Although his directorial debut is intensely personal, Eighth Grade doesn’t have anything to do with Bo Burnham’s memories of his middle school years.
For starters, Burnham was never a 13-year-old girl. And he also was never a 13-year-old today. Both distinctions disconnect him personally from Kayla, the protagonist in his satire about the awkwardness of contemporary adolescence from a female perspective.
“I really wanted to make a story that was not nostalgic. So many stories about this time are an adult’s projection of their own memories,” Burnham said during the South by Southwest Film Festival. “You remember these tentpole moments — first kiss, first drink, or whatever — and the true experience of being that age is looking up at the clock, and it’s 11:30, and there’s four hours of school left, and you want to put a bullet in your head.”
In the film, Kayla (Elsie Fisher) is an introverted and socially awkward suburban teenager struggling to keep up during an age when popularity is defined by social-media profiles. She doesn’t gain any traction through her YouTube videos, and her single father (Josh Hamilton) can’t seem to make a connection with her. During the final week of the school year, peer pressure regarding boys and parties only make things worse.
So how did his lead character wind up being a girl? Burnham, 27, said he didn’t originally set out to write a screenplay about eighth-graders at all — male or female — but rather was exploring a wide range of characters for a different concept entirely.
“I wanted to write about how I was feeling at the time, which was very anxious, and it felt like my anxiety was linked to the internet in some way. I set out to write a big story with all these intersecting characters, and I stumbled on her voice and found that I could say everything I wanted through her,” Burnham said. “I watched a lot of videos of young kids online talking about themselves. The boys tended to talk about Minecraft. The girls tended to talk about their souls.”
Burnham found Fisher after seeing a video of her online, doing an interview regarding her voice role in the Despicable Me films.
“I feel like I wrote it for her,” Burnham said. “She’s the only person who could contain and project all of her chaos on to a scene. It was not improvised. It was an incredibly technical performance.”
Fisher, 15, filmed her first starring role during the summer after her eighth-grade year, wrapping production the week prior to starting high school.
“Eighth grade is definitely one of the weirdest times of your life,” Fisher said. “It’s nice to portray someone my age who feels human and has feelings that are relatable.”
As for the internet? It’s become a broad target for Burnham, who explains it has propagated a false sense of self-worth through perceptions and would-be social interaction that tends to be cold and judgmental.
“I don’t think we’ve begun to process the internet emotionally and what it does to us. We talk about social trends, which is itself an internet buzzword but it’s vacuous and means nothing. But what it’s actually doing to us is putting a little pit in our stomach at the end of the night,” he said. “It’s really sad and bumming everybody out. It’s making a generation of people that are self-centered. It really sucks to think about yourself all the time. We need to take inventory of it, or it’s going to kill us.
“App updates change the way kids view themselves. Putting a 40-millimeter camera on a phone, compressing the depth of a kid’s face, actually changes the way they relate to their own image. Understand the power you have over kids and the way they feel, and use it wisely.”
Bo Burnham will conduct Q&A sessions after several Dallas-area screenings of Eighth Grade on Saturday. He will be at the Angelika Plano (5:15 p.m. show), Angelika Dallas (7:30 p.m. show), AMC Northpark (8:15 p.m. show), and Alamo Drafthouse Cedars (9:40 p.m. show).
