‘If you keep writing something long enough and it gets better, and it develops enough of a voice that people see something distinct in it, then I think it’s almost inevitable that after a while it will find its way into people’s hands that have the power to change your life.’ I’ll be honest: when I first heard about Charlie Lyne, my admiration for him was outweighed by the type of grudgingly awed envy I reserve only for those who are both younger and more successful than me. I was introduced to Charlie through his directorial debut, feature-length documentary Beyond Clueless. A cinematic essay-cum-love letter to the teen films of the 90s and 00s, Beyond Clueless premiered at Sheffield Doc/ Fest 2014, where I watched it. I loved the film, whilst also admiring/envying Charlie from a distance. Born in 1991 (making him two years younger than me), Charlie was a film critic as well as film-maker, writing for The Guardian and Little White Lies and appearing on the BBC’s The Film Programme. All this, and he was barely into his twenties. Who was this wunderkind?! After he kindly agreed to chat with us I am more in awe of Charlie than I was before, though thankfully not as jealous. Honest, open and modest about his many achievements, Charlie is refreshingly pragmatic about how to build a career in the film industry, whilst also being one of the most upbeat, encouraging people I’ve ever interviewed about life in the arts. His mix of practicality and well-grounded optimism makes this possibly the most uplifting Think For Yourself yet. Think For Yourself talks to people who spend their time (and particularly their work) doing things that are creative, independent and interesting. We learn about the logistics of spending a life doing what you love in the hope that we (and maybe you) can emulate them. Enjoy!
An interview with director & critic Charlie Lyne ͢Writing by Sarah at The Edge of the Universe Printing Press
edgeoftheuniverseprintingpress@gmail.com www.theedgeoftheuniverseprintingpress.blogspot.com www.facebook.com/edgeoftheuniverseprintingpress @edge_universe ͢Illustration & design by Rosie Bowery www.rosiebowery.com
I was interested in how you came to make Beyond Clueless. Did you start out in film criticism and then go into film production? Yeah – although not in any preconceived sense that it would be a good idea! I’d always been really into film as a teenager, but it was never something that I had thought too much about doing as career. It was just chance that I happened to start a movie blog Ultra Culture when I was about 16; it wasn’t with any grand designs of it becoming a career or anything, it was just that I wanted something to spend my time doing. And I suppose that lack of ambition – I mean, of needing it to be successful really quickly – meant that I just tooled away at it for a couple of years, and very, very slowly built up a bit of a following. Which was good, because it meant I had time to develop my writing without feeling the need to be building an audience or making any money from it. It was almost by accident that it turned into something that I could pursue when I left school.
The transition from that into making a film was because I had this idea about wanting to do something about teen movies, and it didn’t seem like the best way to accomplish that idea was by writing about it. I think it would have been very easy for a written piece to slip into being a bit detached and very theoretical, and would miss the incredibly vivid audio-visual pleasures of these movies. So it was through that that I began thinking about making it into a film instead. I suppose both things felt like I just fell into them, and was then amazed to get the response that I did. How did you reach a point where you felt you could make a feature-length movie? Lots of little learning curves, basically. This whole process has been one thing after another where I’ve gone, “I have absolutely no idea how to do that” – and then realising that almost anything you can work out how to do if you’re willing to spend a few hours on Google.
Obviously I had been consuming loads of films as a viewer and a critic, but it was all incredibly new to me. So there was a certain amount of asking people for advice, but I would say, more than anything else, that just Googling and making the best of our ignorance were key. Probably it’s taken a lot longer and been a much slower process than it would be for people with more experience, but it’s been an incredible education at the same time. And looking back on it, though it was a real uphill struggle at times, not as terrifyingly indomitable as I thought it would be. Who else was working on the film, aside from yourself? I think, all told, there were about eight people that had any involvement whatsoever, so it was a very small team. The core team was basically me and three other people, and then the two members of Summer Camp, who scored the film. We started out with set roles and titles and so on, but quite quickly, because of the nature of the film basically being made in my bedroom in our spare time, it became everyone mucking in.
Any sense of what each person’s role was kind of fell away. How did you fund the film? In fact that’s one of the bits that it is very hard to approach without any experience – or at least it might have been, had we not had the incredible fortune that literally the month we started developing this idea Kickstarter launched in the UK. So we came in at that ideal moment, when Kickstarter was now a thing but was a little bit shy of having become really ubiquitous. For us Kickstarter was kind of perfect because we didn’t need an awful lot of money, and because we were really were in a much better position to be approaching people like us, who shared that fascination and fixation with teen movies, rather than a financier who probably wouldn’t have seen much benefit in investing in such a small movie. I don’t think it’s a platform that’s right for every project, but I think for ours it kind of made perfect sense, especially the timing.
What was the process of getting the film accepted for festivals? That’s been another massive learning curve. I had attended film festivals as a journalist, but the whole secret world of how films end up in them was completely a mystery to me. And there’ve been positive revelations and negative revelations. I may have had a slightly idealised idea about the festival submissions process. Like: “just send your film off to a festival, using their submission process, and you have exactly the same chance as the new Wim Wenders film.” And obviously that’s not the case. If there’s one thing I’ve realised it’s how incredibly few films at festivals get in on the submissions system alone. It’s almost always a little bit more behind closed doors than that.
But the positive flipside of that is that the whole behind closed doors thing is not reserved for people with a massive standing in the industry. Like, there were occasions when we would have festivals ask us to submit the film because they’d heard about it on Kickstarter – which could be true of any project that is successful on Kickstarter. And there were other ones where I would literally spend twenty minutes trying to work out someone’s email address so I could email them directly, introduce myself, and say, ‘hey, this is the film that I’ve just submitted to you, it would mean the world to me if you could take a look at it.’ Little things like that make such a world of difference when these people are sitting on 5,000 submissions and trying to make sense of them all. Certainly, in the age of Google and Facebook the submissions process is not half as closed off and complicated as it maybe was fifteen years ago.
What was the closest that you came to giving up whilst making the film, and how did you get through that? Weirdly, the Kickstarter thing kind of removed any chance of giving up! [laughs] Which was a really useful thing to have, because I certainly am someone who’s given up halfway on a thousand different creative projects. The knowledge that I had to deliver something meant that I couldn’t stop, but it also gave me a reason to keep trying to make it better and better, because I didn’t want to be the person who was sending out this half-finished, slightly messy excuse for a film after all those people had backed it. That was a real reason to keep going, which I guess is true however you fund your film – if you’ve got producers and financiers breathing down your neck, that’s a really useful thing to have.
But looking back on it now, it does seem like an insane number of things had to happen to get from that point to here, and I can’t quite believe it all did happen. I think that as we were going along I just really, really tried not to ever think about the vast number of things I had yet to do, but instead to think about just the next thing I had to do. Because I’m sure that if going in to the process of starting to write a script I’d been thinking, ‘but oh, how are we going to deal with all the lawyers down the line?’, or whatever else, that would’ve probably stopped it in its tracks. So we tried to be a little short-sighted in the way that we thought about it.
What practical advice do you have to other people who are trying to start a career in film making or film criticism? I would say, with both – and this is probably easier with film criticism, but I think is also true of film-making – is just to have something, you know? I often get people emailing me going, ‘I want to be a film critic, how do I go about it?’ And I think the biggest mistake with those is that they might write a five-paragraph email explaining why they would be a good film critic, but they’re so often not just like, ‘here’s a link to a piece of film criticism I wrote recently.’ And there’s absolutely no bar to clear there. That’s the easiest thing in the world: anyone can set up a Tumblr, write 500 words about something, and publish it.
But even with film making as well: there is such a vast difference between someone who has a great idea, and someone who has a great idea and also has a little 90 second trailer they’ve made explaining the idea, or even just a one page proposal explaining the idea, or anything to show that they are working on it rather than just waiting for someone to come along and gift them exactly what they want. That is the rule I’m trying to follow, anyway. Was that how it worked for you, in terms of going from being a sixteen year old writing a film blog to writing for The Guardian? Exactly. Obviously, if I as a sixteen year old had emailed The Guardian and been like, ‘I think you should let me write for you!’, that wouldn’t have worked. But I think that if you keep writing something long enough and it gets better – and it doesn’t have to be the best writing in the world; mine certainly wasn’t – but if it develops enough of a voice that people see something distinct in it, I think it’s almost inevitable that after a while it will find its way into people’s hands that have the power to change your life
And certainly that’s the way it worked with me. Slowly people started reading the blog and offering me work, and now I’m getting to write for people that I could never have dreamed of writing for. But it was so gradual, and I think that’s probably the only way it ever happens, unless you’re very, very lucky. One thing I was interested in was around the idea of cultural snobbery when it comes to teen films, and in what sense you had that in mind when making Beyond Clueless. The film seemed very genuine in its liking for these films. Recently I read a review of the film where they mentioned offhand something about Beyond Clueless being a love letter to films that actually no one should watch again, using Josie and the Pussycats as their example of this. And I was like: that’s a really good film! I feel like they’ve totally missed the point. Josie and the Pussycats is genuinely really clever. It’s always weird, the films people pick out as being indicative of the lack of quality in the genre – it’s never the ones I would expect them.
But it’s such an incredibly personal genre, and it’s much less important what’s so-called “objectively” good or bad with the teen genre and much more about the connection you have with it because it caught you at the perfect moment. But yeah, it’s weird. I’m really pleased that people, whether they like the film or not, are recognising it as both an affectionate statement on teen movies and also something that is trying to critique and criticise them at the same time. But people sometimes respond to that as if they’re asking – so, do you like these movies or not? And that’s so far from my way of thinking about these films, because I like these movies precisely because they are such a mess of contradictions. Because they are brilliantly enjoyable, often, and incredibly emotive, but also kind of contradictory and weird and often offensive in what they say. It’s certainly not a genre that is very sure of itself. But I think that’s kind of perfect for what they seek to achieve, which is not being critically acclaimed or massive crossover hits, but really tapping into something on a very interpersonal level with teenagers themselves.
You mention these contradictions and difficulties in teen films. Did you have a desire to critique those more strongly? It’s quite a balanced picture in the film. That was a really tough call to make, because so many of these films are so infuriating when it comes to gender, class, and I would say above all race, which is the massive elephant in the room throughout. But I made the executive decision quite early on that I didn’t ever want to step out of the universe that we were building around ourselves to explicitly say, ‘Just FYI, I think this is horrible!’ Instead we would try and reflect all those problems and draw them out in a way that would hopefully allow people to come to their own conclusions, albeit with a fairly strong push towards our conclusions. And it’s weird, because – to give an example, one of the bits that I thought had crossed over into that realm of stepping explicitly outside of the film’s world and commenting on it was the sequence on The Girl Next Door, where the narration talks about what I see as quite heinous “have your cake and eat it too” attitudes towards gender in that film.
But actually I’ve had multiple people at Q&As pick out that and be like, “Oh, I can’t believe you think that’s acceptable, what that film is saying to teenagers.” So some people are still reading even that, which I would consider one of the most openly critical sequences in Beyond Clueless, as endorsing what the movie says. Which in a way I’m quite pleased about. If the film encourages people to feel outraged about that movie, even if it’s because they think I agree with it, that’s fine by me. I wanted to ask about your perspective on teen cinema now. When I said I was doing this interview, one of my friends said, ‘you should ask him why teen films are so bad now.’ And I thought: well, I think it’s probably just because we’re not teenagers anymore that you think that. Yeah, I completely agree with that. On the one hand, these movies do definitely come in waves. And that’s not speaking about quality, even, that’s just quantity. After this massive glut of movies that came out in the late 90s and early 00s you see a real drop off in numbers. But that number’s on the rise again, albeit nothing like it was in the 90s or 80s.
But as for quality, and whether they are any good, I agree with you: I think the absolute best way of telling is what teenagers themselves actually think. I think some of the surest signs that the teen genre is coming into its own again are films that have been hated by adults: films like Project X, which was completely torn apart by critics but made a fortune, or more recently The Fault In Our Stars, which made something like half a billion dollars on a ten million dollar budget, and there was almost certainly no one seeing that that wasn’t a teenager. I would say that’s a pretty clear sign that those movies are working again – even if I, as someone who’s only five years out of my teen years, found The Fault In Our Stars baffling. But that’s probably the way it should be; I think it would be a shame if teen movies that came out nowadays were really appealing to us as adults.
That’s my problem with some of the teen movies that have been more critically acclaimed recently: I don’t really see where the teenager is in them. Stuff like Easy A, which is so postmodern and ironic that it’s like: who is this even for anymore? Easy A I was really torn on, because on the one hand I think a lot of its themes are major preoccupations for a current generation of teenagers, so I really wanted to love it. But yeah, I think it was kind of weighed down by the fact that it seemed so much to conform to the tropes of 90s and even of 80s teen movies. Though I would say that Easy A is a far less heinous example than the untold numbers of angsty white male suburban Sundance-y teen movies that come out each year, and are seen by exactly zero teenagers, yet heralded by loads of middle-aged critics who are like, ‘Oh my god, it’s a new John Hughes movie!’ Movies that you can tell are written by white men in their late thirties who want to write a John Hughes movie, but feel like they should set it in the present day, yet with no acknowledgment that it’s the present day –
so the kind of teen movies where teenagers don’t seem to have mobile phones, or to interact with modern culture. I always find that incredibly frustrating. Have you had many teenagers watching Beyond Clueless, and if so what has their response been? Weirdly, on Wednesday I was back at the BFI because they were showing it for an education day to 400 teenagers! That was the experience that I’ve been really looking forward to, and kind of fearing, because finally a huge number of teenagers were going to see it. And their reaction was really interesting, because on the one hand a lot of them are not that interested in the movies featured in Beyond Clueless, which is quite right. A few of them said those were the teen movies they liked, and we talked about that, and it does seem to slightly be because there are relatively few teen movies coming out nowadays. Which is a shame. But on the whole, I think the things that resonated most were the things about the teen genre that don’t tend to change so much, that are kind of perennial.
Certainly the treatment of sex and sexuality hasn’t got any less sort of fraught in the last ten years, even if it’s a different set of actors and a different set of films exploring it. A personal interest of mine was that for one of the Kickstarter rewards you produced the Beyond Clueless zines. I bought them after I’d seen the movie – Oh, cool! Thank you. Oh, I really like them a lot. And I just wondered why you chose to do zines, and if you would ever make anything like that again? Yes, I absolutely love making zines, and have been making them since I was around sixteen. After about a year of doing the blog I made a kind of “Year in Review” zine, which was the first zine I did, and I found it such an interesting, fascinating process. In fact that’s the first contact I ever had with the BFI: turning up at their shop and asking them if they would sell it. But because I had done the accounting so badly I was selling them all at a loss!
I went in there saying you can sell them for a pound and I’ll sell them to you for 50p, and I’ll drop them off! And amazingly they all sold out in like five minutes – I think because they were at the till and they were a pound, and nothing is a pound – but I literally couldn’t afford to give them anymore to sell, because I was losing so much. [laughs] So anyway, I’d probably made a dozen zines by the time I started making the film, and it seemed like a really natural way to make a fun reward for people. The thing I was not prepared for was quite how much time that would take. I am almost certain that it probably pushed the film back by about a month and a half, because every time I would get into making it I would be like, ‘Oh shit, I’ve got to deliver another zine in two days! I better start making it!’ But I’m really glad I did it, even if I wouldn’t necessarily do it again on the same sort of scale, because it’s lovely to have a document of that process.
I was going to ask what your favourite teen film is but that seemed a bit broad, so I want to ask: what’s your favourite teen film of the post-Beyond Clueless era? So the last fifteen years, I suppose. Oh, that’s interesting. I mean, as we were saying before, my favourite’s probably not a particularly relevant thing to actual teenagers. One I really like, possibly because I – in fact I probably was still a teenager, just about, when it first came out – was the British teen movie Wild Child. With Emma Roberts in it? Yeah, Emma Roberts, and two of the principle cast members from Fresh Meat, and also what’s-hername who’s in everything now... Juno Temple! I remember that being a genuinely enjoyable, weird, slightly subversive teen movie, and also a British teen movie, which is a rare beast. So maybe I would go with that. Though there may be another, more respectable, one… Oh! In fact, more recently, I really, really loved Spring Breakers.
Would you say that it is a teen film as in a film for teenagers, or a film about teenagers? I got from it that it was for teenagers. It was certainly marketed at teenagers, and it made a lot of money – well, at least for a Harmony Korine film – from, I think, a principally teen audience. Although possibly it was slightly mismarketed, because it certainly was more of an art house film than the marketing let on. Although I remember seeing it with an audience that was probably 50% teens, and for all art house weirdness I think it still has enough of the barebones components of a teen movie that it has a cross-generational appeal. So yeah, I would count that for sure.