We spoke to Charlie Lyne, the Bertolt Brecht/David Attenborough of the teen movie genre, about his new documentary BEYOND CLUELESS, which is currently screening at venues around the UK.

Toby Miller: For the uninitiated, could you explain a little about the teen genre that your documentary focuses on? 

Charlie Lyne: We tried not to be too strict about it, but it’s roughly mid-90s to mid-noughties. That was just because to try and tackle something as massive and long-running as the teen genre, we did need to zero in a little bit. We also wanted the film to feel like it had its own universe, and so we didn’t want to mix and match between films from the 1950s and films from the 1980s, jumping all over the place. We wanted to have a very contained world.

And so that’s the era that we ended up going with, partly because it’s the one that I and all the other people who worked on the film grew up in, so we felt very immersed in that space already. But also because it was a time for teen movies when the genre really exploded outwards, and so although it had been massively popular in the 1980s and earlier, suddenly you had hundreds of these films coming out in a matter of years, and it just felt like a much more fertile space to get to grips with the genre.

TM: Your film starts as high school but then goes much more into teen films. You’ve got films like JEEPERS CREEPERS which don’t quite fit into the high school model. Could you explain a little bit about the genre – if indeed if it is a genre?

CL: Exactly, that’s the strange thing. I keep calling it “the teen genre” although in actual fact it isn’t really a genre, it’s a kind of loose grouping of every imaginable genre. That’s one of my favourite things about teen movies: they can be in one beat a horror movie and in the next second a comedy, and you’ve got all these vastly different movies jostling for space inside this one “genre”. But I think for me that the thing that unifies them all is a set of similar preoccupations.

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The thing we were looking for, above anything else, was the capturing of people in that awkward phase between childhood and adulthood, and I think you can find that just as easily in JEEPERS CREEPERS as in something more obviously teen based like SHE’S ALL THAT. So it gave us a lot of options, because tonally we could be jumping all over the place, just like the genre tends to do; but the things that popped up time and time again were more aesthetic and thematic. So regardless of whether it was a horror movie, or a comedy, or whatever else, it would still have that prom night scene, or it would still have that house party scene. These things seem to be very enduring.

TM: One quote that popped into my head whilst I was watching the film was from Jay-Z paraphrasing Duke Ellington. Jay-Z said “hip hop” and Duke Ellington said “jazz”, but he said hip hop was the perfect music genre because everything could work with hip hop. 

CL: Yeah, that’s a really interesting comparison point. I totally agree. I guess because the whole process of adolescence and puberty is such an emotional upheaval, and such a fraught time that it does tend to find parallels wherever you put it. If you put it in a horror movie you can find an amazing parallel between the horror of your body changing and your mind going insane, and all the things that happen when you’re a teenager. If you put it in a romance genre, you’re dealing with people who are at their most impulsive and overwrought emotionally. So I think it’s just a very heightened world, and whatever you throw at it, you get something very strange out.

TM: Do you think the American teen movie works as a barometer of how America’s currently feeling?

CL: I think it’s certainly a good way of taking the teenage pulse by what kind of tone of teen movie you’re getting. In the period we were looking at, you notice a sharp shift from the kinds of movies that were coming out before. In some of the films that came out after the Columbine high school massacre, there’s certainly an awareness of this major event that’s had such an impact on teenage life in America. So I think things like that do tend to bleed into these movies, but I think almost more interesting is how insular they are, and how rarely you get an explicit reference to something in the outside world, or a backdrop that is specifically historical. At their best, these movies are little self-contained packages that are so wrapped up in themselves and their characters and their problems that they kind of have no room for anything else. So when those things seep in, it tends to be in quite a subtle way.

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TM: I can’t think of another genre that is as self-aware.

CL: People often patronisingly assume that teenagers just want to watch something aspirational and that they don’t really understand what they’re watching. But I think there’s an awareness on both sides that when teenagers watch a movie like that, they’re watching this heightened version of what they’re actually living. When people make teen movies they’re aware that they’re skewing the reality of teenage life to some extent. So it’s certainly very wrapped up in itself, not least because of the very prevalent tropes that pop up time and time again. As a screenwriter sitting down to write a teen movie, when you come to write your prom night scene it’s very unlikely you’re going to be able to do that without thinking, “Oh yeah, I remember that prom night scene in SHE’S ALL THAT or PRETTY IN PINK”. There’s such a canon of these famous tropes that I think it would be hard to write a teen movie without in some way paying tribute to that.

TM: Is it a genre that, more often than others, has to keep reinventing itself? 

CL: Yeah, definitely. And I think it should. I always find it quite disappointing when a teen movie comes out that to me feels like a teen movie from my own teen years. Because although I might enjoy that, because it’s a nostalgic thing, it makes me think, “is this actually doing anything for teenagers today?”. I always think it’s a better sign when you have something like PROJECT X come out and adults get really upset about it. I went to see that movie when I was only a few years out of my teens, and I felt confused and slightly frightened! But in the cinema, every other audience member was a teenager, and they loved it. I think that’s the most important thing – that these movies are working for contemporary teenagers. And if that means teen movies have to constantly go further or go in a different direction, I think that’s for the better.

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TM: If you go back through the history of teen movies you get to something like GREASE or BYE BYE BIRDIE which are obviously studio impressions of how teenagers act. Is that still the case now – are there many film makers of the same age as the audience?

CL: I think yeah, more and more so, there are, I mean you still have a few quite patronising efforts in the vein of the original teen movies, I suppose, there was  moral panic about “Oh, these teenagers are going out and doing these terrible things, how are we gonna solve this social problem?”. And I think the descendants of that style of teen filmmaking are still around today. But yeah, more and more so, you do have stories that seem to be coming from, if not actual teenagers then from writers who are only just out of their teen years. It feels much more fresh and much more sincere. And of course the nineties and noughties teen movie wave was the first time you did have actual teenagers getting behind the camera and writing and directing; whether they were doing it themselves with a camcorder, or you even had studios looking to teenagers to write films like THIRTEEN or KIDS. Inevitably what you got out of that was a much more authentic version of what it was like to be a teenager in that exact moment.

TM: I was surprised to find that your film reminded me of Jonathan Meades, whose work has a very left-of-centre academic approach.

CL: I would certainly take that as a compliment! We wanted to make something that was blending two quite different ideas: an academic and genre study that had the heightened emotion and visual sensibility of a teen movie. So it was an interesting balance to find. One of our reviews said it was like a wildlife documentary set in the world of the teen movie, which is exactly what we were going for.

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TM: What led you to Fairuza Balk as the narrator? You focus a lot on THE CRAFT at the beginning of your film, but she’s far edgier and more interesting than the actresses teen movies usually use.

CL: To me she has that dichotomous feeling of being very much an outsider but also kind of an insider. She’s known for a few teen performances, especially THE CRAFT, that are so about outsider characters but forming their own insider clique; and that was exactly the kind of odd duality we wanted to capture. That feeling that yes, you are in the teen movie when you watch BEYOND CLUELESS but at the same time you’re slightly viewing it from the outside. You’re able to see the wood from the trees while you’re in this incredibly heightened, surreal world. And apart from anything else, she just has an amazingly evocative voice! She came on board quite late in the process, but I’d been thinking throughout the making of the film, “She’s my dream choice”. And so I think it would have been quite weird if we’d not been able to get her, because by that point I was hearing everything in her voice anyway.

TM: How did you choose the films that you would focus on? They seemed to be films that are outside looking in, rather than inside looking out – for example, MEAN GIRLS and SLAP HER, SHE’S FRENCH.

CL: It was very much an investigative process, really. We put aside three or four months for writing and structuring, and I didn’t decide in advance which films to focus on, or whether they would be the tentpole movies like CLUELESS and CRUEL INTENTIONS. But as time went on, it became apparent there was much less to say about the heavyweight teen movies. What is there left to say about THE BREAKFAST CLUB? It’s a fantastic film – it knows itself very well – personally I find it much more interesting to look inside those movies that have identity problems and don’t know themselves so well. They’re the movies that mirror the teenage experience best. They’re a little bit awkward, they’re a little bit weird. They might be brilliant at some things, but they have massive failings in other areas.

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TM: Do you think the genre as a whole plays a role in sanitising American youth, or is it a good place for American cinema to push boundaries? 

CL: It certainly sometimes can feel like one step forward, two steps back when you have a seemingly progressive teen movie that then conforms to other stereotypes along the way. But I think one thing that teen movies have in their favour is that they are very clearly packaged, and often thought of as lightweight and insubstantial; and I think that means that perversely, they can get away with a lot more than movies that are taken a bit more seriously. For so long this genre has been slightly written off by critics, and not seen as a film discipline, and you find these apparently very mainstream, traditional films tackling some really big, bizarre ideas – barely under the surface. And I think that’s a really powerful thing. It gives you the ability to transmit these ideas to an incredibly wide audience, rather than just preaching to the converted. So that to me is the greatest achievement of the teen genre – it’s managed to get so many fascinating ideas in under the radar.

Meet Charlie at the screening of BEYOND CLUELESS at the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse on Tuesday 13 January – or visit http://www.beyondclueless.co.uk/ for information on other screenings.

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