How to make a movie starring the internet, with Eighth Grade director Bo Burnham

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The new coming-of-age comedy Eighth Grade is one of the surprise success stories of the summer, turning a tiny story of a 13-year-old girl’s last week in the titular grade into a much larger tale of the universally awkward and cringeworthy experience of being an adolescent just trying to figure shit out. Its hero, young Kayla (played by the remarkable Elsie Fisher), deals with trying to launch her YouTube channel, with a crush that goes nowhere, and with her feelings of inadequacy when compared to more popular girls or older teens. So here’s the part where we point out that it’s somewhat remarkable the film is the product of a man, writer-director Bo Burnham, who makes his feature film directorial debut with Eighth Grade. Burnham launched his career as a teenager making funny videos on YouTube, but he’s gone on to be a hugely successful standup comedian, a director of standup specials, and an actor in numerous great movies and TV shows. But Eighth Grade marks him as an unusually empathetic and humanist director — and as perhaps the first filmmaker to really grapple with the internet not as a blessing or a scourge but as a simple fact of life. So Todd had Burnham on the show to talk about how to put the internet onscreen, what other movies get wrong about technology, and why he chose to make his first movie about a teen girl.

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