Academy Conversations: Eighth Grade

how did you get from what you were doing with with music and YouTube videos and Netflix to your first film how'd you make that leap um I don't know I was you know I had the script written for a few years and I tried to get it made and tried to get the money for it and kind of couldn't and then made my last special and felt like I had sort of enough momentum at the time to get some undisclosed amount of money to make this film and I was lucky enough to do it but yeah I mean it was a lot of yeah you know I've been I've just been trying to work at it first sort of ten years I started started when I was 17 or so and I've just been a yeah I'm very happy I've had things almost happen and then fall apart or ever I'm very very happy this is the first thing though I feel like there's two feelings that permeate this film it's like anxiety and optimism it's like an anxiety sandwich with optimism at the front and at the at the end with your wonderful like inner monologues and the bread gets stuck in your braces just like exactly do you feel like this is your outlook on life you know is is like does do does this story reflect how you look at life is it an anxiety sandwich is it like optimism bookending you know this well if I could continue with this metaphor the toothpick would be no um the crust of sort of creation with a sort of rye bread of wit no yeah I mean I I wanted to write about my own anxiety that that was sort of the impulse for the script it wasn't middle-schoolers it was like I wanted to write about how I was feeling at the time which was nervous you know I was just feeling really nervous and unsure and I wanted to write about what it felt like to be alive right now which to me felt confusing and strange like everything was changing and I was trying to grasp at things they were slipping through my hands and what is happening and I feel really hot right now I need a drink of water and that just reminded me of middle school you know really truly but yeah there's some yeah there's optimism I think hopefully through it but it's her optimism that's why it's meaningful to me you know it's it's her hope it's hope constructed out of you know what culture on fire or whatever she has to be dealing with you know so um yeah sure I definitely like get the anxious thing oh you else what do you think you'll see he had a great answer so mine is I feel nervous to go we're hopeful that we won't be those soon right we'll see why tell the story through the eyes of a 13 year old girl I I don't want to assume too much but I don't think you've ever been one yeah beautiful choice I was one back when the earth was cooling I also I also graduated from eighth grade and that's one of the things I like is that this isn't just you know that this isn't a memoir this isn't like you don't watch it and think oh yeah I remember I mean the emotions are there the technology has changed but I just like that it's you're you're a metaphor for maybe what we felt in eighth grade and kind of what we're feeling now I mean I felt like a lot of that resonated now though these many years after I passed through eighth grade so yeah yeah and I feel that way too you know it's like why can't you know an epic story about the human condition be about a girl wandering into a pool party and not you know some in a one-piece yeah exactly and also hopefully it serves the specific circumstance that she's going through as well but the initial impulse for the script was watching hundreds of videos of kids online expressing themselves you know and I just found them really really fascinating the boys tended to talk about fortnight and the girls tended to talk about their souls so it was like okay probably gonna write about a girl not being cruel to the boys but the girls are just slightly deeper at that age and then also I I really wanted to make a movie about this age that wasn't nostalgic and I like nostalgic films I like films that feel like a memory and hopefully this you know film can make you feel nostalgic but it wasn't where we were operating from you know my disconnect from her is twofold I was never a 13 year old girl I was also never 13 now you know and both of those things lend themselves to a very specific experience so it being a girl I just kind of had to subjugate myself to the truth of what she was going through and go like I don't I don't know what she's been through instead the film is gonna walk her life with her as she does for the first time and not go you know these are all memories and these are all things we've processed you know something like a brand party when you remember it we know it's a cultural standard so we sort of normalize it in our heads but when you see it as she does fresh it's like what is it like this a bunch of kids whose bodies are exploding half-dressed around a hole in the ground with water like how is this legal like it's just like so like part of it was wanting to do that like because that's truly how I feel about my anxiety I would love to be 10 years away from my anxiety looking back nostalgically on it but that's not the experience of anxiety you know it's visceral and current so yeah it being a girl I just had to I was I felt like I was going through first grade eighth grade for the first time again first grade for the eighth time again however the math adds up see what do you think about that people ask me if I'm surprised that Bo wrote such a compelling story about a girl and I'm really not because I truly see it as like not I don't know him researching eighth-grade girls and there you go eighth grade girl story but it's about us right now and you know how everything feels explodey I don't know but I mean yeah basically what he said I feel like a nervous person writing about a nervous person as much as I feel like no truly as a man writing about a girl um and also I have most vividly connected to films personally that I don't demographically align with that's the miracle of movies to me when I can see myself vividly personally in someone that is on the surface not the same as me I mean I you know well that's a great character when you watch it and you think you know no I am NOT a black person in the south and the 20s but I can relate to what they're going through and and that's the brilliance of this so well done you okay so you came up with this incredible story and now you had to have the perfect actress the perfect person to tell that story so give us a little and we couldn't find that sir settled for it our ban sirs I really I hey we saw hundreds of kids here I mean like hundreds of kids and like it was like the lights were off before she came on like truly like he was dead it was it was it was meaningless before she read it because every other kid that would read it would play it like it felt like a confident kid pretending to be shy and when she played it it felt like a shy kid pretending to be confident which is actually what that is everyone else played shy which is like played shy is this inactive cowering thing and she knows and she played shyness as active shyness is wanting to speak at every moment and not being able to when I watch it I don't see Elsie playing Kayla I see Kayla playing all the people she wants to be in every moment which is impressive for an actor of any age I think and it is it really truly I really believe that and like she'll be super humble about it and act late but like it is written - the monologues are written like yeah um so the thing about being yourself is like I'm reading this off a piece of paper you know people don't give her credit cuz they think it's do you think I made like homeward bound or babe there's a dog movie or it's like at the enemy I was just like Ubu and I'll figure a movie around it's not that I can show you 9 takes where she stumbles in the same place every time yeah you know it's it's I think it's incredibly difficult to be able to realistically and reliably portray something that is very close to you I think it's very easy to became and a top hat and be like yeah whatever you mean like much harder to put you know be something that has cut so close to the bone she graduated eighth grade a week later we were filming and a week after we stopped filming she went to her freshman year of high school and she didn't get into her school play so I promised her I'd say this on this wonderful stage mr. Dona from Thousand Oaks High School is a piece of [Laughter] it's like Jordan not making his high school team so that brings me to the script I understand that you is it true that he didn't let you read the whole script except maybe one time I read the full script one time and that was right after I got the role okay was that liberating or terrifying okay no I mean honestly cuz I was like I was having actual anxiety attacks before this isn't like oh man she's method I mean I was gonna say I think I'm seeing the madness here yeah yeah I don't know it was it was it was also very liberating though as you said because I mean I got the lines for each day on the day of and I'm pretty minimal time to memorize yeah thankfully it worked out but no I mean I got to have them kind of in the back of my head and that let me be more natural and he wrote a lot of poems and pauses yeah can one of you tell me what the hell Gucci means well Gucci was my creation [Laughter] no I love it funny cuz it's like you mean what does it mean the truth is I don't know what it means either no I mean if we're being honest like you know I was on the East Coast for the first time and I came up with Gucci in pre-production and like and like so I was on the first East Coast for the first time I was a big fan of Bose work so and this was like the first movie I'd done in a while so there were just a lot of levels of anxiety for me so instead of acting like a normal person an exiting conversation by saying goodbye I would say Gucci and he started doing it to embarrass me yeah I would just say it all the time you know cuz it's embarrassing when older people do anything and then I would say good and then I got so banal at some point it was literally like grips being like is this gay or not and then the videos were the last we shot the videos the last two days of the shoot and I always wanted of a sign-off cuz all the kids and the videos I saw ahead sign-offs I was like oh my god of course so she literally has the last word of the movie which is alright well I'm the oldest person up here and this film is definitely Gucci yeah thank you very much

Channel: Oscars

Views: 72,288

Rating: 4.977489 out of 5

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Id: VJmunVzdvLY

Length: 10min 35sec (635 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 19 2018