THE HIGH SCHOOL BLACK COMEDY THAT KILLED THE COOL KIDS AND MADE WINONA RYDER A STAR. DIRECTOR MICHAEL LEHMANN RECOUNTS THE MAKING OF HEATHERS
I have an older sister named Heather and I grew up in Ohio. But even without these real-life parallels, the 1989 black comedy Heathers was destined to be one of the key culture lodestones for my generation. In a time when most high-school-themed films were concentrated on the happy, humping lives of cheerleaders or-almost as bad-the beautiful loser who finally gets to go to the prom, and all of its beautiful dark architecture seemed to come rolled in a baggie from outer space. First, the story is off-the-wall. Three girls named Heather and the movie’s bookish protagonist Veronica Sawyer (played by Winona Ryder) rule Westerberg High-that is, until a transfer student named J.D. shows up, gets Veronica in the sack, and starts offing the popular kids of the school via guns, knives, and, of course, Liquid Drano, all the while making it look like suicide. But the brilliant phantasmagoria that is Heathers goes beyond the smart social satire. The acting is phenomenal. The colors and symbols—especially the croquet—are vibrating. And last but not least, the tongues on these girls are shameless. The dialogue is probably the best ever written (to refresh the memory: "Heather told me she teaches people 'real life.' She said, Real life sucks losers dry. You want to fuck with the eagles, you have to learn to fly. I said, So, you teach people how to spread their wings and fly? She said, Yes, I said, You're beautiful.") Heathers exposed the real cruelty in the pecking order of high schools but it also turned the American dream right on its twisted head. "Now there's a school that self-destructed, not because society didn't care, but because the school was society," J.D. says at the end. Here, director Michael Lehmann talks about the making of his first feature film. Heathers should have been the road map for all high school films that came after. Instead, it remains the smartest and most challenging film of its kind because it takes risks, puts bullet holes in school walls, questions the responses to suicide, and shows the meanness behind the pretty blonde hair. Swatch dogs and Diet Coke live on, but anarchy is not the answer. Christopher Bollen
CHRISTOPHER BOLLEN How did Heathers, the project, fall into your lap?
MICHAEL LEHMANN Dan Waters, who wrote the script, was a friend of mine. I knew him through a friend at USC film school. Dan wrote the script on his own; he was working for a couple of years at a video store in L.A. and wrote it in his spare time. I think it was like a 250-page script—twice as long as a normal one—and it was really good. He was trying to figure out how to get people to read it and gave it to a friend’s agent. The agent said, “No one’s ever going to make this movie.” I had made a short film in school and had a pretty interesting agent with great taste. Dan asked me to show it to her, and I did. She flipped for it. She thought it was the best thing she’d ever read. Dan wanted her to get him hooked to a big director like Stanley Kubrick, so she sent the script out and a lot of people liked it but no one wanted to make it. I had a deal in place at New World Pictures, which was then a low-budget exploitation film company. They said they’d make Heathers right away. Within a couple of months, we were shooting.
CB The movie is set in Ohio. Did you shoot on location?
ML We shot it all in L.A. If you look very carefully, you can find some palm trees. But we did our best to make it look like the Midwest.
CB The cast is pretty phenomenal, from Winona Ryder all the way down to each Heather. As the director, were they your choices?
ML We had really good casting directors, Julie Selzer and Sally Dennison. They had just cast Robocop and they had a really good sense of who was around in Hollywood. We had no money to pay anyone and basically everybody in the movie came in and read for it—except Winona. She had been in a movie called Square Dance, which had played in one of the very first Sundance festivals and had gotten her a little attention. She had also been in a movie called Lucas. Michael McDowell, who was the co-writer on the movie Beetlejuice and was represented by my agent, read the script, and Winona was shooting Beetlejuice at the time, so Michael said, I have the perfect person to play the lead. Her agents didn’t want her to do it, but she loved the script and came in and we met. The funny thing is, New World told me I had to offer the movie to Justine Bateman first.
CB Oh, God. That would have been a very different Veronica Sawyer.
ML Apparently her dad has a relationship with the studio, and they thought she meant good box office. So we had to wait for Justine Bateman to pass on the script first. The rest of the cast—all the girls who played Heathers—Shannen, Lisanne, and Kim—they just came in and read. We auditioned a lot of people. I wanted to cast Heather Graham in the part of Heather #1, the one who goes through the coffee table. She was perfect for it, but she was under 18. Her parents were extremely conservative and her mother wouldn’t let her.
CB But Kim Walker almost steals the whole movie. She owned that role.
ML We saw a lot of people. Kim was either Christian Slater’s girlfriend or had been once. I don’t think they were still together. But she gave a great reading.
CB So even Christian Slater had to audition?
ML His career was just starting. He’d done a picture called Gleaming the Cube. And he had been in The Name of the Rose. But no one really knew him yet. His main competition was Donovan Leitch.
CB Whoa! It’s amazing to imagine what a different film it would have been if other actors had fallen into place.
ML When we were prepping the movie, we decided to do a reading of the script and invited a bunch of actors over to sit around the table and read. You do this to hear how the script sounds; the dialogue was so unusual, we wanted to know if the actors could pull it off. But we didn’t have anyone to read for J.D., so one of the actresses said, “I can bring in this guy from my acting class. He’s pretty good. Maybe it will work.” So this guy showed up and we did our reading and he was good, but both Dan and I thought, “He’s totally not right for the role.” Years later, I was sitting down to meet with Brad Pitt for a project that I was desperately trying to attach him to, and he says, “You know, I’ve met you once before. You did a reading for Heathers and I came in and read for the J.D. part.” So somewhere I have an audiotape of a very young, very inexperienced Brad Pitt reading the script completely cold.
CB Shock is definitely a big part of the film—even by today’s standards. Was the studio fine with letting you do whatever you wanted, or did they ask you to reel it in a little?
ML The language was not an issue. In fact, Dan Waters is still pissed off at me for some reason because Kim Walker’s character says to Winona’s character at one point, “You stupid cunt.” I changed it and Dan was really upset. That was self-censorship. The big change we had to make was the ending. In the original, the high school blew up. It ended with the prom in heaven. It was really good and it’s what the ending should have been. But this guy Steve Weiss, the head of production at New World who was a big supporter of the movie, basically said to us he’d make the movie but he wouldn’t allow the high school to be blown up at the end. He wouldn’t make a movie that was satirizing teen suicide and have this main character who we grew to love actually kill herself at the end. He was worried it would lead to copycat suicides, and he didn’t want that on his head. I don’t necessarily disagree with that, but I felt like, “Come on, this movie is clearly a satire. It’s way out there. The farther you go the better. If somebody’s going to kill themselves because of the movie, then they have a much bigger problem than this movie.” But he wouldn’t do it.
CB So she doesn’t try to stop J.D. from blowing up the school?
ML I think the different ending starts where Veronica’s face is sort of blackened and from the point where J.D. blows himself up. Right there he blows up the whole school too. When Winona goes back into the school and says to Heather, “There’s a new sheriff in town,” and Martha Dumptruck rolls in on her wheelchair—that wasn’t in the original script.
CB Even still, do you think that Heathers took on a different tone after Columbine? Did it predict that kind of teen rampage? I think of Veronica and J.D. shooting Ram and Kurt in the woods behind the school.
ML I got really worried the day of Columbine. I had three of four messages on my machine—one from the New York Times, one from Time magazine—asking me to comment. That freaked me out because I don’t want to comment on Columbine. I don’t know anything about what led to it, and what a horrible idea to think that this movie made many years before had contributed to these kids shooting a bunch of people in their school. Certainly it made me think. But then I also went and did a little research to find out if any of these kids made any Heathers references. Apparently, there were none. That wasn’t part of their vocabulary. They were enamored of Leonardo DiCaprio in the Basketball Diaries. But there were enough similarities to spook me.
CB Turning back to the cast, I bet a lot of people imagine a very bitchy attitude between the actresses behind the scenes. Were the Heathers Heathers in real life?
ML It was a surprisingly great set. Everybody was very friendly and gung ho. People wanted to make the movie. It was so different, so out there, so much funnier and edgier than anything else anybody was making in that genre. I heard about a little bit of trouble with Shannen Doherty. She’s a terrific actress and was really good in the movie. She always came prepared, but...
CB I guess that is who I was picturing.
ML I think she came into it with a little bit of attitude, and the other actresses were aware of it. But people get into character, you know. I could never figure out what she thought of the movie. She was only 16, really very young. She came into read for Winona’s part but I had already cast it. I was happy to give her Heather, but I think when she saw the film she wasn’t really happy with it.
CB For a while there were rumors that there was going to be a Heathers II. What happened with that?
ML That Heathers II thing came about mostly because Winona would always push me and Dan to try to come up with a sequel. She loved the character so much she thought it would be fun to put her in a different context. There was talk of doing a Heathers in Washington, D.C., where Veronica Sawyer has finished high school, graduated college, and is an intern in Washington. The set of world politics is just like high school, and I thought that was a pretty good idea. But you’d have to write a great script, and Dan was always too busy to do it. But I feel like there are movies that lend themselves to sequels, and this isn’t really one of them.
CB Kim Walker died in 2001 from a brain tumor. Did you keep in touch with her before she died?
ML No. I don’t think I saw her more than a couple of times right after the movie. I liked her a lot, but we never stayed close. I didn’t even find out that she had died until quite a few months later.
CB Do you think you could make that kind of black comedy today?
ML It was part of its time. It’s really hard to get a dark comedy like that put through—certainly you can’t put it through the studio system. But today it’s also really hard to get a handle on satire. It used to be that you took things one step further and played it straight. But nowadays if you look at what happens politically in the world, it’s already so absurd. Things are so perverse when you take them straight. How would you twist it? How do you twist 9/11? How do you twist George Bush’s reaction to 9/11? How do you satirize Dick Cheney? He’s already a cartoon.
CB Today, do you get pathological teenage fan letters about the film? Is there still that kind of mass following?
ML Not anymore. I did when the movie first came out. I got some really strange letters from people, and I’d answer them because I felt, Why not? I was a strange teenager too. But then I realized that sometimes you answer them and it’s probably not a good thing...
CB To encourage them...
ML Ha. Yeah.
From left: Winona Ryder as Veronica Sawyer, Christian Slater
as Jason Dean, Kim Walker as Heather Chandler
Photography courtesy Lakeshore International LLC
