Everybody is in their bathing suits. They look unconcerned about it too, as though they spend a lot of time seminude around other kids, the naked-in-a-hallway-nightmare come to wretched life. They all seem to know each other—not just the person who invited them to the pool party, perhaps reluctantly, at the urging of a parent. How are they already this chummy? They’re all locked into giggly conversations or pool noodle-fights or submarinal games of Marco Polo. And then there’s you: standing at the sliding glass door, eyes ablaze, prepping a plan of attack for the moment you will inevitably have to go out there, into the fray, in just your dumb bathing suit.
“My initial thing was I assumed nothing, I assumed that it resembled my childhood not at all,” says Burnham, 27, during a recent interview. “I was just trying to come at it from a place of, like, writing a WWII movie: This is a new experience with new kids in a new environment.”
Related Video: Eighth Grade highlights the effect social media has on developing adolescents
Burnham’s own personal tour of duty in adolescence concluded at a time when a lot of the things that make being that age unimaginable for an adult today were just around the corner. He was an early adopter of YouTube at age 16, one of its first homegrown success stories. His videos were mostly silly songs, penned with an aggressively 16-year old sense of humor. He parlayed them into an international touring act, combining those songs with a theater nerd’s ambitious production sensibilities, and became the youngest comedian to ever get a solo special on Comedy Central, at 18. Further Netflix specials followed, and eventually film roles. (You may have seen him in The Big Sick.) About five years ago, it occurred to Burnham that directing films might be something he’d like to do.
Eighth Grade is the first result of that realization. (Burnham once developed a screenplay with Judd Apatow, but it never panned out.) The Sundance sensation follows Kayla (the absolutely incredible Elsie Fisher) as she shuffles her way through the final week of eighth grade. People are always telling Kayla she’s quiet—indeed, she wins a Most Quiet Girl superlative—but she wants to prove that’s not necessarily who she is. Some of her efforts involve going out into the world—braving one of those well-populated pool parties and also exploring her nascent sexual maturity. Mostly, though, she navigates the treacherous waters of social media and makes tortured advice videos on YouTube.
Unlike the videos Burham made as a teen, Kayla’s are seen by almost nobody.
Eighth Grade is teeming with heartbreaking glimpses of life as a tech-addled adolescent. In order to make the viewing experience as immersive and authentic as possible, Burnham crowdsourced plenty of lived-in details from actual 13-year olds. He watched hundreds of vlogs, where young boys and girls offer stammering advice on things they know nothing about (the opposite sex, how to just be yourself.) He got to know almost as many kids while casting and scouting and filming and promoting the movie, listening closely as they explained and contextualized their day-to-day lives. Through making a film set in school, he became a student of what teenagers today are like.
“The core emotions—loneliness, wanting to connect, wanting to be seen, wanting to be heard—they’re all the same, but the truth is, the internet and social media really just extend the spectrum of emotions. Everything is just felt bigger and deeper and longer than it was,” Burnham says. “I was actually encouraged by those kids, though. They seem to have a better grip on the internet than 30-year olds do. They seem to actually get the joke of the internet.”
He trusted his young star Elsie Fisher when she suggested that Kayla sign off her YouTube videos by saying, “Gucci!” And when he needed a realistic, current heckle during a school assembly scene, he put the question out to the extras on set. The response that made it into the film, ultimately in more than one scene, was “LeBron James,” a reference to a popular Vine.
“I asked them and I don’t think they live with that fear,” Burnham says. “I think it’s more of a 20-year old, 30-year old thing. The stakes of politics hasn’t entered their lives yet. Kids are still being offensive and weird. The bigger fear for them is that something embarrassing happens.”
He’s thankful, however, that the technology that launched his career only became available when he was 16, and not a few years earlier, when he was Kayla’s age. Otherwise, his life would look very different today.
“It would have been a nightmare,” he says. “It was already kind of a nightmare and embarrassing for me, but if my 13-year-old self had been posting stuff, I wouldn’t be here today.”
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