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Charlie Lyne: Watching Beyond Clueless is the equivalent of watching 300 teen movies simultaneously, so whatever you make of it, it’s inarguably a timesaver. It also has a really great soundtrack by Summer Camp, so if you’re not enjoying the movie you can always just close your eyes and listen to that.The film has some amazing edit sequences drawing together clips from different teen movies. My particular favorites are the pool sequence and the ejaculation sequence. Did you edit it?
Yeah, I edited the movie myself over the course of about a year. I had roughly 450 hours of material to choose from, so picking just the right shot of Freddie Prinze Jr to illustrate each emotional climax was no mean feat.

Fairuza runs a candle-making business in her spare time, so I actually got in touch with her through that. Her voice is absolutely tailor-made for a film like this—you’re never quite sure whether it’s an insider or outsider perspective that you’re hearing. And her candles are brilliant.
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The teen movies that break the mould in certain respects are usually the same ones that very carefully toe the line in other areas. That’s how they get away with it. A film like Idle Hands is only able to explore big, ambitious themes like sexual anxiety because it plays it safe in so many other ways. The teen genre is basically one big Trojan horse for some of the most challenging ideas ever committed to celluloid.Hundreds, even thousands, of teen movies must have been made from the mid-90s to the mid-00s. Why was there such a boom?
In the 80s, the teen genre was ruled over by a small handful of unimpeachable kingpins, John Hughes being the definitive example. By contrast, the 1990s teen boom was characterised by smaller films, with smaller budgets and less experienced writers and directors at the helm. These stranger, more idiosyncratic teen movies unsurprisingly struck a chord with teenagers who couldn’t see themselves in any of The Breakfast Club’s designated character types.

It’s the only genre that is defined by the age of its audience, which is kind of sinister when you really start to think about it. These films are declaring in advance that they want to be seen by people who are at the most impressionable stage of their lives, so it’s no wonder they have such influence. So would The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel if it marketed itself exclusively towards 15-year-olds.
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My only rule was that each film—or the specific subplot of the film that I was interested in—had to capture some sense of adolescence, or some suggestion of the transition from child to adult. I’m not so interested in the specific ages of the characters, or the actors playing them.I was interested that you chose to include a lot of films that I’d call “horror” films before “teen” films; why do the two so often overlap?
The teen genre isn’t really a genre. It’s an umbrella term that covers comedies, rom-coms, horror films, dramas and a million other kinds of movies. Horror elements crop up especially often because one of the few things that most teenagers agree on is that adolescence can be pretty horrific.The most common way it rears its head is a parallel for either puberty or menstruation. My favourite is always Ginger Snaps and the subsequent increasingly bizarre sequels and these incredibly elaborate feature-length metaphors for menstruation… It’s compared with becoming a werewolf, which is so brilliantly unsubtle. They say throughout, you know, “I’m growing loads of hair! There’s blood everywhere. I don’t know what’s going on with the way I feel each month!” and then the answer being time and time again, it’s like, “Oh, it’s because I’m a werewolf.”
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A lot of people have a pretty snobby definition of teen movies, which excludes anything that they consider to be artistically valid. The movie I get picked up on more than any other is Rushmore, which is a film about a teenager, set almost entirely at a school. But because it’s Wes Anderson, people put it on a pedestal, and refuse to recognize it as a teen movie.You seemed to mostly choose American films, and you used an American voiceover even though you're British. Why is that?
I certainly did, and that’s ultimately what Beyond Clueless is about: interrogating a world in which I feel completely at home, despite its otherness. Although I don’t think there’s anything quintessentially American about teen movies. There are certainly other countries that produce more of them. But America is especially adept at exporting its teen movies around the world, and as a result, it’s hard to grow up anywhere else and not become familiar with the very distinctive traits of American teen cinema.
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The psychosexual clusterfuck that is the 2006 body-swap comedy It’s a Boy Girl Thing would have taken our entire 90-minute runtime to unravel, so we decided to leave it be.

It’s been great. As a filmmaker, I can’t imagine anything more rewarding than reading a carefully considered appraisal of your work from somebody who’s actually sat down and given it their full attention. It doesn’t really matter whether they like it or not—some of our best reviews have been utterly brutal.And finally, who is the greatest teen high school queen of them all?
I’ve never actually seen it, but I hear good things about Rose McGowan in Encino Man.Follow Emilia on Twitter
