Bo Burnham: Eighth Grade director on relating to 13-year-old girls

At only 28 years old, Bo Burnham is winning accolades for his first movie. It’s probably not what everyone expected when he got his break.

In 2006, when he was 16 years old, Bo Burnham uploaded a video of himself onto YouTube.

It was titled “My Whole Family” and featured Burnham seated at a keyboard in his bedroom, decked out in a blue T-shirt and neck chain, singing that his whole family thinks he’s gay.

“The goddamn question just won’t go away and I get asked every single day,” he crooned as he stared at the camera.

Originally made for his family, that video racked up millions of views and he became something of a viral sensation, back in the days when that was barely a thing. He continued to make what he called “pubescent musical comedy”, taking on sexuality, gender and race in a satirical, irreverent way.

In the 12 years since then, Burnham’s had a flourishing comedy career — touring, releasing four albums, winning awards — and then started acting in movies and on TV, including in The Big Sick alongside Kumail Nanjiani.

The leap to writing and directing his first movie seemed quick, but the film, Eighth Grade, is an accomplished and emotional affecting piece of work that hints at a maturity Burnham’s still tender 28 years belies.

Elsie Fisher stars as Kayla Day in Eighth Grade, a role for which she’s won several accolades

Opening in Australia this week, Eighth Grade debuted at the illustrious Sundance Film Festival almost a year ago, before going on to enjoy a theatrical release in the US, Independent Spirit Award nominations and being picked by the American Film Institute as one of the top 10 films of 2018.

It’s an extraordinary achievement for a first-time writer and director.

Eighth Grade tells the story of Kayla Day (Elsie Fisher), a 13-year-old girl in the last days of middle school who, like Burnham, makes YouTube videos. But hers aren’t widely watched and her earnest advice to “be yourself” and to “be confident” is exactly what her own social anxiety prevents her doing.

Eighth Grade has been praised for being a thoughtful and humanist portrait of an awkward time in most people’s lives. Burnham, who started suffering from anxiety when he was 20, says he wrote the script because he could relate to this 13-year-old girl character that formed in his head.

Bo Burnham’s big break came on YouTube

“I was interested in the experience of what it means to have to live your life out loud and self-chronicle your own journey as a kid, which is something I feel now,” he tells news.com.au. “I experience the pressures [teenagers] experience, I just have the adult faculties to deal with it.

“And I can barely deal with it, let alone when I was their age.

“Eighth Grade started in a place where it was like they were a new alien generation that I was trying to understand. I realised that they can change the world and invent the internet but being 13 is still being 13 and your body is exploding and your mind is mash potatoes and you’re panicked the whole time.

“So I had to discover the commonality rather than the differences between us.”

Burnham’s empathy for this “alien generation”, a brood of kids who, from the outside, seem forever glued to the world in their devices, is what fuels Eighth Grade’s sincerity. It never feels like he’s judging them and their choices.

“A lot of teen movies feel like they’re made for teenagers and not about them,” he says. “Space movies aren’t made for astronauts. I wanted to treat it honestly because they are as worthy a subject to talk about the human condition as anybody.

“And I think everyone should be able to see themselves in her whether you’re actually her or a 40-year-old guy.”

Eighth Grade has been nominated for four Independent Spirit Awards, including Best First Screenplay for Burnham

So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Burnham feels like he relates more to a 13-year-old girl than a boy that same age.

“With girls, at least in their online presence, was a little more interesting and complicated. They tend to self-analyse more. I think boys that age like to ask ‘What do you like?’ and girls ask ‘What are you like?’

“I felt that to me, as a 28-year-old guy that’s in my head, thinking about myself all the time, I had more in common with the 13-year-old girls than 13-year-old boys.

“My anxiety didn’t hit me until I was 20 or so — so the girls were ahead of me on that.”

It was young teenage girls coming up to him after his comedy shows and telling them they felt the same way as him that made him realise that this experience he had with anxiety and introspection wasn’t unique to him, and sharing Eighth Grade with people will hopefully make people feel less alone.

“Movies and art do that really well — let people know their experience is shared, beyond gender or time or circumstance.”

Bunham (left) in a scene in 2017 rom-com The Big Sick

He said the year he’s spent promoting Eighth Grade, hearing feedback from people, has been long but incredible.

“Every step of it has been beyond what we thought we would do. You want people to hopefully connect to it — it’s been incredibly meaningful.

“Being that age is a very formative time for people — you don’t tend to look back on it as much as other times. You kind of romanticise your high school or college years, but you bury being 13 years old. And now it’s drumming up these feelings you try to forget a little bit.”

In Eighth Grade, Kayla records videos for her future self to go inside a time capsule, messages of encouragement.

Asked what he would tell his 13-year-old self if he could make him a video, Burnham, after worrying about inadvertently killing himself through the butterfly effect, says: “I would tell him to relax a little bit and maybe think about other people a bit more.

“I would tell him to drink more water and stop eating those sugar tubes.”

Eight Grade is in cinemas from today.

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