this material as naturally as possible?

Bo Burnham: A lot of the day players were kids who just went to school like normal kids. A lot of the kids at that pool party were just kids that would have gone to a pool party. Most of them were from the New York area. I would go every weekend and meet with the extras one-on-one and get to know them to see what I could use. I would chat with them and ask them if they had any special talents. One girl when I asked that said, “I have eczema.” (laughs) That was a great part of the collaboration was working with kids because you don’t have to worry about getting them into character. They just naturally ARE eighth graders. A big part of the movie was making sure they got into the film in an unprocessed fashion. You don’t want them to think that they have to find a way to get into the movie and act unnaturally. I always told the kids that they knew better than we did. I just wanted them to show us what they were like.

The film has a musical score that’s also a bit different from what I think most people would expect. Outside of licensing an Enya song, most of the soundtrack is electronic and not the kind of poppy, bubblegum stuff that adults usually associate with kids in their early teens. How did you come to make that decision?

Bo Burnham: I always wanted something electronic because I always thought the acoustic, lilting sort of mandolin scores for teen movies felt so fake to me. I just wanted it to be visceral and reflect her subjective experience. Whenever Kayla sees Aiden, you get this musical sting that’s nothing like what you see in teen movies, but that’s definitely an approximation of the real feeling. Those feelings aren’t cute and little. They’re pretty grandiose. The inside of a young adult’s mind isn’t all pop songs. There are pop SOUNDS, which is what we wanted to use. We wanted to take the sounds of pop music, but to overlay it onto a weirder, more avant garde score, which is exactly what Anna Meredith, our composer, was able to do so amazingly. She makes music where you can recognize the sounds as poppy and bright, but they’re assembled in this emotionally strange and sometimes scary sort of way. What I actually told her was that I wanted to sound like what it would be like if Trent Reznor was a thirteen year old girl. Anna definitely tapped into that.

And the Enya thing was something I always wanted. To get the rights to it, I actually had to send her a note. I had to send a “Dear Enya” note. (laughs) I was, like, “Do I tie this to a salmon and put it in a river? How do I get a note to Enya?” (laughs) But I was just obsessed with getting that song in the movie. I knew the song, and I heard it again during the production, and I knew that the sequence where Kayla is browsing social media on her phone was going to be an important one, and cinematically I knew that scene needed something grand to make it come across how I wanted it to come across. I wanted it to feel as grand as surfing the internet feels to me. I never wanted the stereotypical sort of hacker score that people use when they’re on a computer. For me, surfing the internet can be something really transcendent, and that’s how I wanted the music to feel. I wanted it to feel like a spiritual and emotional experience, which is what Enya sounds like. I think Enya sounded like the internet before the internet even existed. It’s acoustic sounds that sound electronic. It’s also the kind of music you might listen to when you’re thirteen in an effort to sound deep.

You’re pretty removed now from your own eight grade years. You’re not an old man, but were you ever worried that you might make the kids sound like “old men”?

Bo Burnham: (laughs) Every time you see teachers dabbing or you see Kayla’s dad saying something embarrassing, those are totally moments when I’m giving voice to myself. I wanted that voice to exist. I did want that older pandering voice to be in there. You need to have the voice of people who don’t understand what these characters are going through.

But for the kids, I would always defer to them all the time. I had a line in there about getting messages on Facebook, and Elsie told me straight up that no one uses Facebook anymore. Then I gave that line to someone else in the movie. I was KEENLY aware that I was the old guy the whole time. I was always asking them if something sounded right. I was always asking them to come up with their own references. I had their input on everything from the posters in their room to the calendars on their walls. There are references in this movie to things I’ve never heard of and that I think I’ll never understand. I don’t get what “Gucci” means. Some kid’s yelling out “Lebron James,” and I don’t fucking get it. (laughs) I’ve never seen Rick and Morty, so when they have to start acting like those characters, I just let them lead that stuff because it feels real to them. And if I can see that it’s real to them, it becomes real to me.

It’s interesting that you admit to having so little of a tie to modern youth culture since you’ve built your film around a very loving, if somewhat one-sided relationship between a father and his daughter. Since you aren’t a kid anymore yourself, was that important for you to include on an emotional and contextual level? And what was it about Josh Hamilton that endeared you to cast him in the film’s only truly useful and empathetic adult role?

Bo Burnham: That character was so fascinating to come up with because he’s clearly trying too hard to be cool, but he’s also the most genuine in his effort to connect to a child in a non-cynical way. He’s not pandering in the way he shows affection or any kind of kinship to his daughter. And I don’t blame teachers for dabbing or trying to get an easy reaction from their students. Whatever these teachers are trying to do, I like to think they’re trying to do it from a place of love, and I think that’s what makes Kayla’s father such a special character. He’s kind of embarrassing, but that love is so pure and unfiltered.

Part of the point of being the parent of a teenager, I think, is to just let them repeatedly punch you in the face. You kind of have to be their punching bag because they need to get all of these big emotions out, and taking it out on a parent might be healthier than taking it out on someone else. She’s so frustrated by her classmates, but she can’t take it out on them because she’s too scared. She’s going to take it all out on him. We’re often meanest to the people we love because they’re the only ones we’re comfortable being mean to. He’s taking it and he should take it. People actually ask me now, “How do I get my kid to stop being mean at the dinner table?” My answer is that you don’t. You have to let them be angry. We teach our kids that it’s okay to be angry, but as an adult you know there are only so many places where displays of outward anger are socially acceptable. You have to get SOMETHING out. If your kid isn’t expressing any of that to you, that’s when I would say you need to look out. That’s when something is more seriously wrong. If your kid isn’t expressing any of that stuff, that’s even worse.

And Josh I had loved for a long time. I always found him to be really warm, human, and exciting to watch. He’s a really warm, and attentive actor. I knew that if Josh and Elsie could hold a scene together and find a common ground that the film would be really exciting. Josh is so refined, technical, and brilliant, and Elsie is really raw. By working together, you could see that she became a little more refined and he became a little more raw. That was so great to watch it happen.

When you make a film that’s about feeling awkward all the time, I assume there are different levels to the creative process, and that there are unexpected turns in the road. I can imagine that there are scenes in this that turned out differently from how you envisioned them on the page when you went to shoot them, and probably scenes that, once they were completed, played differently from what you expected when you put them in front of an audience. Were there any specific moments that turned out differently than how you imagined?

Bo Burnham: That’s really interesting to think about, but you’re right. That definitely happened, but never in a bad way. The goal was to always stay true to the tone. We had to stick to a sense of honesty in terms of depicting how awkwardly kids talk to adults and to each other. If that was funny or scary or sad, that would all emerge on set when we found what we felt was that sense of honesty.

There’s a scene where Kayla is trying to talk to her crush, Aiden, during a school drill where they all have to hide under their desks, and I was terrified that no young actor would ever be able to do all the things that I’m asking Elsie to do in this one scene. It was too much even for me to probably do. I was asking her to flirt, but also be terrified. I was asking her to lie, but to also be completely transparent. She had to be covert, but also terribly awkward. It was the scene I was most convinced going in wasn’t going to work, and the one that I had the most anxiety about. And I couldn’t believe when Elsie performed it how close it was to what I had envisioned.

But in terms of things playing differently with an audience – and in a really good way – I would have to say that the scene where Kayla is in the backseat of a car with a boy was definitely that moment. Watching that play with a crowd for the first time blew me away, but in a good way. We were hoping that the scene pulled people in the way we wanted it to, but we didn’t know how it was going to come across at the time. People always ask me now what it must have been like to film that scene, but really when we filmed it nothing exceptional or harrowing happened outside of us capturing the scene. There were seven people in this car, and it wasn’t crazy intense or anything like that, despite what the scene depicts. It was a really safe, well lit environment. Elsie actually had her lines sitting in her lap. (laughs) And yet, some people when they see the film are so unnerved. To watch that with a crowd for the first time was something special. None of us realized at the time what we were onto. It struck the chord we wanted it to, but we never expected how well it would do that. People were yelling at the screen. It was a fucking awkward room to be in, which was great because it was what we wanted.

We were never concerned that we were going too far, but we had plenty of other blanket concerns, and we always wanted to create an environment and a film where we could talk about all of these different and awkward life moments. If we got no reaction at all, we would have failed horribly. I was always aware that I was a dude telling this story, and that I had to work extra hard throughout this process to make sure we were true to the lives of other young girls and not just my own. That was there from the moment I thought of the idea. I was always drawn to this story, but I knew we all had to work really hard to make sure that we did it properly and that we were never backing down from anything.

Eighth Grade opens exclusively at Cineplex Varsity & VIP on Friday, July 20, 2018. It expands to Vancouver and Montreal on Friday, July 27 and to Halifax, Ottawa, Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton, and Victoria on Friday, August 3.