I’m not sure if it’s intentional, but it’s really subverting the book because it’s such a boy thing, it could turn into this obsessive male fantasy really.
I think they have some reverence for the girls though and they become these kind of mythic creatures and I was just kind of going with that. Just the heightened drama of the epic-ness of high school, the teenage epic moments of the school dance, all the things, I was going for that feeling and that the girls give these little clues. It’s hard to talk about, but showing their world from the inside that the boys don’t see, but still keeping a distance and a mystique. I felt like I was showing it like the girls presenting themselves to the boys, so there was a connection to them even though the movie is looking at girls from the boy’s perspective.
That’s a theme, obviously, within your work: teenage girls, and even sort of like the complexity and confusion of young female desire. Are you conscious of that? One can argue that you’re always making the same film each time, but obviously they’re all quite different.
Thank you. A lot of artists make the same thing over and over again. And I’m critical of that, like, “Oh, here I am making the same movie again.” But I just make what I’m drawn to and they build on each other. I don’t set out to make work about this. I just go with what interests me. I didn’t have like an agenda. But I was really drawn to doing things that were feminine because I grew up with so many guys and in such a masculine dominated world that I guess I clung to that feminine side of myself. I had brothers and all male cousins, so it’d be me and six or eight boys and they had a louder voice. And all the filmmakers I knew were all these macho guys, so I think I was drawn to making something that was closer to my own experiences.
What about the book struck you enough to want to make it?
I loved his writing and the way he described that time. It was poetic and funny and it felt true to that experience. I also felt a lot of movies didn’t depict teenagers in an authentic or respectful way. I love John Hughes, but …I grew up with “Grease” and they all admit they were in their 30s. I didn’t relate to those teenagers. So I wanted to make something that treated the young audience with sensitivity and respect and had beautiful cinematography. Something thoughtful. Because most of the movies made for teenagers pretty low brow, when I was growing up.
You adapted “The Virgin Suicides” before you even had the rights which they always say is a no-no.
It was really just an experiment to figure out how to adapt a book into a screenplay. I thought I would do the first chapter. I never intended to write the whole script. I had heard my dad talking about [adapting books] and I was curious. I loved this book and I heard someone else was making a movie of it and I was like, “Oh I hope they don’t ruin it. I hope they do it like this.” I wasn’t planning on being a director, I really credit that book into making me into a filmmaker because it was just out of wanting to protect that book that I loved. Then I wrote the script and then through my dad, I met the producers and somehow convinced them to let me direct it. They were really cool and open-minded to give me a shot with very little experience.
The band Air, their score it has such a beautiful dreaminess to it. But they’re obviously a modern group. Where did the inspiration to use them come about?
It was a bit by chance, really. I was in London working on the script and I went to a record store and they had Air’s first album Premiere Symptoms and I just saw the cover and I’d never heard of them and I asked the guy at the store, “Is this a good record?” And when I listened to it, it really felt like the mood. It was helping me write. The more I listened to it I thought, “Oh, maybe I should ask them about making a score.” I’m glad they said yes. It was just really random that I saw the record and bought it.
Kristen Dunst is really candid in the DVD documentaries. She’s self-deprecating and basically suggests she doesn’t know what she’s doing. What was it like working with her at the time?
I loved working with her. She’s just so smart and intuitive she got the character right away. We didn’t even talk about it very much. She just understood that character and it was a side of herself that she was just coming into. She was a teenager too and expressing sides of herself that she hadn’t in a movie before and was just all new to her. But I was impressed with her right away because we just clicked and were on the same page and always had the same sense of humor and sensibility of what we liked and the subtlety. She just conveyed that without counting on me to say much. And we had such fun with it.
Yeah, and you’ve obviously worked together so many times since.
Yeah, but it’s because we have a similar kind of taste and sensibility and I just trust her that she’s not going to do something outside of what I’m thinking.
