Bo Burnham Tells Us Why He Made "Eighth Grade" and What's "Horrifying" About His Teenage Fame

"I definitely felt like, 'Oh geez, what am I doing? This could be bad.'"

Bo Burnham is not a 13-year-old girl, and he knows it.

But his first ever feature film, Eighth Grade, is all about that specific teen experience.

"There’s something about being 13; you’re not a young adult, you really are like a child and a young adult," Burnham tells Student Edge.

"I do think it’s a time when your self-awareness is flicked on like a light switch."

In Eighth Grade, that's what happens to Kayla Day, a big-hearted girl eager to grow out of her seemingly endless awkward stage. Elsie Fisher plays Kayla, and she has to navigate a series of hilarious, painful and ultimately relatable encounters. Absolutely triggering to watch, it gets everything about being 13 just right. Basically, with his first at bat, Burnham made a perfect movie.

Still, the stand-up comedian turned writer-director says he was aware this could have been seen as "[not my] story to tell", despite feeling "a connection" to the character of Kayla.

"I definitely felt like, 'Oh geez, what am I doing? This could be bad.'"

That’s where Elsie came in.

"This will be brought to life by an actual 13-year-old girl," he says he told himself before filming, adding Elsie "really provided the truth" to Kayla.

"Elsie understood that being shy isn’t cowering in a corner. Being shy is wanting to speak at every moment and not being able to."

Fisher, now 15, also helped Burnham expel all the old person parts from the script too.

"I had written a bunch of Facebook into the movie, and she told me, 'No one uses Facebook', so we changed that."

Fisher, for her part, has been rewarded with a Golden Globe nod. She told Vanity Fair she celebrated by "getting some video games and some records, and taking a fat nap," which is additionally #relatable content.

Even with Fisher’s assistance, Bo says he "wasn’t whistling along going, 'No problems here.'"

"I was well aware of the responsibility I had."

That 'responsibility' meant making the rare high school film to focus on female adolescence. (Quick, list the male equivalents and realise how easily you run out of fingers to count.) It also meant not shying away from puberty, sex and the dangers of growing-up while everything's documented on social media.

"Our grandparents are so lucky that their black-and-white photos don’t talk back to them, because it would probably be pretty embarrassing," he says.

"They might say some pretty insensitive stuff that wouldn’t fly right now."

In this way, Bo has something very specific in common with aspiring YouTuber Kayla. Burnham first became famous as a teen with an uncanny knack for musical comedy on that very same platform. And though his skills evolved over time, and he delivered a masterful commentary on the genre in his stand-up special Make Happy, he is now, at age 28, reckoning with the fact that not all of it holds up under a more 'woke' glare.

"Oh yeah, I mean, it’s horrifying, but I’m so, so grateful for them that I would not change a thing," he says.

"I’m happy to be what I am now. But if you had what you thought was funny at 16 years old immortalised… it’s not great," he laughs.

"Part of the movie was probably an exercise in me wanting to go back and maybe forgive myself or something. We’re gonna have to do that as a society at some point, when all of our politicians 20 years from now have everything they’ve ever said since they were 12 years old immortalised on the internet. We’re gonna have to call an amnesty and say like, ‘Alright, we were all figuring it out.'

"How do we fail out loud when it’s recorded forever?"

He also sees value in having at least some of that awkwardness recorded for posterity.

"I think it’s a really helpful exercise as a kid to articulate the version of yourself you wish you could be, out loud, in the air in front of you, before you can actually live it in action," he says.

And for real kids who are like Kayla—so lonely in real life, and whose only tether to other people is Instagram and YouTube—he believes social media can also be something of a lifeline.

"There’s gotta be a middle ground here where we admit [social media’s] pretty dangerous and caused some problems but it’s also connected all of us and given a voice to people who aren’t able to have a voice."

Eighth Grade takes place over Kayla’s last week at 'middle school', which isn't really a thing in Australia. No biggie. The transitional period she’s living through will be familiar to any Aussie.

Nonetheless, I told Bo that many of our local high schools see Year 6s and 7s sharing a campus with Year 12s, to which he had only one reply: "Wow, wow, wow."

"When 18-year-olds are hanging around 14-year-olds, that’s just a little strange to me," he says, before conceding, "maybe the kids are looking after each other and stuff."

"I’m not gonna be lecturing, as an American, any other country on their school system."

Maybe we should let him. Eighth Grade is that good. So was Make Happy, which ended with a brilliant Kanye-inspired rant-song about the contract between a stand-up and a stand-up’s audience, and which seemed to indicate he was leaving stand-up behind for good. (Key lyric: "Come and watch the skinny kid with a steadily declining mental health, and laugh as he attempts to give you what he cannot give himself.")

The question is: Does he now feel like there's a different relationship between Bo, the filmmaker, and the audiences who watch his film?

"I definitely always feel like I owe someone something," he says.

"The most obvious contract, which is completely liberating, is the contract in a comedy show basically that you need to make the audience make a very specific sound at least two to three times a minute, and you don’t need to do that in a movie, which is nice. You don’t always have to make people laugh.

"The real difference is that I am the subject of my comedy show. I just am, because I’m performing it. That is the subject: me. And I am not the subject of this movie, and this movie is not just made by me. It’s made by other people. And a really beautiful part of this movie was just being able to disappear into it and behind it.

"I can’t watch my stand-up, because all I see is myself and it stresses me out. I watch this movie and all I see is [Elsie's] performance."

Eighth Grade opens in select Australian cinemas 3 January 2019 (Luna Leederville in WA; Cinema Nova & Elsternwick Classic in VIC; Dendy Newtown & Palace Chauvel Cinema in NSW; and Palace Nova East End Cinema in SA).

Header Image: Sony Pictures