Screenwriting 101: Bo Burnham
“I have to work inside out. It has to work moment to moment before I even start to extrapolate from a scene to feature-length. It has to…
“I have to work inside out. It has to work moment to moment before I even start to extrapolate from a scene to feature-length. It has to breathe. So I just dive in and start writing. Eighth Grade, the initial impulse for the script was watching videos of young kids online speaking about themselves and just transcribing those monologues. Because I found the way these kids expressed themselves to be so visceral and in really sharp contrast to the way I had seen young people portrayed onscreen, perfectly in command of their own narrative. And for me, what it means to be alive right now is to be out of control of your narrative; to be constantly trying to be your own biographer and failing… I feel there is a specific struggle of being young and creative now — because of social media, because the internet’s creative process has collapsed in on itself. The line between writing something, testing it out, revising it, has collapsed into a single moment. If someone has an idea for a film or a book, maybe they’ll tweet out a little bit of it and see what the reception is. There’s a constant temperature-taking at every moment.”
— Bo Burnham