Fresh out of film school, director Amy Heckerling hit the ground running in the early '80s. Her first feature, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, remains a classic for its delicate balance of absurdity and pathos and the way it treats its characters with bemused-older-sibling affection laced with comic incredulity. Her next few features were more uneven, the humor generally broader and the emotional stakes often less engaging, but they also had their moments, reflecting the director's quick wit and love of larger-than-life characters, and they never sold their female characters short. In 1996, Heckerling returned to form with Clueless, another brilliant high school comedy—this one written as well as directed by her—that deeply respects and understands its female characters at the same time that it laughs at their, well, cluelessness. This week, I had a chance to speak with Heckerling, who was promoting a retrospective of four of her films by the Metrograph theater in the Lower East Side. Quick to laugh, with a sense of mischief and a lack of interest in mincing words that may explain why she's so drawn to young characters, the filmmaker discussed gender inequality in Hollywood and what movies have in common with the economy.
Fast Times and Clueless are great in so many ways, but what I especially love about them is how well they get American teenage girls, and in such a fun away.
In a fun way is the different thing. There were so many movies about teenage girls. It's a scary, depressing time for a lot of people, and a lot of movies capture that brilliantly. But they may not be as happy. When we came out [with Clueless], there was this movie Kids...
The Larry Clark one?
Yeah. And people were saying, “Oh, you've captured American kids,” and I'm going, “Well, that one did too. It's just, I chose those kids.” [laughs] There are a million stories in the naked city, and I gravitated to the happiest one.
Actually, some pretty tough stuff happens in Fast Times. But the overall tone of it is always comic.
If you're doing something very real, you've got to be wary, like [Jennifer Jason Leigh's Stacy] getting pregnant. There's just so far you can take something like that, in terms of what you'll show and say and how you photograph it, because the rest of the film has these other elements, and it has to be kept up in the air. So, you know, the tone can't go too far.
You weren't the only woman making movies with fully realized female characters in the early '80s, but you may have been the best. And you were coming after such a drought for women, both behind and in front of the camera, after World War II.
There was Ida Lupino. But then there was a long [dry spell]. But then when the baby boomer executives got in there, they were very liberal and political and feminist, there was kind of a switch, allowing women in more. And there was Joan Micklin Silver and Claudia Weill and, I think, Joan Rivers did a movie, and a writer woman did a movie with Talia Shire, and Jane Wagner did a movie with Lily Tomlin. So you’d go around and see posters: “That’s by a woman; that’s by a woman.” It wasn’t so unusual. But I think once they did that, if they didn’t have the results that they wanted, that wasn’t like, “We didn’t develop that movie right,” or “That wasn’t the right person to be in it,” or any of that. It was always, “Well, it was women.” That was the answer. So that shut down.
Lately, there’s been a push for more jobs and more roles for women. The ACLU is investigating gender discrimination in Hollywood, and there’s the Shit People Say to Women Directors Tumblr, and Geena Davis keeps track every year of how many speaking parts women get compared to men. So I’m wondering: Do you feel like it’s coming back to where it’s a little easier for women to make movies about women, or is it still harder now than it was back in the early ‘80s?
Well, another thing that’s happened is that there was a recession, so there’s less money and you can take less risks. There used to be a healthy middle class of movies, medium-sized movies that told human stories, and then there were the big tent-pole movies, and then there were the indies, which you may or may not get to see. But the middle class of movies is gone. Maybe it’s coming back a little. But that was the area in which women told human stories that had a better chance of having strong female characters.
And they didn’t require a huge amount of funding, so it was easier to make them.
Yeah. And when that went away, the women had to go to the indie ghetto. And when you look at the tent poles, there’s like a female at the end of Batman v Superman, but she doesn’t say very much. There are some more females getting into the leotard movies, but it’s still geared toward a young [male] audience. You know, every economy needs a strong middle class.
Strong female characters and female friendships and a female point of view are kind of baked into pretty much all your work. Is that just what you were interested in so that’s what you wrote or said yes to, or is that something you were consciously doing to some degree, because you saw there wasn’t enough of that out there? And did you have to fight to do that?
Well, for Fast Times I have to give a lot of props to Cameron Crowe, because he wrote a screenplay that had six major characters, two of them are women, and he knew them and he talked to them and they were real. When I came on, we talked a lot more about that and added things, so that I felt very good about that. The film was produced by a man, and the studio was Thom Mount, and Art Linson was the producer. Those were men who were very open to a woman’s input. They were all very cool. And there were big male stories [in the film], about the loss of prestige at work, going from the best to the worst burger joint [laughs], and the slacker and his bouts with authority. Those were strong stories for the guys, and I was very much into them, so they didn’t feel like all I cared about was the girl stuff.
Of course, after that people came to me saying, “Oh, you’re a woman?” And so I got offered a lot of girls-losing-their-virginity movies. But I didn’t want to do that.
You don’t want to be ghettoized as a woman director doing women’s stories.
Yeah. I really, really wanted to do something not female, and one of the genres I’ve always loved was gangster movies, because I’m madly in love with James Cagney. And there was this script that Mel Brooks had developed—actually, I don’t know if Mel was involved with it, but his people. But after Blazing Saddles, it was like: “Let’s do this to gangsters.” I loved the script, and I wasn’t the person that you would normally think of for it, but I knew all the references, and I could go on about the genre. So they let me do it. And that was Johnny Dangerously, and there were no girls losing their virginity. I had made a real effort to step away from what they wanted to put me into. As it turned out, it didn’t work. A billion years later some people tell me they like it, but I couldn’t even watch it for decades because, to me, it represented something that I loved a lot that got changed a lot that didn’t help me. But I’m not sorry I didn’t take one of the girls-losing-their-virginity movies.
You told The A.V. Club: “A lot of my movies were completely destroyed by the censors, who can be pretty arbitrary. They’re not completely fair with how they treat one person vs. another.” Can you elaborate on that?
I’ll go see a Sasha Baron Cohen film—and I love him, because he’s hilarious—and there’ll be 10 minutes of full-frontal dicks. And I’ll go, “What? That’s allowed? And it’s not an X?” And when I had a sex scene in Fast Times and she takes off her panties, he takes off his thing, I had full-frontal nudity. Because when I grew up, and I wasn’t allowed to see these movies, but I had read that there was a sexual revolution happening [laughs], and from what I could see, that meant that women are naked and men aren’t. I didn’t think that was fair. And I thought, “Well, maybe if there’s a female making those movies, men can be naked too. And women will be the ones that are more hidden.” So I had a scene where you saw her from the side and you saw him from the front and then they went at it, and it was a horrible experience. Because I wasn’t trying to be sexy.
Is this the scene with Mike and Stacy?
Yes. I wanted to show that your first sexual experience isn’t, like, soft music and out-of-focus breasts. It’s scary. There’s that thing that you don’t see very much of, and suddenly it’s there and it’s going to go into you, and that’s horrifying at first. So it wasn’t like I was trying to be, like, nasty or exploitive. I was trying to say that this is what a young girl’s first experience is like.
And they said, “No, you can’t show the male organ.” And I said, “How come it’s okay for an R-rated film to have a naked female from the front, but not a naked guy?” And they said, “The male organ is aggressive and the female organ isn’t.” The studio wanted to go down to Washington and argue with whoever is in charge of all of that, but our post-production executive there in the field, she had cancer, and it was very hard for her to get up the stairs to the cutting room, so was I really going to go, “Hey, I really want a dick in my film, so let’s go down to Washington?” [laughs]
Do you think if you tried to do that now it would be easier because times have changed, or do you think it’s just easier for Sasha Baron Cohen to do it than it is for you?
No, no. Sasha Baron Cohen can do it because that’s not sexual. You can have a whole parade of dicks if they’re not thinking about sex.
Fast Times is such a classic, and so many of the people who were involved have huge careers, but at the time that you made it, I’m guessing it just seemed like a little throwaway film. It was your first feature and Cameron Crowe’s first screenplay, and you were both not much more than kids yourself. How did you get involved with it?
I knew the producer, Art Linson. He had shown me some other things he was working on, and we’d talk about them, because we both had offices at Universal. And he was way cool, and very open to young people. He showed me that, and I was saying what I thought of the theme and what I thought could be done and ideas I had. And he said, “I’m going to talk to the studio about you.” I didn’t even know he was thinking about me in that way. So that was great. And then I met Cameron, and he was amazing.
You’ve always been so great at casting really good actors. A lot of them weren’t really known when you first worked with them, or weren’t known for the kind of role you cast them in, like Sean Penn in Fast Times. Do you find your actors yourself, or do you have some great casting director you always work with, or what?
I don’t work with, like, one person all the time. A lot of times the studio has their people that they like. One of my best friends is a casting director, Carrie [Frazier]. She was head of casting for HBO for a long time, so we’re always talking about that. But, you know, you’re always seeing people and writing down names of who you like. There’s something so fun about finding new people. It’s one of the best parts.
You still seem to be doing a lot of stories about young people. Do you feel a little typecast, or is that a choice that you’re making and happy about?
I don’t think about it.
Are those the stories you’re developing as well as the ones that are being brought to you?
Well, now I’m doing the Broadway show of Clueless.
So where are you at with that?
We have a bunch of songs, and we had a read- and sing-through on Friday. You know. I mean, it’s a process, but it’s a fun one.
Do you have your cast yet?
No, but you start to zero in. There are some wonderful young people out there now.
I wanted to ask you about movie theaters too, since we’re in the Metrograph, which is a nice new addition to the theater lineup here in New York. When you were a kid, I know you watched a lot of movies. Did you have a favorite theater?
I was just at Criterion and they showed me Janus films, and I was like [gives an ecstatic sigh]. I would go to The Elgin, or, like, The Thalia and then that Janus logo would come up and I was “Aaaaah. This is gonna be smart, I’m gonna like it. This is gonna be good.” So they gave me a cup with the Janus logo on it. [laughs]
Do you have any favorite theaters now?
Since I was a kid, I’ve lived at the movies. I would go to the 11 o’clock movie and then the three o’clock, on Saturdays. So I love that. That was my education. I liked going to The Elgin. That was one of those dumpy theaters; it was at, like, Sixth or Seventh Avenue and about 20th Street. There was a cat and there was the Janus logo and I was like: “Aaaaah.” [mimes ecstasy] “C’mon, French people!”
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