Head’s up everyone, Olivia Wilde is the next big thing. Yeah, you know her from her work as an actress in films such as “Tron: Legacy,” “Her” and “Rush,” but at 35, she’s seamlessly stepped behind the camera for the new coming of age comedy, “Booksmart.” And if every studio in town isn’t trying to get on board her next project someone at those companies needs to be fired. Seriously.
Set in contemporary Los Angeles, “Booksmart” centers on a wild last night before high school graduation for best friends Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) and Molly (Beanie Feldstein). The two girls have spent so much time focusing on college that they’ve never really allowed themselves to enjoy their high school experience. That changes as the night unfolds and the BFFs race from one party to another. Along the way, Molly makes some stark realizations about their friendship and Amy finds out if she and her longtime crush, Ryan (newcomer Victoria Ruesga), are meant to be. The film not only features standout performances from Dever and Feldstein but Jessica Williams, Billie Lourd and Noah Gavin.
READ MORE: Olivia Wilde crushes a superdope friendship goals movie [Review]
“Booksmart” debuted at SXSW and the Austin festival is perhaps one of the biggest “bubble” events out there. The overhype for a film by the media attending South By can be embarrassingly skewed, but Wilde’s feature is one of the few SXSW premieres that lives up to it (a stellar Metacritic score of 86 is absolutely on point). And if you’ve been anywhere on social media and following those in the film twitter world you’ve heard a ton of love for the movie. Obviously, much of that praise is due to Wilde’s directing prowess and it was a joy to sit down with her and dive into one of the most impressive feature directing debuts in years.
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The Playlist: Hey Olivia. How you doing?
Olivia Wilde: Hey. How’s it going?
It’s going good! Congratulations on the movie.
Oh, thank you.
I got to talk to you for like a quick minute at this reception for the movie, I want to say it was like three weeks ago at The London Hotel.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
I’ve sort of been in love with the movie ever since and I’m not the only one. How are you taking all of this adoration before it even hits theaters?
Well. You know it’s this crazy experience of this having been a very personal project for a long time. “Booksmart” has been my life for close to two years. It’s been so personal and so to release this very personal thing into the world feels very vulnerable. So, to have the early response be positive and to have people kind of owning it as a generational anthem that speaks to them, like that’s far beyond anything I could have ever dreamed for, dreamed of, hoped for but it’s still kind of surreal. It’s as though you’ve shown someone your home movies and they were like, “This is for me. I love this.” It’s a really kind of exciting time but it’s also totally surreal.
You said it’s been a two-year process. How did this script even come your way?
Jessica Elbaum, who of course heads up [production shingle] Gloria Sanchez, she and I were pitching a comedy series around town written by a great new director named Nora Kirkpatrick and we were leaving Comedy Central and Jess said, “What is your first feature gonna be?” And I said “Look, I’m working on something now. I’m writing something.” A script I had kind of been doodling with, “I think it’s probably going to be that.” She said, “I think you should read ‘Booksmart.’ It’s a script that’s been around for a long time.” It was originally on the Black List in 2009 and then that was Emily and Sarah’s draft and then a couple years later Susanna Fogle had done a pass and it still had never made it to production. It hadn’t quite found its voice and it was sort of relegated to the kind of dusty files of unmade movies at Annapurna. Then I pitched on it. To my shock, I got the gig but part of my pitch was that it needed a rewrite and we needed to kind of break it open, expand it, and kind of reinvent it a bit. And so I brought on Katie Silberman who’s an extraordinary writer and from that point, we rewrote and redeveloped, we then developed the story to be what you saw. But it was kind of an interesting journey for this movie. In some ways, I think society had to catch up with the notion of “Booksmart” wanted to celebrate. The idea of a movie being about two smart women who aren’t trying to hook up with [anybody]. It’s not about them trying to assimilate or be fulfilled by a boy’s attention. It’s truly just about their friendship and an adventure they go on without becoming, you know, the popular kids or whatever the assimilation movies usually do. So I think in a way the culture had to be ready for “Booksmart and I think it could only be made now even though the original kernel of the idea was written in 2009 and that kernel just being two best friends who are very smart. Everything else we kind of changed, but that concept has lived since 2009 waiting to be made.
How much was actually changed from that iteration of the script to the version that you guys shot?
Oh. Completely different. Completely different. Huge changes. Yeah. I mean, it was not quite a page one rewrite but it was pretty damn close.
Storyline and everything?
Yeah. We kept the relationship between two best friends who were women in high school on the last day of school but everything else was new. It’s interesting because my pitch to Annapurna is very close to the movie that we ended up with because I knew at that point what I wanted it to be. I knew what it could be. I love actually looking at my original pitch deck now. It’s kind of insane like Beanie and Kaitlyn and Billie Lourd were all on my dream cast page, which is extraordinary because typically you never end up with any cast that you put in your pitch because it’s all kind of fantasy casting. But somehow, I got to hire exactly who I wanted for those roles. And my pitch to Annapurna was that high school is war and we should make a high school comedy that had the high stakes of “Training Day” and somehow they still gave me the job after that pitch.
You grew up in New York City, right?
I was born in New York City but then when I was four, we moved to D.C. and I grew up in Georgetown.
While there’s something inherently universal about the story, but you shot it in the [San Fernando] Valley, right?
Yeah. Yeah. We did.
It does feel like an LA film in a way.
Good. Good.
Was that something that you wanted after living here for years? I know you live in New York now…
I do live in New York now, [but] I did live in LA for eight years and I did want this to be an LA story. I mean partially because I love the fish out of water element of two intellectual girls who dreamed of living in the Northeast going to a competitive college and being kind of stuck in the bucolic heaven of the LA environment, LA schools where you can eat outside and everyone’s skateboarding through the hallways. Like that was my kind of fantasy of what being a teenager in LA must feel like. When I was going to boarding school in freezing cold Massachusetts I imagined what LA kids were getting to do and so part of it was my kind of projection of what I thought LA school must feel like. And then the whole movie is intentionally a story that can sort of only happen in LA, a city that’s so big and so sort of vast and full of so many different environments that you can have an odyssey in one night and go through so many different types of places and different types of people in a relatively short period of time. That’s why “The Big Lebowski” was a huge inspiration for me. As an LA story, I think it’s comparable. Well, to me it was and I was hugely inspired by it in many, many ways.
How did you know that Kaitlyn and Beanie were the right mix as your two leads?
Well, Kaitlyn was actually cast before I came on board and my job was to not only defend that because I thought that was genius casting that I wanted to maintain. I loved the idea of Kaitlyn Dever for Amy. I first discovered her in “Short Term 12” and then actually loved her in a movie a lot of people haven’t seen called “Men, Women, and Children.” You probably have because you’ve seen everything.
Oh yeah. I actually reviewed it.
But she’s always good. In “Justified.” In “Detroit.” So, I wanted to keep her attached and I wanted to find the perfect Molly to her Amy and Beanie was exactly what I needed. Beanie has an innate intelligence and warmth. She is vulnerable while at the same time being incredibly, incredibly smart and she’s also funny in her bones. She’s also someone who if you, you know, once you look into her eyes, they are so kind of deep and compelling and she maintains eye contact in a way that is kind of startling and intense and that intensity was what I needed for Molly and her comedic timing. Like Kaitlyn’s, it’s just perfect and perfect for this tone that I wanted to create. I also liked that they were very different from each other. Like when I use those references of buddy cop movies “Beverly Hills Cop” and “Lethal Weapon” and even “Blues Brothers,” not a cop movie but another great duo. I knew I needed actors who were different enough from each other but felt like they were kind of moving to the same rhythm and from the same world. And to my delight, I was able to cast them as the leads even when they had never [been the leads in a] movie before. I’m really happy that Annapurna took the risk and allowed me to cast whoever I wanted in every role but particularly in our two leads. You know? No one ever asked me how many Instagram followers do they have? It was not about that. It was who was right for this part and I really appreciate that because that’s why we were able to cast Beanie and Kaitlyn who then magically had perfect chemistry almost immediately. They had been big fans of each others so that really helped and then they lived together all throughout pre-production and production.