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SHOW NOTES
Season one, episode five of the Genre-rama podcast is titled: Writing Lessons Learned from Heathers (1988) and features an interview with director Michael Lehmann
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CAST
Host: Helen Cox
Guest: Michael Lehmann
Michael Lehmann is the director and producer of such films as Heathers, Meet the Applegates, The Truth About Cats and Dogs and 40 Days and 40 Nights.
Michael has also directed episodes of TV shows such as Dexter, True Blood, Californication, Veronica Mars and most recently, The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window which is now streaming on Netflix.
Jingle Performance: The One Man Barbershop Quartertet
Ich Luge Subterfuge Service Voice Over Artist: Blarock
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Helen: Hi, Michael, welcome to the show.
Michael: Hi, Helen, how are you?
Helen: Good. Thank you. How are you doing?
Michael: Oh, very well.
Helen: We’re really, really grateful to have you here today to talk about well, basically your experience of directing Heather’s because we’re interested in how creative people create things that interest teen audiences and grip teen audiences. And you certainly did that. With Heathers which I know was, you know, some years ago now. But if you wouldn’t mind just kind of taking us back to the beginning of you getting the script and just maybe telling us a little bit about what your vision was for it as a director. What aspects of teen life did you decide you were going to play up with this script?
Michael: Right. Well, I was a young director trying to make my first movie, I was not in particular looking to make a teen movie. But at that time, those films were very much in the air, people were making different forms of teen-oriented films. And there were a lot of good ones. And there were a lot of terrible ones. And my friend, Daniel Waters, wrote this script, Heathers, a massive tome, the first draft was 200 and some odd pages. The standard length of a feature film strict script would be about, I’m going to say about 110 pages, but for a comedy even less, but closer to 90. You translate a page to a minute of screen time, generally.
So he wrote an epic, that would have been a three hour plus movie. And he wrote it on his own. He was a friend of mine. He came to me and he said, I have the script. Some people think it’s good. Some people don’t get it. You have an agent, can you help me get it to your agent. And that was my first task with that script. That was the first time I read it was simply just to help a friend get a script out there. When I read it, I said, you know, this is really good. And I didn’t entirely, I remember my first read, I didn’t quite get everything in the script, I felt like I understood the dark humor, which I was very connected to. And his experience in high school was a little different than mine. But there were many things that we shared, and many things that I felt everybody would share in their American high school experience. So I connected very strongly to the script, I helped him get it to my agent, my agent tried to set it up with Stanley Kubrick or whoever, you know, the best directors at the time were. And when that didn’t work, I said, I’d like to try to get this made. And I partnered with Denise Di Novi, who was a producer that knew me and knew Dan and had a deal kind of in place it at a low budget company called New World Pictures. And that is how I got into it. I was not specifically out to find a teen movie to make.
Helen: That’s so interesting, I didn’t realize that you were friends, that’s really cool, that you know, going back that you have that connection. And that really, this was something that you read, and you just felt an affinity with. And that once the big players had passed on it, you decided that you were going to have a go at making the movie. Which, anyone who knows even the smallest amount about the movie business knows, it’s no easy task to get a movie made. So, thank you for that.
So, once you were in production with this movie, which, you know, you might want to tell us a little bit about, what that was like trying to get it into production? Maybe there were a few challenges there. But I’m just wondering what the most challenging aspect was? Because I know that was a decade really rich for teen movies. So was it an easy sell? And then once you’d got it on the road, you know, what were the challenges that you faced,
Michael: It was not an easy sell. It’s never really an easy sell. At that time. There were a fair number of team movies being made. And there was a little mini explosion of films being made because of financing possibilities that came about through the rise of home video, which was still fairly young. And at that point, a lot of companies were trying to make products that they could put out into video rental stores, and home video. So there was a moment in which the gates opened, kind of for a bit. But people wanted genre films, they wanted things that they can sell easily based on a title, based on a concept. And Heathers is not really that kind of a movie, But it is a teen movie and teen movies were things that were getting financed.
So, we took it out. And people generally understood how good Dan’s script was because it was a phenomenal script. It was extremely well-written. It was very original. It reflected on some, you know, kind of classic black comedies but on its own it was a very idiosyncratic, really unusual piece. And people got it. When they read it, a lot of people got it. But nobody wanted to write the cheque. And I had shown my student film to an executive at New World Pictures, a guy named Steve White, who had a background in comedy. He understood what the script was, he got what it was about, he embraced the darkness of it. And he was willing to make it with a few changes. We also had interest from New Line pictures, which had made John Waters’s movies, but it also made some very successful genre horror pictures. They wanted to make more changes and spend less money. And none of the major studios wanted to have anything to do with it, they didn’t think it was the kind of thing they could do.
So, we were lucky to have one champion at one company that was willing to make the movie, pretty close to the way it was in the script. So that was a big hurdle to overcome. And it was just luck, it was luck that he liked my student film, it was luck that he got along very well with a nice-to-know VR producer. And it was luck that he recognized the qualities of the script and said: I’m going to make this I’m going to figure out how to get you guys some money to make this. You won’t get much but I’ll leave you alone as much as I can.
Helen: And then you went on to make this gem of a movie that is very much beloved by many has had its own musical made, and many other different things, many homages over the years. And in terms of sort of pleasing the teen audience, do you feel that the casting of Winona Ryder and Christian Slater in those two roles were kind of key in that or were there other things that really played a role?
Michael: Casting is always key. In our case, we got very, very lucky. We had a first time director, we were making it for kind of an exploitation film studio. We didn’t have very much money and getting people to even read the script was difficult. So luckily the script was so good that word got out and people read it but we had a very, very hard time finding even actess to cast.
When Daniel Water wrote it had I think he had Jennifer Connelly in mind for Winona’s part, and she would have been great.
Helen: She would have been fantastic.
Michael: So I think we’ve managed to get it as far as her agent and maybe as far as her parents, she was only 16. And we were told no. There was a point at which Justine Bateman who is Jason Bateman’s sister and a fine actress and now a director had been presented with, you know, maybe we could go to her. But that never worked out. And we were searching. We auditioned a lot of people we. We went down a lot of avenues that were closed to us. And the way we got Winona and stop me if this is just too boring, but it was interesting at the time that Michael McDowell, who was one of the writers of Beetlejuicem read the script. He shared an agent with me and Dan Waters and he read the script. He said: this is fucking great. This movie has to get made. And he said I know the perfect person to play Veronica. It’s this girl, Winona Ryder who has a lead role in Beetlejuice. It’s filming right now. And I’d seen Winona in a movie called Square Dance. That was an indie film and, and I’d also seen her in a film…it was a thing with Charlie Sheen. I’m kind of blanking on the name of the movie… [The name of the movie Michael couldn’t remember is Lucas]
Helen: Well look at it and put it in the show notes.
Michael: Yeah. Anyway, I’d seen her in a movie. And I take a note of her and I thought: this girl is really magnetic. And she has a great look. And she comes off as smart. And so I said: Yes, get the script to her. And then I kept saying to everybody in our team, this girl is going to be the one. She’s the one. And she got a hold of the script through Michael McDowell. She read it, she flipped for it. She went to her agent. She said: I want to do this. Her agent said there’s no way I’m going to put you in this movie. And she went around her agent and insisted that she come in and meet. So, when she came to meet with us, it was immediate. You know, there I was getting in an elevator on the way up to the office where the meeting was being held, just before the elevator doors closed. Winona ran up. And she came in the elevator and I looked and I said, you know, hi, nice to meet you. And I thought in my head: this this girl has got to be the one.
Helen: Yeah. And it was just such an amazing dynamic between her and Christians Slater on the screen. One thing from a British perspective, that was really interesting about this film was the language that is used throughout. ‘How very’ – interesting that they’re using that as a kind of way to say cool. But things like, you know, sort of saying to someone that, you know, well fuck me gently with a chainsaw, we were just like, Who talks like this? What is this? I’m a British person. So I, you know, kids don’t really speak like that. Is this reflective of the teenage experience?
Michael: Nobody speaks like that. Nobody speaks like that.
Helen: And so when actors were bringing that to life, what kind of direction did you give them on those kinds of lines?
Michael: Well, the interesting thing is that the cadence of the language and the attitude behind it was very much the way teenagers spoke. And what Dan Waters did was he listened a lot to his sister and her friends. And he picked up on the way they spoke. Dan has a very good ear for dialogue. He’s also way too clever. And he figured out all sorts of ways to create a kind of a, you know, a believable teenage slang. That was not accurate, but was not very far removed. And some of the great things that he invented never even made it into the film. I always remember he, he had an expression: that’s so turbo. And I don’t think is in the movie.
Helen: I love that. I think I might resurrect that.
Michael: But it was such a perfect kind of 80s slang word. At that time, all the cars had turbo engines. He’s brilliant. And he has a great ear for this. And he worked it in. What I found was that we tried as hard as possible to cast actual teenagers. And this was something that that I really felt strongly about. Because at the time, the most successful most-watched teen movies were John uses films, which were great, they were perfect. And they hold up in their classics. He cast 19 and 20-year-olds to routinely to play 16-year-olds and sometimes 25-year-olds to play 16-year-olds. I felt like there would be something special that we would get from casting actual teenagers, if we could find ones who could actually embrace the language and do all that sort of thing. What I learned was that the younger actors had very little problem adapting this language. They took it on as if it was totally real, and they never hesitated. And, you know, they say: how very and that was that, they didn’t try to go how very, you know, there was something in the actual teenage mind that helped with the language. I think
Helen: That’s great. And I think, you know, you saw the results of being of taken one level closer to authentic, than some of the films that we’ve seen before. And there have been I don’t know how many articles and probably several books, I know, I’ve read a few on teen movies that talk about, you know, Heather’s as this kind of anti-John Hughes movie, which of course, it isn’t an anti John Hughes movie, but just that it presented such a different picture to what we’d been shown almost all the way through the 80s. So it wasn’t any kind of, you know, form of protest, it just so happens that it came at the end of a decade, where we’d seen a lot of different portrayals of teenagers. And this was something completely different that nobody else had really explored.
Michael: It is funny, we were all very familiar with the John Hughes movies. And my friends and I were very familiar with John Hughes as a writer from National Lampoon. And we were fans of John Hughes. But I didn’t like those movies very much. Well, that’s not fair. I had, I was ambivalent about them, to say the least. I found them very entertaining. The actors were terrific. They’re great. They were very, you know, they were teenage fantasies, basically, that hooked very well into what it was that teenagers concern themselves with. And they were very much of the time. And I had a bit of a connection to it.
I worked on The Outsiders, which was a movie about teenagers based on a novel. And in The Outsiders, a lot of the Brat Pack kids were cast for the first time. And so I saw this stream of actors go through and I knew some of the people who were involved in making the John Hughes films. But I wasn’t friends with John Hughes. I met him somewhere along the way. A nice guy. I felt like, yeah, I get where those movies are coming from. And they’re not far removed from things I’ve been involved in. But I didn’t want to make one of those. We didn’t want to make a John Hughes movie, we wanted to make something that was a quite a bit darker and quite a bit different in that sensibility.
Helen: Yeah, absolutely. And again, that’s why it stands out so much to people. It’s something that is so different from all those other ones. And I know that several people who were involved with the John Hughes movies have, including Molly Ringwald have come out to talk about some of the scenes that are included in them and how you look back and, like you said, it was very much of its time. I’ve watched Heathers quite recently. And it does, it’s aged very well, in so many respects, because it is really unapologetic, on so many levels. And I think a lot about teenage experience isn’t apologetic, you know. These people are just kind of raw human beings trying to figure out who they are, what’s going on what this world is that they live in. And so bearing in mind that we are a little bit further down the line, and you’ve had probably time to reflect a little bit about the movie. Why do you think it has become one of those movies that just resonates with people so much? Do you think it’s just because it is so different?
Michael: I’m not, I don’t entirely understand it, what I do think is that it is genuinely funny. And the humour holds up, the kind of the biting humour of it that Dan put in the script, and that we’ve managed to find a way to make it work more often than not I suppose. Which is a pretty good ratio. And that so many of the themes that are the source of satire in the movie are still active themes that people concern themselves with, that makes it hold up. But I also think there is an element of this is fun and funny, because it’s a different era. And, you know, it’s, I mean, it’s 35 years old, or however many years old. It is that’s a long time in the world of movies, and a long time in the world of teenage movies. So, you know, when we made the film, there were John Hughes movies. But the if you look back, if you’ve looked back even 20 years before, well, less than 30 years, let’s say 30 years, you’re looking at things like Rebel Without a Cause that no longer had any real relevance. They were classic movies, but they seemed like documents of a past era. I think that’s true of Heathers, but people realize: Oh, my God, they actually had those attitudes back then. People always think that, that, you know, biting satire and hard, dark humor is being invented.
Helen: And because it’s satire, and it’s so biting. I think that’s part of what helps it hold up now. You know, in a way, that some of the ones that were a bit more kind of stony faced about it, don’t. So having done this. Having created this movie, and you know, you’ve worked on so many different projects over the years, and some of which do, again fall into a bracket that teenagers might be interested in, I was wondering if you could give any advice to anybody creative who’s trying to create something for a teenage audience? Is there anything in particular that you gave thought to and still give thought to when you’re doing that?
Michael: Well, I think you have to not speak down to a teenage audience. Teenagers are in a very privileged position. They’re, first of all, they’re smarter than they’ll ever be for the rest of their lives. I don’t know if that’s true scientifically, but it feels as if you’re, they’re coming out of childhood, in which everything they were told what to do, how to feel, how to behave, they were limited in all these ways. And now they’re being given opportunities, gradually, and in some cases, reluctantly, to expand themselves and to become adults, but they’re not yet adults. They still have all the fire, and they have all the naivete of, of children. But they see the world, I think, more accurately than and the rest of us do.
You know, by the time you’re my age, everything is becomes so repetitive. I mean, this is one of the problems of getting old is that the world just keeps presenting you with things that you reinterpret in the same way. And teenagers aren’t like that. They’re looking at the world, the way it’s being presented to them and saying, fuck this, you know? Or, I’m going to take advantage of that. All these attitudes.
Don’t talk down to teenagers, when you make entertainment that’s either about them or directed towards them. You should, as much as you can, if you’re not a teenager yourself, try to recapture how you felt about the world when you were dealing with these things. And you’ll get closer to the the authenticity that I think teenagers want. You know, I can quibble with who it is the teenagers choose to idolize or whatever. But still, generally speaking, their bullshit meters about the world are, are very finely tuned. So you know, remember that, yeah, that makes a really
Helen: That’s really great advice. And yeah, I know what you mean, about being smart. I wish I’d written down everything I knew when I was 18. I’ve never been so wise in my life. It’s been so lovely talking to you. And just before we wrap up, I just would like to let people who are listening know what you’re going to be up to soon because you recently directed an episode of one of my favourite TV shows Veronica Mars, which I enjoyed a great deal. But I was wondering what else you’ve got going on or what’s on the horizon that we can look out for?
Michael: Well, speaking of Veronica Mars, on which I worked with Kristen Bell, who I’m a huge, huge, huge fan of. And I so I did the pilot for the reboot on Hulu, and had a great time. And I’d worked with Kristen before on a House of Lies episode. And we just finished doing an eight-part Netflix limited series called The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window. It is a very dry, dark comedic take on female murder suspense thriller. With Kristen in the lead. I love it. I had such a great time. She is so phenomenal. We did eight episodes.
Helen: That sounds fantastic. And we’ll make sure that everyone knows about the upcoming project in the show notes as well.