Besides the screenplay and your direction, this is a film that lives or dies on you two [Dever and Feldstein] and your chemistry. I’d love to hear about how your guys’ work together before the movie and then during allowed you to have such great chemistry.
Feldstein: The biggest thing, and Kaitlyn always says this, is you can’t fake this. She’s my friend for life. And when I think about “Booksmart,” I think about not only this film that we made, but also these people that I get to take with me for the rest of my life. It’s a gift. We lived together through the entire prep and shoot of the film. The first time the three of us had lunch, we hugged for 45 minutes, if not longer. I think it was Liv who brought it up. And [she] was like, “Well, you guys could live together.”
Dever: It’s easy to love Beanie Feldstein, I have to say. She is an extraordinary person, and I could go on and on about her, but it was just instantaneous, our friendship. And getting to live together was such a huge thing because we were already spending all of our time together on set, so we just needed to extend that time.
Feldstein: Some people have misconceptions about comedy, which is that it’s easier or it’s less scary. And I find it a lot more scary and more vulnerable. And in order to be able to improv, or ad lib, or add alts, or be climbing all over each other, you have to be comfortable with one another. So, the fact that we’d been living together for five weeks by the time we started shooting, we had this foundation as Beanie and Kaitlyn, and then we could just layer in Molly and Amy on top of a trust that was really there. And that’s why doing the fight was so heartbreaking.
Let’s talk about this amazing dance number. How did that sequence come to be?
Feldstein: [Gooding] had never danced in his entire life, ever!
Wilde: We’d dance on the weekends. Denna Thomsen choreographed them and created this amazing piece.
Feldstein: She’s remarkable. And her choreography is led through emotion. It’s not led through movement. She was the perfect human being to find for this storyline because it’s fantasy and it’s all projected emotion. And that’s how her movement lives. I came from some dance background, but still, dancing on camera in a Steadicam one-shot is so hard. But I was just in awe of Mason.
Gooding: It was that first time we met and choreographed the first bit that I realized, not only is she really good, but she’s getting it really quickly and looks so amazing doing it. And I’m pushed every day to lift to the level of Beanie’s greatness. And you really can’t ask for someone to just be as patient and kind. The easy part was dancing with you. It was getting myself to not look like a goof doing it.
Wilde: It’s just wish fulfillment for me. That’s what I used to fantasize about in high school with the boys that I had a crush on – that everyone would disappear and they’d sweep me off my feet. And then to see it manifested in [the film], I couldn’t believe it. When I watched their first rehearsal after they worked all week for about 90 hours, I cried. I couldn’t believe it. And I just grabbed Denna and I was like, “You’re magical.”
With a film that’s female-centric, are you seeing women being represented as equally as men in this press tour?
Wilde: I value the male responses as much as the female responses. I never felt like we were making the film just for women, not only because we have such great male characters in the film as well and such great male allies in the crew, but it moves me to hear men say they love the film. In Hollywood, the problem is that there’s been a paradigm set that assumes that men don’t like stories about women, and that is why you don’t see them invested in as much. So, rather than thinking I only want to talk to women about this movie, I actually think it’s incredibly valuable to meet men who are actually connecting to this and want to talk about that because that is what’s going to shift that paradigm.
People are going to recognize that it’s worth making movies about women made by women because, guess what? Lots of different types of people love them. And obviously, there are massive examples of this everywhere, “Captain Marvel” breaking every record and being a perfect example of that, but men connect with a Molly or an Amy. All of those guys are like, “I’m definitely an Amy [laughter].”
How did you approach the calumniation of the other characters within the script while also foregrounding Molly and Amy’s Friendship?
Wilde: That was one of the extraordinary things that Katie did when she came on board to rewrite the script. She baked that in there. And I told her when we first met, I want the movie to be about judgment and about how we all are judging each other and then, therefore, judging ourselves. What can we say about how foolish that is? Can we just strip that away? Can we give adolescents the opportunity to skip the 12 years they end up living out of fear? And she found a perfect way to illustrate it through the story.
Feldstein: My character, Molly, is so smart, but she’s not wise. And that’s her journey through the film, is she’s judging so many people, and it comes from insecurity. She’s a really insecure person, so she throws up a wall. At the speech at the end at the graduation, she’s really like, “I see you and I’ve learned so much from you, and I’m sorry.” And even the smartest people, academically, can be really judgmental, or not wise, or silly, in some capacity. So, that’s what the real beauty of the movie is. It asks you to communicate more with people you might not normally talk to or you might pass judgment on.
Will we get a sequel?
Wilde: Oh, yeah.
Dever: “Booksmarter”.
Wilde: Yeah. “Booksmarter: Too Smart to Book” [laughter].
“Booksmart” opens theatrically on May 24.
