Sweethearts Movie Starring Kiernan Shipka Is a Millennial Ode to John Hughes

While Rebel Without a Cause first took teenagers seriously on screen in the 1950s, John Hughes helped revive them as a full-fledged genre in the 1980s. The new film “Sweethearts” celebrates both moments in cinema history.

“Sweethearts,” whose title is a nod to the lingo of ’50s-era high school sweethearts, is the directorial debut of “Dollface” creator and “Freakier Friday” screenwriter Jordan Weiss. The filmmaker co-wrote the script with her real-life best friend Dan Brier; Weiss and Brier’s relationship also partially inspired the not-quite-romantic comedy about Jamie and Ben, two college freshmen who make a pact to break up with their high school boyfriends over Thanksgiving break… and realize that they might actually Have feelings for each other instead.

It’s fitting that Kiernan Shipka, a breakout star in the ’50s series “Mad Men” who later starred in the ’80s-esque “The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina,” was the first all-star cast member in “Sweethearts.”

“She was always the person I dreamed of playing Jamie… She’s such a great performer on screen, but off screen she’s really, really smart,” writer/director Weiss told IndieWire about the collaboration with Shipka. “She had such great things to say about how she wanted to bring Jamie to life, and I just knew she would be such a great leader on a set. And as a first-time director, I just knew she was going to be such a relatable and incredibly energetic person.”

But who could balance Shipka’s Jamie? According to Weiss, for whom the character Jamie is a kind of stand-in, the film would “live and die on the chemistry between her and whoever played Ben.”

Enter: Booksmart alum Nico Hiraga.

“As soon as Nico left the room, no decision had to be made. I think he got the part about four seconds after the door closed and had their chemistry read because it was so obvious,” Weiss said. “(Dan and I) wrote this together. We were also both executive producers on the film. We really knew what dynamic we were looking for…captured through our real life friendship. And as different as Nico and Kieran are, they have such opposite personalities, but there was just this magic as they made each other laugh even when they were just goofing around between reading scenes. I thought, ‘That’s them, that’s Ben and Jamie.'”

Rounding out the cast are “Severance” star Tramell Tillman, Joel Kim Booster, Ava Demary, Charlie Hall and Christine Taylor.

And although the film is semi-autobiographical for Weiss, she encouraged the cast to improvise on set, particularly to avoid making the script seem too “millennial.”

“I am a big fan of improvisation. I’m a comedy girl through and through and come from television originally. Television is very democratic, the best joke wins, so I really have no ego in that regard. And I love it when my actors make me look funnier than I am by coming up with cool things on set,” Weiss said. “I’ve tried to really encourage and create an environment on our set where the actors can act and improvise… where our actors, especially the younger generation, who are closer to the age of the characters than Dan and I are, as people there’s our 30s…We really wanted to make sure this felt authentic to young people.”

But she said: “We’ve also consciously tried to avoid too much modern slang or colloquialism, just because I think it can make things outdated.”

She added that “Sweethearts” must have a “sense of timelessness” like “Ferris Bueller” like her “all-time favorite director” John Hughes.

“I think that we wanted to create this evergreen timelessness with the way we designed her costumes, with the music we chose, and with the kind of slang we tried to avoid,” Weiss said . “But on day one we definitely got all of our cool Gen Z actors together and said, ‘If we’ve written a line in the script that makes us seem like terrible millennials, you have an obligation to speak up and tell it.’ us and with us to work on it.’”

It was also important that Shipka brought her own “experiences and touchstones and her personal style and the way she speaks” to the character Jamie, so that Jamie “isn’t just about me anymore,” Weiss said.

Regarding the character’s backstory, Shipka said, “(Character development) is always important to me, and I was fortunate that in the film there’s actually some insight into why Jamie is the way she is, so I thought about it a lot. “. Growing up, I thought a lot about our friendship and our relationship, and honestly, being on set with such great backdrops made it very easy to feel the energy of this film during production. Everything was there, no green screen. It was very practical and we just had fun.”

Weiss wanted to create an idyllic 1950s-style town to illustrate how much Jamie and Ben’s view of the place they grew up in would have changed after just a few weeks at college. It’s rose-colored glasses, so to speak.

“This film is all about leaving your hometown and coming back with fresh eyes from the first time, and I think that’s such an interesting, disturbing cardinal event when you’re a young adult and you go back there.” “This is my first time in your hometown since you don’t live there anymore,” Weiss said. “When you first return to your bedroom, it is no longer your bedroom, but your ‘childhood bedroom.’ And I think sometimes it can feel like you’re stepping into a time capsule or going back in time, and so I thought it would be a really cool take on that feeling to have a little bit of a retro feel in our production design and our costumes. We have a lot of 1950s and mid-century aesthetic elements; Even the title “Sweethearts” is a play on the term high school sweethearts. It makes me think of ‘Archie Comics’ and my grandparents and sock hops and ‘Grease.’

Of course, there’s another Shipka connection: The actress fronted “The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina,” which was literally an “Archie” comic.

“Sweethearts” isn’t everything sweet – It also captures the heightened emotions of a teenager trying to navigate adult situations. Shipka referenced a “stunning fight scene” alongside Hiraga that she “really loved filming.” However, Hiraga did not do this.

“It was hard,” Hiraga said. “You look at this angel (Shipka) and your voice gets louder and louder. It somehow doesn’t make you too excited. I didn’t like that.”

But Shipka explained that it was a real-life time crunch that caused the on-screen drama to be so intense.

“There was a lightning storm and we didn’t have that much time to film before the set had to shut down,” Shipka recalled of the scene, “and I love time constraints or any kind of pressure. It felt like there was a lot at stake, and when we did it, it ended up being so cathartic.”

It also helped that Shipka saw herself in Jamie.

“I’m in my 20s, I have a lot of male friends and there’s always this energy with a lot of people, at least for me,” Shipka said of the “will they, won’t they” storyline. “I always think about the “what if,” even when it’s not supposed to be that way.”

“Sweethearts” writer/director Weiss hopes the film can live up to the John Hughes legacy of teenage angst and love on screen.

“(Hughe’s) films were so successful … because he took teenagers seriously and took their stories seriously, and I think we tried to do the same thing,” Weiss said, “even if one of the characters was a little misguided at times, or maybe It.” is about recognizing something that seems obvious to an adult, but is nevertheless of great importance to him.”

Weiss will adapt Curtis Sittenfeld’s bestselling novel Romantic Comedy and also sold a romantic comedy pitch about the NFL playoffs to New Line Cinema. She also wrote Late Night and And Just Like That director Nisha Ganatra’s Freakier Friday sequel. Shipka’s The Last Showgirl co-star Jamie Lee Curtis reprises her original role from the 2003 film alongside Lindsay Lohan, Chad Michael Murray and Mark Harmon.

For Weiss, “Sweethearts” is a guide for all of her projects.

“The theme of my career so far and the type of stories that really interest me are unconventional love stories,” Weiss said. “I think that ‘Dollface’ was a love story between a girl and her friends, and ‘Sweethearts’ is a love story about platonic love, and ‘Freakier Friday’ is a love story for mothers and daughters.”

“Sweethearts” premieres November 28th on Max.