Bo Burnham and Elsie Fisher Discuss Coming Up With Her 'Eighth Grade' Catch Phrase

I'm just a very weird awkward nervous person all the time so I find comfort in ending conversations with certain verbal tics I guess you know or sometimes physical tics and one manifested and it was just like I would say instead of okay or cool or hide Gucci I started doing it because it was I could tell him embarrassed her for me to do it and then everyone else had did it to the point where it was like gaffers being like is this Gucci [Applause] what I was writing and I was sort of coming to terms the fact that I had anxiety and I was putting a name on it in the way it's personal it's about my current experience much more than my 13 year old experience I sort of look at the world and go and the culture and go like what is happening you know and I was able to just with someone else say do you know what's happening and then we can kind of both look at me and shrug out into the universe a lot of stories made at least for this age are you know very big like Harry Potter or something where people think it's escapism for the kids I actually think it's realism for the kids because it feels like walking over across the hallway and talking your crush feels literally like going to slay a big snake dragon or something so a lot of these movies about you know kids dying or I love you but I have lupus or whatever the movies are you know I mean it's like they have to be so big to make the kids you know to make the emotions of a kid feel true there's like can you can you portray can you sink the audience's heart rate in hers because if that's happening doesn't matter what the situations are like doesn't matter if in theory that situation is very small and silly Kayla's experience is very reflective of my own because I think this is a good portrayal of like what the Internet is it's not always smiles or obsessing on emojis it's it's own thing it's not bad or good it's both that's at least my experience with it yeah I would say like the things about the internet that are targeted towards kids they try to portray the Internet feel to me like a McDonald's commercial or it's like I love a Big Mac and it's like oh my god it means I'm so hungry and yeah tone deaf people that speak with like authority on the internet often to me are dusty dusty people that have no idea what the internet is I mean the more you engage the Internet I think the more ambivalent it becomes it gives us great social movements and the country's on fire yeah I mean this is like a really good portrayal of the highs and lows cuz like Kayla feels good about herself making her videos you know almost as like a coping mechanism for her anxiety and like expressing herself and that's like a high of it and then she's like you know kind of like looking at all the other people doing crazy cool stuff and realize and that you know makes her feel not so good I trusted her so much her performance was so rock solid in the center that it actually allowed me to attend to the world around her because so much of the story is about this kid moving through space and moving through these different environments so because I was able to trust that she was gonna she was delivering I could work on the kids around her in the world around her to make that vivid that was hugely beneficial I think the kids were across the board unbelievable we had a couple of specific scenes he kind of had me run through you know and kind of improv it a little and yeah it was just a really fun tight like for auditions that was really really fun I mean I test her 3 or 4 times but I never saw another actor or more than once I remember writing it for her but I didn't because I wrote it two years before I met her but yeah I can't believe we were going to make this movie before we found her I stumbled on a video of her at some brown carpet event talking about like cupcakes or something I don't know but she was incredible and like immediately very close to what I felt could be right for the role I didn't know if she could act but I hope she could and she was like my favorite before I met her and then I met her in Jeddah ssin and she really really can act a lot of the collaboration was in inferring things from her performance and having a diet because the you know she's done eventually we're able to stand up and say this isn't right this doesn't ring true yeah but it was it was moment to moment rather than big giant ideas of things it was just like kind of I mean feeling it out and really knowing what felt right to like Who I am I guess you know as this nerdy 14 year old / 13 year old kid you [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: Variety

Views: 250,965

Keywords: Variety, Variety Studio

Id: 7IKyfcAeRik

Length: 4min 49sec (289 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 29 2018