"Eighth Grade" and the quiet horror of early adolescence



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The brilliance of this standard teen movie moment, however, is that by this point in the film, you are so immersed in the awkwardness of Kayla's life, that her long, timid march of the guest bathroom in its lemon green room at the pool makes you almost sweat with anxiety.

Of course, these are just teenagers, not velociraptors. But watching the high school student shyly take her place in a small corner of the otherwise active social scene, you wonder if Kayla would almost prefer to be a dinosaur lunch to the silent judgment that she perceives as being directed in her direction.

"explains Elsie Fisher, the 15-year-old actress who plays Kayla. "And the scene just represents children in the [way] they are seen by other children, which is the scariest thing alive."

In real life, Fisher is the farthest thing from the scary. In fact, she speaks to people with ruthless enthusiasm that most are reserving to the best friends that they have not seen for a long time.

Kayla shares this energetic method of communication with her portrais but rather than coming from a place of conviviality, she is rooted in a frenzied embarrassment, especially when she engages in conversations with children about her age, a little too absorbed by their own ambivalence to notice Kayla trying very hard to make and have friends.

Much of her dialogue in the film comes straight to the camera while Kayla is shooting first-person, personal-style YouTube videos for other kids her age. Little watched, the videos end up being a chronicle of a teenager giving others the advice that she wanted to know put into action.

Fisher was one of the first people Burnham saw auditioning to play Kayla and said his connection with the material was instantaneous.

  Elsie Fisher plays in

"All the other children who came to the audition had the impression of being a cool and confident boy who pretended to be shy, confident, "he says. "Elsie really understands the layers of performance, and it's an exceptional thing to do when you're an actor at any age."

"Eighth Grade" is Fisher's most publicized role so far in his career, but not his first big part. Fisher was the voice of Agnes in the first two opuses of the franchise "Despicable Me" and has a long list of credits for interpretation.

Despite her resume, she admits that the work has been harder. especially the roles for teenagers with acne, are not abundant. "

Fortunately, authenticity was Burnham's goal and, it turned out, key to the magic of" Eighth Grade. "

He wanted children who were in eighth grade to play in Grade 8 – a simple but far from Hollywood standard, where older actors often play roles for their youngest children several years old.This method, Burnham says, is reflected on the screen. [19659002] "You can see that it is older children who claim to be young … and the way you remember to have that age is different from the one you had at that age," he says. We wanted the kids to live their experience and let themselves be guided by their experience. "Beyond the cast, Burnham had the challenge of writing, as he puts it, a dialogue for" kids " who can not speak, "decorate bedroom sets for emerging adults that do not may not have a distinct style yet. , embracing the disorder of not yet knowing each other.

"You are growing up in all these things," he says. "So we wanted to show the work and show as a failure because it's the beauty of it."

  The actor Elsie Fisher and director Bo Burnham of Eighth grade & # 39; attend The IMDb Studio and The IMDb Show at Location at the Sundance Film Festival on January 20, 2018 in Park City, Utah.

Thanks to YouTube, finding Kayla's voice was easier than expected for Burnham, who had his own start as a comic artist on the video platform. While watching hours of videos, he said that he discovered that "the boys were talking about Minecraft and the girls were talking about their souls". This inspired him to tell a story from the point of view of a girl in her early teens.

"I was very sensitive to the fact that I was a man in charge of this story, but I also had to trust the fact that he seemed to work," he said.

He was very fair, according to Fisher – except for one thing. In the original scenario, teen social media was Facebook, which prompted Fisher to joke: "Nobody uses Facebook anymore, what is it, aunt?"

It has been changed to Instagram and Snapchat.

Burnham says that his overall goal was to use a high school student to tell a story rooted in the same pathos that drives any good movie about the deepest battles of a person .

"And if you were making a film about an eighth-grade student who took his experience as seriously as, you know," The Wrestler's done it? " Burnham says. "I hope it's really live right now. The human condition is often reserved for cowboys and male poets in the movies, but why can not a 13-year-old girl be an intermediary for sex?" Current experience? "

Fisher It's even simpler: "I just want people to feel close to Kayla and feel less alone in their strange experiences."

"Eighth Grade" will debut at the movies on Friday.

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