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→ WHATEVER - Review and Interview, directed by Susan Skoog

by Sarah Jacobson

You don't have to be a girl to enjoy WHATEVER. But it helps. As you watch it, memories rush back of your girlfriends proving their worth by proving how skilled they are with a beer bong, or gagging on your first blow job, or running off to the Big City (this case New York) and pretending you're a big shot artist. And while WHATEVER perfectly nails the subtleties of what happens when girls are friends and one has ambition while the other has looks, it also is an in-depth study of how a young girl becomes an artist. Not your typical movie plot.
The story follows Anna, a high school senior whose dream is to be accepted into Cooper Union on a painting scholarship. Her single working mother spends all her free time cavorting with a married man, so Anna has lots of opportunities to get into trouble and go on adventures. She mainly parties with her beautiful best friend Brenda, whose abusive home life makes her constantly push the boundaries of suburban existence. Unfortunately, the ones who are willing to help Brenda in her quest for excitement are the skeezy biker/drug dealer types, the kind who have schlong haircuts (short in front, long in back) and listen to Rush. In the midst of her best friends craziness and being ignored by her mom, Anna tries to figure out the world and her place in it. She only has her art teacher (Frederick Forrest, perfectly cast), who encourages her in her dreams.

Liza Weil is incredible as Anna; you can read every emotion on her face. She wears her character seamlessly. This is important because much of what happens to Anna is internal, worrying about if she has what it takes to be an artist and trying to muster up the self-confidence to BE somebody. Liza conveys the passion of wanting something so badly and the confusion of not knowing if you'll ever be able to achieve your dreams. While Anna definitely gets to experience the joys and heartache of boys, it's totally refreshing to see a film that focuses on a girl's goals, not on her wish for a boyfriend. The secondary characters are just as interesting, especially watching best-friend Brenda go from high school party girl to Druggie Fuck-Up and wonder if Anna will be sucked into her destructive life-style.

Like any good teenage movie, there's a great soundtrack. The punkiness of the Ramones, Patti Smith, The Jam, Blondie, The Pretenders and Iggy Pop make a contrast with the sludge of suburban living. And while WHATEVER stays true to all the crazy awkwardness of high school, it also has the insight to show that kids need an adult who believes in them if they're going to survive as they test out the world.

Director Susan Skoog grew up in Red Bank, NJ and studied theater at NYU. She was highly influenced by the playwrights Chekov, Shakespeare and Isben and the internal struggle of their characters. She loved directing but was disheartened by the silliness of the '80s New York theater scene. She started working in cable television for companies like VH-1 and eventually moved out to Los Angeles, where she was making enough money to save a substantial amount. She did a short film, A DRY HEAT, which was screened at Cannes, before embarking on her feature script. "I had a big hunk of money I had been working like crazy to save. What was I going to do with it, buy a house and have no movie? I mean I'd live in a house but have no movie and be miserable. What else was I going to do?"

Between her hunk of money, credit cards and help from her family, Skoog went ahead despite the many people who told her she would never get her script made. "Everyone told me, 'No you can't make this.' Well you know what? I made it by myself." She taught herself the AVID editing system so she could make more money from her freelance jobs and rallied people from the industry who were crazy about the script and who were willing to work hard to make it happen. Eventually, investors came on board which erased her credit card debt. The sale to Sony insures that her original investment is paid off.

"There's been a lot of articles about how girls are the new audience, since Titanic did so well and it was mostly teenage girls who went to see it. It's like "Hello, we've been there for a long time." They haven't put movies out there that girls have been able to go see. Sony bought our movie before Titanic. They didn't buy it because "Okay, we're going to tap into this girl market!" They were like 'We don't know what the market is, but we like the movie.' It's pretty awesome of them to have faith in it, it's a pretty risky genre."

Sony Pictures Classics was also the ones who took a chance on WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE. "They used Dollhouse like a model almost. They had a really great experience on Dollhouse, they talk about Todd as their favorite director. He was very involved with a lot of the aspects of marketing and everything. And they've involved me very heavily. I have this really wonderful open relationship with them. They've ruined me for any other company. They're really trying hard and it seems like they really care about the movie. They're putting an extra special effort in getting it out there."

The inspiration for a film like this? "I really hadn't seen a movie that realistically portrayed what it's like to be a teenage girl in this country," says the director, Susan Skoog. "I'd never seen one that I felt really represented what I saw, what I did, what me and my friends went through. I felt like there's a lot of stuff that hasn't been dealt with in a real way." Instead of writing autobiographically she took incidents from what she saw as a teenager. "My life was much more stable, my parents are still married and were pretty much on me. Anna's way cooler than I was. I was the quiet girl in the back watching Anna, wanting to be like her."
Initially when people read the script, they were worried about Anna's character seeming too passive, too negative on the page. But Skoog cast the film so well that Weil, as Anna, transcended the pitfalls and created an incredible portrait. "I was casting in LA for a really long time and wasn't finding anyone and went to New York. She came in late, and I knew immediately. The angels were singing. I knew."

"(Liza) and I had a very mystical relationship. She very much lived the story herself in her own life, so she was very connected to it. We could talk without speaking and had this real sense of each other and what we were doing. I'd look at her and say 'It's like more this' and roll my eyes and she'd understand and go further with it. It was amazing to work with an actor like that, to have that kind of symbiotic relationship, because we were so close, spiritually and on all these other levels."

About exploring the dynamics of girls with ambition, Skoog was subtle but effective. "Girls tend to give up easier. When boys run into difficulties they tend to blame their circumstances, but girls blame themselves. They think they're bad or not talented. I think that's endemic of a lot of women and girls. I know a lot of women who are afraid to ask for more money. Women blame themselves when things don't go well, where men are much more brazen about saying 'This didn't work but it's that guy's fault! It's the industry!' I think that's something women need to fight. I know I fight it constantly."

"When you're a teenager your world is your bicycle and your room and your school. Getting beyond those boundaries is a big deal. Everybody wants to explore and get out into the world. Part of being an adolescent is learning how to do that, but also coming back to your base. If you don't have a parent watching out, if you don't have someone paying attention to you, you tend to fall into the abyss. This psychiatrist came up to me at Sundance and said how I really got it right about parenting, how Anna survives is because she has that one adult who's really paying attention."

The film is set in the pre-AIDS, pre-Just Say No, pre-Superwoman era, the early '80s. "That's the era that I knew. Everyone was like, 'you can't do a period piece, it's too expensive.' But it was cheaper, because we shot in West Virginia and all the thrift stores have all those clothes from that time period. " And those attractive '80s hairstyles? "They grew their hair. The guy who played Zak is an old friend of mine. I made him cut his hair real short and then grow it (out into the 'schlong') much to his dismay. Even the really pretty girls had cheesy hairdos. My goal was to make these people real, as real as they could be."

"I'm 33. We didn't have a generation who's gone out and done things that we can look to, understand how we are supposed to live our lives. Should we have careers, should we have families, how do we deal with love, how do we handle being a running relationship with someone who's threatened by you because you're more successful than they are? Or if you're more ambitious than a man? It's just really complex, it's a really complex world for women right now. Women have been breaking new ground and it's only been the last 15 years. (In the movie) these girls were right before women in the '80s wore tennis shoes. This is when women were fighting to be in the work place and not be hippies. This was early '80s."

But despite the specific time period, WHATEVER speaks a universal teen language that seems applicable to any rebellious youth movement. The freshness and realness of the film makes it stand out in 'the coming of age' genre. For me personally, when I dream of the day that films from a girl's point of view would be as much of the norm as the boy's, it's films like WHATEVER that I've always wished for.

Have girls finally started to break into the film world? Not too long a go we had WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE which had women of all ages (and some men) re-living their geeky childhoods. Now, everywhere you look, there's some article marveling at the fact that teenage girls have made the success of films like TITANIC and ROMEO AND JULIET. You really know that teenage girls have hit their stride when a movie like Susan Skoog's WHATEVER, one of the most realistic films about girls in high school, gets picked up by Sony Pictures Classics.

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