While actress Olivia Wilde was quietly searching for a feature film to direct, Jessica Elbaum, her friend and head of the production company Gloria Sanchez, suggested she pitch on a project at Annapurna Productions called "Booksmart."
The movie was about two high school seniors, Molly and Amy, who realize they've been so diligent in their studies that they missed out on a social life. The best friends make a pact to go hard on the night before graduation, attempting to get the full party experience in just 24 hours. Wilde immediately found herself creating a lookbook to pitch.
"I just knew right away what I wanted this movie to be," Wilde said. "I thought, 'I need to see a movie about smart girls who are ... proud of being smart. A comedy about women that isn't poking fun of them being disasters.'"
Wilde landed the gig, casting Beanie Feldstein ("Lady Bird") and Kaitlyn Dever ("Justified") in the lead roles. She also went back to rewatch some of her favorite films, channeling her inspirations into "Booksmart," which premiered to rave reviews at the South by Southwest Film Festival in March and hits theaters May 24.
"Training Day" (2001): "When I went in to pitch, I told [Annapurna] I wanted to make the 'Training Day' of high school movies. I wanted it to have high stakes. In high school, everything is life or death _ every social interaction, every grade.
We look back at it with a slightly patronizing attitude, like, 'how quaint that we thought high school parties were important.' But they were, and the thing that got you through it was your friends. That felt like a buddy comedy to me [with] the relationship between buddy cops _ the sense of partnership, of being willing to take a bullet for each other but often having very different personalities."
"Fast Times at Ridgemont High" (1982): "I screened this for the cast before filming, because I wanted them to understand that there are no small characters. There is no one forgettable in this film, and they really took that to heart. Many of them had never seen it, so they were coming up to me after saying, 'I didn't know about that movie! It's the coolest movie I've ever seen!' Also, musically, it has, like, 30 needle drops like we do."
"Clueless" (1995): "'Clueless' is a less surprising influence, but it was the anthem for a generation. It was a film that was so funny but really human. Cher was a character who could have been misunderstood or minimized _ not only by the actress but also in the writing and directing. But she was a fully nuanced, interesting, surprising person, and she became iconic because she was different than anything we've ever seen before."
"The Breakfast Club" (1985): "There's a humanity in comedy that John Hughes' films taught me. We understand high school tropes not only because of films from the last 50 years, but we also recognize the jock, the nerdy kid ... 'The Breakfast Club' was a master class in unraveling assumptions and bringing people together in unexpected ways."
"The Big Lebowski" (1998): "I'm a big Coen brothers fan. 'The Big Lebowski' is an odyssey told in a very short period of time in Los Angeles. The fact that they took such big swings with the Busby Berkeley dream sequence _ that was a huge influence. It's why I wanted to take a big swing like creating a fantasy where Beanie's character imagines dancing with her crush. To remove the audience from the environment that they had been lured into ... which I think if done well can be really energizing."
