Positive Influencer

Real, relevant and riotously funny, Eighth Grade is the first great coming-of-age movie for the Instagram era, and a launchpad for two exciting new voices in American filmmaking. But, you know, NBD. Total Film gets schooled by writer/director Bo Burnham and the film’s breakout star Elsie Fisher.

- Jordan Farley

My approach to the movie was, ‘I’m going to make The Wrestler for a 13-year-old girl,’” chuckles Bo Burnham, the debut writer/director behind Eighth Grade – one of the finest films you’ll see this year, and the best coming-of-age since Boyhood. Burnham may be best known as a comedian, but he isn’t joking (well, maybe a little). As seen through the eyes of Elsie Fisher’s Kayla Day, a student struggling through her last week of classes before graduating to high school, it’s an agonizingly authentic dispatch from the frontlines of contemporary American middle school that treats the teenage experience with gravity and empathy that’s not often seen on screen.

“Even though it is a coming-of-age movie, the impulse was: ‘I’m going to take her experience incredibly seriously,’” Burnham tells Total Film in late December 2018. A few weeks later he will win the Writer’s Guild of America Award for Best Original Screenplay, besting Oscar heavyweights Roma, Vice and Green Book – just recognition for a film criminally overlooked by the Academy Awards. “We’re not going, ‘This is Fast Times At Ridgemont High.’ We’re taking it as seriously as if it’s Saving Private Ryan.”