KE: What concerns did you have being a grown-up man telling this kind of story? I mean, I think you did a very good job with it, I think a lot of people agree with me, but what was it like when you decided you were going to make a story about a 13-year-old girl, and how are you the person who can help tell that story?

BB: Sure. It would be easier to ask, “What weren’t my concerns about myself?” I was very aware of what I was doing. I was like, “Oh shit, is this what I’m writing about?” But, you know, I knew that I would cast real eighth graders and I would let them author it, and it was really just me hopefully being a barrier to everything that would infringe upon their truth. Just letting them sort of speak for themselves and giving them enough structure so it feels… Because the content that they make online is so incredible and alive, but if you string together all their Musical.ly clips, it’s not going to work as a feature-length clip, you know what I mean? So, I’ll impose a little bit of structure and things, but I really do think the truth of the movie is theirs and spoken by them.

And all of my fear of not being able to connect to her specifically, which I had—God, so many answers to this—were obliterated when I met Elsie, which was like, “Oh, we’re the same person. I am so much more similar to you than 98% of men my own age,” and that’s truthful. The balance to be struck now, which is an interesting question that people are thinking about and talking about and I don’t quite know the answer to, the needle to thread is, and what I tried to be aware of, was can you recognize that there is a specific lived-in experience of this film, specifically of young women, that I cannot know fundamentally, which I think is true, but also for men, and men in the arts, to recognize themselves in women and not just other them in a sense of… I never sat down and thought, “Okay, imagine if this was happening to my daughter or my sister or my mother.” I hate that shit. I hate that men are like forced to see women through that prism as opposed to like, “Imagine if it was happening to you.” So, to be respectful ultimately of what I couldn’t know, but then also to trust that I could recognize myself, because the movies that have meant the most to me, the movies I have most personally resonated with, are movies that I don’t demographically align with.

KE: Talk to me about finding Elsie. I know you looked for Kayla for a very long time and you met a long of great actresses, but then, you know, there’s Elsie.

BB: Yeah, and she was—I mean, she was the second person in the room, but she was the first person on my initial email to Allison Jones, our casting director, where I was like, “I really think this person might be it.” I found a little clip of her online being interviewed on some weird thing talking about, like, brownies or something, and she was just immediately arresting and real and alive. I didn’t know if she could—how much control she had over what she was to be able to put it in a film. It ends up she has all of the control, truly. People think the film is improvised, I can show you nine takes of the opening monologue where she stumbles in the same place. But yeah, she walked into the room and it was just, like, the lights were on. I mean, the movie was—and I met a lot of young actors who were fabulous, wonderful young actors––but everyone else who read it felt like they were a confident kid pretending to be shy, and she felt like a shy kid pretending to be confident, which is what it actually is. She understood what shyness was deeply. Because shyness isn’t cowering in a corner and not wanting to speak, shyness is wanting to speak at every moment and not being able to. It’s the classic actor thing of, “Don’t play the obstacle,” you know what I mean? “Don’t try not to speak. Try to put yourself out there at every moment.” So, she took a character that could be seen as very passive and blank and imbued her with a lot of truth and meaning.

I remember showing my girlfriend Elsie’s audition and her saying, like, “This is the first time… This is the first time I’m hearing the words.” When Elsie spoke, you just understood what she was saying, and it was all just so meaningful, and to be able to bring all of yourself into a role is so incredible, I think. She carried the whole thing. She was the lighthouse for the whole film. Every department, everyone, we all just looked at her and were like, “This is the bar for the realism in the movie and the truth of the movie.”

KE: This was a huge collaborative effort between the two of you. What were some of the specific things you and Elsie worked on together?

BB: Um, everything. There’s little funny things where it was, like, I had written all of her DMs on Facebook, and she read the script and was like, “No one uses Facebook anymore.” So, I put that in the script, and I didn’t put that in the scene. She read it and was like, “Is this about my aunt?” Really every moment is authored by her, and what we did is, we rehearsed with Josh [Hamilton]. I rehearsed with her and Josh because that was something that had to feel familiar, but then the rest of the movie, we rehearsed together. I would just be all the parts, and she would be her, and we would just—that was just to figure out what was feeling right and what made sense and to feel like, for her, that I was in the scenes with her, and if anything ever sounded wrong or didn’t feel right, it was always the script’s fault. Like, we always knew that was what needed to change. But, yeah, just everything. She would collaborate without having to actively say things.

KE: There is a scene in the film that a lot of people have been talking about, which is that scene in the car. It’s really so beautifully played because it’s so honest. Can you talk a little bit about that scene?

BB: Yeah, um… It’s interesting. It’s obviously a very intense scene and very loaded. Honestly, in making it, it wasn’t as particularly loaded as it appears in the film. Not to say that it wasn’t treated carefully, it’s just that other stuff was as well. Like, the banana scene, which plays funny or whatever, that was not treated funny on the day. It’s like a kid doing something sexually suggestive on a set full of adults. That was a closed set. Before we did that scene, I took the crew outside and was like, “I know this appears funny on paper. You are not to make any jokes about this. This is an incredibly vulnerable position this kid’s being in.” A kid in a one-piece bathing suit walking in. You know what I mean? You have kids in bathing suits when you’re filming. You have to be very conscious of things the entire time. So, we tried to treat everything very sensitively.

But that scene in particular in the movie… A lot of the movie is trying to do it, but I think it’s the real high-stakes version of it, which is trying to legitimize the subjective experience of something that maybe on paper seems very small. You can picture her—and this really was in the news recently, you know, with [Christine] Blasey Ford and everything—you can picture her, saying that experience 10 years later and being like, “What, he sat in the back seat with you and he touched your arm and you said, ‘No,’ and he stopped? Like, nothing happened.” But when you sit with her in the moment, you realize it doesn’t have to be anywhere near on-paper criminal to be incredibly violating and incredibly emotionally violent.

And it’s owed to the young actors for making that feel so real. And to Daniel [Zolghadri], too. Daniel really doesn’t get enough credit because I think he does such a nice job of… You know, that kid could have been played as some sort of bro-y, typical, like, PSA-type of backwards baseball cap, or whatever, the thing you’ve seen. He imbues him with a lot of humanity, where you see, like, he’s a sensitive kid. He may have been like Kayla, he really understands her, and it isn’t always just the kid you fear. Maybe it’s the sensitive, quiet kid who really understands you and is wielding that very understanding against you in every moment because he knows exactly what you’re worried about and exactly what you fear. So, yeah, but um… They just did really—both of them just did really beautiful, beautiful work. But on the day, it’s just being very, very communicative. Talking to Elsie and Daniel, and Elsie’s father who’s there—but Elsie knew what she was doing and knew what the scene would mean, and the purpose of it, and what it would hopefully mean for young people—boys, girls, and especially boys—to watch that scene, hopefully.