Recently Abe Froman and myself sat down with the cast of the new film Whip It. This is also the directorial debut of Drew Barrymore who you may remeber from a little film called E.T. (and about a hundred other great films after). We didnt have much time to speak with Drew as she is a pretty busy person. But we do have this interview with her and we hope you enjoy.

As always be warned of some minor spoilers.

And the first question was

Is this the first time you had a pie thrown in your face?

a.. a what? Gosh…. I hope not. Well um we did a food fight actually for E.T. in the commissary so it was sort of my ode to that great moment in life and that was real. And I definitely had a pie thrown in my face then. That was definitely one of the funnest scenes to film on the planet.

So how did you decide to jump into this as a director?

For me it was just very clear it had all the themes that I can personally put myself into. It had a mother daughter relationship, a movie about women who don’t want to be put into a certain type of cookie cutter box, not that there is anything wrong with that again I found a lot of films parody pageants and I really didn’t understand why. It’s like there not the most evil things they’re a door opener and certainly a lifestyle choice, they are just not right for this person, character, and I felt a lot of the metaphors with that with Hollywood so I was really able to make it personal because there is a lot of boxes that they want you to check in this industry that I just refuse to check, I am more of a derby girl. So I really related to that. And I have been through so much with my own mother that I was able to put a lot into the writing ad the filmmaking and the performances the emotional experiences that mothers and daughters go through. And I am also old enough, im gonna be 35, I can see it from both sides. I get when a family just wants whats best for their daughter and yet their child may have different plan on what their future wants to be and how when you are in that crucial sort of crux crossroads how do you get some honesty and acceptance eve if you have to lie cheat and steal on your way to get there. At some point you are going to get caught and you are going to have to lay your cards on the table and one can only hope for their family’s acceptance but I don’t believe that things turn around over night either and I really wanted to make sure that it wasn’t all Hollywood and happy at the ending. Its not about winning, its not about everybody turns a corner and magically this girls got the rest of her life set. I used to really think in my 20s about happy endings and in my 30s I think a lot more about good days and for this film was a journey, a person, coming of self, I was always drawn to like, you know, Breaking Away and Slapshot, Saturday Night Fever ad those kinds of films, and believe me those are masterpieces, and I am not saying that I am like them but even a Pretty In Pink, it was just there was these people that saw the future, who saw a different path in life and the brass ring was near they had all these certain elements working against them these goals that they were trying to achieve they were so intimate and were sort of done in these settings and were so entertaining or relatable and I just wanted to try and tell more of a timeless movie more like that.

Whip It features one of the most beautiful scenes of the last year, can you explain how you executed the under water scene?

Thank you, it was definitely a challenge and the most important thing for me was not to make it too staged I didn’t want a lot of close-ups or to follow them I really wanted them to be like water themselves. I would tell the camera operator to make sure that you just focus on the stockings or the shoe at the bottom of the pool or let them swim out of frame, let it be about feet sort of doggy paddling in the water, or undressing under water, just make it sort of sensual and playful and very fluid, pun intended, rather than all of a sudden it becoming like this music video, and I purposely kept them swimming up to the top to catch a bit of breath and I was like  well they are not amphibians. But I know as an actor the challenge of a love scene and I would love to be able to just say go swim around and be free and have fun with this. I knew the scene that followed up when she says goodbye to him and she was sort of trying to be brave and keep it all in would have no dialog and I took all the dialog out of it. And the scene before when she is at that 711, I just sort of made the whole sequence about a feeling, an interpretation and visual emotions rather than spelling it out for everyone and that way anyone can take from it what they wanted.

How did you pick your cast?

Just by picking the people who I just thought were the coolest people on the planet. Marcia Gay Harden and Ellen Page getting in the ring, those are 2 heavy weights. Daniel Stern and I just talking about the performance of this man who was not beaten down who loved the women in his life but chose his battles. Juliette Lewis who is just a animal and one of the most talented actresses on the planet and Eve and Zoe Bell and me who would make up this team of just misfits who have each sort of got our own identities and then Kristen Wig who I just think is a national treasure and yet I didn’t want her to just rest on comedy laurels on this, I wanted her to be very natural and neutral and a great mentor to Ellen and then of course the great Ellen Page to be the hero who carried us through the story and I also wanted fun guys like Jimmy Fallon and Andrew Wilson, because I like boys and I wanted fun boys in the movie.

There was a certain amount of improvisation by necessity with some of the scenes and yet you are dealing with a film that doesn’t have an unlimited budget and you have to stay on schedule, how did you plan for that and how did you balance the need for structure?

Very carefully. I made sure that I got everything I needed out of storyboards and a shot list, every single day was planned to the minute and that way I allowed to make sure and I also worked right next to the camera instead of a monitor or a video village so I am in there able to get improves and say surprise me or let them do their own take or get as many different performances as we could at one fell swoop and have a real eye to eye combat wonderful, inspirational relationship rather than going ok that’s great now let me watch playback, now let me over think it, the amount of time you waste you can get 30 different performances by just being right there in it with theactors, I don’t care of the space is that small.