'Booksmart' Director Olivia Wilde: Teen Movies 'Made Me Excited To Be Young'
Right after Olivia Wilde saw Lady Bird — the 2017 film about the loving, infuriating, infinitely complicated relationship between a teen daughter and her mother — her first impulse was to pick up the phone to call her mom. Now, when the credits roll on Wilde's new film Booksmart, audiences are dialing their old high school best friends.
These are the friends who got you through adolescence, Wilde says — the ones who knew you best, allowed you to be vulnerable, and saw you in a way that was "more intense and intimate" than romantic relationships. Wilde continues to have those friendships today — this film, she says, is "my way of honoring the female friendships that have sustained me."
tells the story of two star students headed to the Ivy League. For years, got into good schools. Worried that they've missed out, the two friends decide to cram four years of high school partying into one night.
