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THN Talks Teen Movies With ‘Beyond Clueless’ Director Charlie Lyne

Beyond Clueless

Premiering at SXSW earlier this year, BEYOND CLUELESS is a documentary which journeys into the  mind, body and soul of the teen movie, as seen through the eyes of over 200 modern coming-of-age classics. Narrated by cult teen star Fairuza Balk and with an original score by Summer Camp the film will delight teen movie fans as they reminisce over their favourites. THN spoke to director Charlie Lyne after the film was presented at Sheffield Doc/Fest 2014.

Congratulations on the movie; it’s great to see teen movies like LOSER back on the big screen; who doesn’t love that!

This is the great thing, everyone comes out and wants to thank me for putting a specific film in and it’s always a different one. No-one’s ever mentioned LOSER to me before so yeah, it’s very vindicating.

What’s the usual movie people mention?

Honestly there isn’t one, everyone is very idiosyncratic. Someone will come out and be like ‘finally – someone has raised THE RAGE: CARRIE 2 as high art’ and having them always come up with something new is very satisfying. It’s a very specific thing to the teen genre I think; it’s not a genre defined by titan movies, it’s a genre defined by its’ smaller movies.

So why teen moves; what drew you to that genre?

I think like everyone else I grew up with them; it’s hard not to! I’d reached that point, as I think everyone does, where I’d started to rediscover movies I’d loved as an adolescent and you have that strange simultaneous feeling of feeling quite nostalgic and affectionate towards these films but also sightly scared or baffled by these films that meant one thing when you were fourteen and an entirely new thing now. That kind of odd double feeling; very satisfied but also intrigued and scared. I was fascinated by rediscovering all these films and finding out what they mean to me now and wanted to present that in some way to the world and the best way to do it seemed to be to create something that could get as close as possible to the feeling of an actual teen movie. I think also with a genre that is so often thought of as a bit frivolous and frothy there is a real risk that people can think you’re being condescending of the genre and I didn’t want to go anywhere near that so I wanted to, if possible, to create something that would clearly be a tribute to the genre while also criticising and analysing it.

There’s a huge variety of movies in the film; how did you define a ‘teen movie’ for your purposes?

We were always keen to keep it as broad as possible so that we could encapsulate a genre that is very broad and really isn’t defined by any one particular tonality; the teen genre is as comfortable with comedy as horror or drama or anything else and it’s kind of unique in that sense in that it’s defined only by the age range that it covers. Our one criterion was that a film had to in some way grapple with the sense of what it means to be an adolescent and the sense of what it is to be in that transformative time in your life which was great as it really opened it up for us. It meant we could look at movies as disparate as JEEPERS CREEPERS and MEAN GIRLS; which I think are both equally as important aspects of that genre. Often the weirder more ‘genre’ movies are the most interesting ones to talk about – teen horror especially is absolutely rife with bizarre psycho-sexual underpinnings. I kept using the phrase ‘beneath the surface’ but some of them it’s blatantly on the surface; no digging required! It’s like therapy for me as much as analysis of the films themselves because you watch it thinking ‘what was going on in my head that I never realised this when I was 15’. I watched this and just thought ‘oh yeah that’s fine’ so it’s definitely been a personal discovery along the way.

So did you have a plan going into it of the movies you wanted to cover?

We started out with a list of about 100 films that I drew up from memory and within 3 months that had ballooned to 300 because the second you go down that path you are immediately introduced to so many films you’ve never even heard of. We might load up the IMDB profile of Freddie Prince Jr. and suddenly be confronted with 25 more movies that we wanted to cover and a lot of money was spent on Amazon and a lot of money was spent on every possible regional variety of Amazon importing all these films and it was a long journey! I would go to parties and start talking to people about what I’m doing and they’d instantly say ‘You’ve got to be covering SUMMER CATCH; have you not seen SUMMER CATCH?’ so I’d be returning home with notepads full of films that I knew I had to somehow seek out the next day and trawl my way through!

What was your best undiscovered gem?

There were so many; it was incredible and that’s what nice about having a big response to the genre is that even the most informed teen movie enthusiast will find something in there that is slightly a blind spot for them. For me there were so many films but IDLE HANDS was not a film I’d ever seen as a teenager and that was an incredible moment of discovery for me. Another one is DISTURBING BEHAVIOUR; it was one of those twin movies like DANTE’S PEAK and VOLCANO where it came out just after THE FACULTY and was very similar to that film so it got completely lost and no-one ever saw it. I just dug it out along with a million other Katie Holmes movies and was absolutely amazed by how many indelible images there are in that film and certain sequences that just summed up better than anything else a particular trope or feeling that we were trying to get at. There’a a sequence early on in the film where we wanted to echo that classic scene where you have the different cliques in the cafeteria and that was in the script from very early on but never really tied to a particular movie. I had in mind all the obvious ideas like MEAN GIRLS and CRUEL INTENTIONS but then I watched DISTURBING BEHAVIOUR and knew we had to use that one; it so perfectly gets across that idea but it just never entered the pop culture film canon in the way that those other movies did. People come up to now and say ‘thank God you got DISTURBING BEHAVIOUR in there’ so that’s the brilliance of the teen genre; even thought that movie never really sunk in, for some people that’s the most important movie in the world.

In terms of your title, BEYOND CLUELESS, you don’t really talk about CLUELESS in the documentary – what was it about CLUELESS that made it the starting point for you?

We knew going in that we had to pick a certain era to cover; we so wanted to create a world to be invited in to so we knew we had to have continuity; it was never going to work cutting between Devon Sawa and James Dean – there would have been a jarring effect there. The 90’s/00’s era seemed perfect to us a) because we’re all in our twenties and it’s the era we’ve grown up with but also because it’s by far the broadest era of teen movies. It’s the era when teen movies were finally allowed to branch out and become everything they could possibly be and twice as many teen movies were made in the 90’s/00’s than the 80s. With CLUELESS; I would hazard a guess that 90% of the films we included would not exist without that movie. It came at a time when the teen genre had fallen into such disrepute and was an absolute box office disaster. No-one was making teen movies; it was a terrifying thing to even attempt and so for CLUELESS to come along and be such a smash critically, at the box office, in every imaginable way just completely convinced studios that there was life there and that they should commission teen movies and they should let people take risks with teen movies; that one film is pretty much responsible for the ten glorious years of teen movie output that followed. At the same time CLUELESS is a movie that knows itself so well that actually it’s pointless to really analyse; the best way to think about and talk about CLUELESS is just to sit down and watch it – there wasn’t much point us actually getting into it. It’s a movie that I love and that is absolutely responsible for this movies’ existence even though it doesn’t factor into it majorly.

What fuelled the decision to essentially ignore the history of teen movies and a figure as seminal as John Hughes?

We really didn’t want to make a historical documentary. The history of the teen genre is very interesting but what we wanted to do was talk about the psychology of these movies; what they think and the way that they think and how that impacts on a whole generation of young people. To us, the history of it was besides the point. Which isn’t to say I couldn’t sit here and reel off a million anecdotes about the production of those films that I find fascinating but we made a conscious decision early on to avoid that. We wanted to make a teen movie and what better way to do that than disregard all the stuff that was happening behind the scenes and just go in and talk about the characters and talk about the way they feel, what they do and what that means for the viewer.

How did having Fairuza Balk narrating the movie come about?

It was right from the beginning. I remember an afternoon I spent during the Kickstarter campaign and I went for a drink with a friend and him saying ‘well you’ve got to get Fairuza Balk to narrate it’ – she’s got that voice that is so distinctive and so indicative of that era and that sense of being in a teen movie but being a bit of an outsider. Pretty much day 1 we started making the film we had a list up on the wall of ideal people to narrate the films and she was top of the list. Being on such a tiny budget and working so independently we had to make the whole film before we approached people to come on-board. It was a scary process as we had 10 months or so making this film with her name up on the wall and you can’t help but hear everything you write in her voice and thinking there’s a very real chance she won’t go for it. We were just incredibly fortunate that when we took it to her she was up for doing it. It would be a very different film without her. She’s got that perfect voice; she’s very familiar and iconic in a way and associated with those films to such a large extent  but equally she feels a little bit more withdrawn than the average teen movie star and she gets at a certain uncanny unease that was important to us.

Another integral part of teen movies is their soundtrack; how did Summer Camp get involved?

I mentioned earlier we so wanted to make a teen movie, as well as a documentary about the teen movie, and what are teen movies without their soundtracks? They are so completely integral and I had been a massive fan of Summer Camp for years; their first album is very heavily teen movie influenced, they’ve got tracks on there named after characters from HEATHERS and My So Called Life, so I knew they had analogous pop cultural interests to mine. Again, I was really lucky that when I went to them and said I’d love you to be a part of this and craft this with me… I really didn’t want to make a film and then bring it someone who would compose music to go over the top of it, I wanted the composer to be as involved in the creation of the film as I was. They came on board and really they were writers, directors and producers as much as I was. They crafted so much of the film and for every track where I would come to them with a sequence they came to me and gave me something to work from. It really was a beautiful back and forth process that I relished.

You mentioned the Kickstarter campaign; how was that as an experience?

Completely incredible. It’s a really strange device but I think for a film like this, and it’s not perfect for every project, but for a film like this it’s perfect. We were all coming in as people who had never made a film before and it would have been very difficult to go to traditional funding bodies and convince them that we were capable of making a film. We were blessed by a subject matter that a lot of people are incredibly close to. We went to people and said you may have a vague familiarity with me; I worked as a film critic before so I had a certain amount of people who knew my work and maybe trusted that that would convert into some sort of filmmaking ability. Summer Camp obviously have quite a significant following that they were able to go to but really at the end of the day the thing that clinched it was enough people who thought ‘I love these movies too, I would like to see a movie where they are interrogated and spoken about like proper works of art’. We had 500 people come on-board and give us small amounts of money that totaled up to enough to make the film. We’ve had screenings in Texas, Toronto and everywhere and every time there’s been a backer in the audience and it’s been so nice to be able to say to them your £5 genuinely made this possible so it’s been absolutely fantastic.

There’s been so much discussion here at Sheffield Doc/Fest about funding; whether filmmakers going to continue down more traditional routes anymore, what are your thoughts on that?

For certain projects absolutely; I’m working on another project now and I’m not going down the crowd funding route. Not because I’ve grown tired of it or anything I just think for certain projects, like BEYOND CLUELESS, it is 100% the right thing to do and for certain others it doesn’t work. You look at something like Kickstarter which has been around for 5 years and already you look at the wealth of films that have come into being and won awards and won Oscars and become massive incredible films that would never have happened otherwise; just because there was this thing that effectively allowed people to buy into the movie before it was made and it’s just fantastic.

Talking of the future, we aren’t really seeing teen movies being made at the moment. What do you think of the future of the teen movie genre? Is it dead in the water?

I think it’s coming back. I think the teen genre naturally has peaks and troughs and the whole era that we look at followed quite a significant trough of the early 90s where no-one was making teen movies and it really was a dire time for it. Then it came back in a big way and died again. It’s always going to be the way but I think the thing that I always hold up as the most solid indication that the teen genre is in good health is if adults are getting upset about it. You look recently at something like PROJECT X and the way that outraged tabloids wrote very upset pieces about that movie. To be honest I wasn’t a big fan of that movie but that’s because I am now the adult; I am the guy who is not meant to appreciate the modern teen movie and so I always think whenever a teen movie is coming out and massively appealing to teenagers – to the sum of more than 100 million dollars in the case of PROJECT X – but confusing and angering adults; that’s a good sign!

We couldn’t finish without one last question; what’s your favourite teen movie?

Like all the people who come up to me after screenings and thank me for showing their favourite teen movie ever, my favourite teen movie is not a particularly well-regarded film but it features very heavily in BEYOND CLUELESS and it’s EUROTRIP. Purely because it is the definitive example of what we were getting at in the film which is something that means one thing to you when you are 15 and an entirely different thing to you 10 years later and that movie is what inspired this whole thing. It’s the film that stayed with me over 10 years of my life and evolved with me and became an entirely different beast and I genuinely think is a masterpiece of comic timing and plotting and is so well put together and is very harshly regarded, unfairly. It’s a perfect teen movie because it seems frothy, fun and frivolous and actually there is a whole wealth of stuff going on beneath the surface that just resonates with teenagers to an extent that is so powerful – that’s what we wanted to get at so that’s why it means so much to me.

BEYOND CLUELESS will be screening at various upcoming festivals and you can find out more information here.

Originally from deep in the London suburbs Vicky is now enjoying the novelty of being able to catch a night bus home from anywhere in the city. Her favourite films are anything John Hughes is involved in, SAY ANYTHING and DEAD POETS SOCIETY. Don't mention the rumour she once served cold tea to Robert Webb and Olivia Coleman. Find her on twitter @chafferty

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