(lively music)
- When I write, I kind of have to work inside out.
It has to work moment to moment before I even start
to extrapolate from a scene to figure out that
it can work over a feature length.
It has to breathe.
I just sort of have to dive in and start writing it.
And my movie, Eighth Grade, which is about a young woman
at the end of eighth grade, who's recording Youtube videos,
and then the sort of life that's happening
around those videos.
The initial impulse for the script, in the start of it,
was watching videos of young kids online
speaking about themselves and talking about their life.
And just transcribing those monologues and,
'cause I found the way that these kids express themselves,
to be so visceral and meaningful to me
and sort of existed in really sharp contrast
to the way I had seen young people be portrayed onscreen,
which was perfectly articulate,
perfectly in command of their own narrative.
And for me, what it means to be alive right now
is to be out of control of your narrative.
To be constantly trying to be your own storyteller,
your biographer, your own filmmaker and failing to do that.
And these kids were doing it so beautifully and viscerally
that I just was watching these videos,
thinking if this were a performance in a movie,
it would be incredible, and to see the life
that this person was living outside of this video
and what they're expressing, however it was similar
or different would be engaging to me.
So I kind of start pretty granularly.
I have to sort of feel like I can feel the moments
of the film working before I can then pop out and take out
the next cards. - What led you to those videos
in the first place?
- I'm from the internet, I sort of got my start
on the internet.
I go to the internet for a lot of the things that I--
- You're a 3D-printed human.
- I am, yes.
Yes.
(laughing) - [John] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- These joints move.
Barely.
The internet is a well of humanity if you dig past
the surface of it, you know?
All you sort of see on the internet is
the trending viral videos, which are usually corporate made
and talk show appearances and music videos.
But if you search something on the internet
and sort it by upload date, you see that it's
the most pure exchange of material
between the public and us, so I'm going online
searching middle school advice and seeing videos
with 10 views of a 13-year-old girl in her bedroom,
doing a 10-minute soliloquy about her own life
in real time, and it was just so engaging,
and why it was engaging to me was it was so clear
that these kids were trying to sound like
the cultural representations of themselves
they had seen in movies.
(panel laughing)
They're trying to sound like good characters in movies,
and they were failing to sound like that,
and I wanted to do a story about one of those kids.
I wanted to do a story about being alive
where it's almost the main stress of the main character
was that the movie of her life wasn't interesting,
'cause I do think that's what it means
to be alive right now, especially young and online.
(lively music)
I have sympathy for the conversations
that are happening right now.
Obviously, there's this sort of core issue
at the center of the country right now,
and I think oftentimes people point to the symptoms
when we all sort of know where the tumor of this thing is,
that all these things are, maybe these over-corrections
are emanating from, but there's obviously a,
yeah, there's a lot of elephants in the room right now.
As there should be.
Maybe there were elephants there the entire time.
Maybe for the first time, people like me are being pointed
at the elephants that other people were pointing at
the entire time.
Representationally, you know, we are talking about
hopefully encroaching diverse group of storytellers
that are not necessarily represented by the people
around this table fully, and that has to be acknowledged.
And I think,
what I understand is that I felt like
when the sort of election happened, it felt like
the tail was really wagging the dog,
and it felt like this was a cultural failure
of our country, and so I understand the impulse,
even if it's an over-correction for people to go,
okay, let's tear apart every part of our culture
and see where this all started.
Is it our stories?
Is it our archetypes?
Is it our representation in arts?
And I understand that, and I think it's slightly unfair
for us to expect the solution to these inequities
to be perfectly fair.
That's where I think it gets,
you know it's people throwing up, and all of a sudden
it goes a little too far the other way
and it's panic.
So I try to listen in the best way I can, I'm frustrated.
I'm certainly having conversations
that are different in private than I'm having in public.
But, I don't know, I'm just tryin' to be open
and listen to it, and I do think as much as it may
overly criticize certain things,
I think the overall mentality is leading to
much more diverse, exciting art that I'm excited to see,
so I'm happy to be a part of it.
(upbeat bass music)