“Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” (opening June 19 in select San Diego theaters) won the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year.
"I have no idea how to tell this story or how to start it…"
So begins “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.” Greg (Thomas Mann), our narrator, is a geeky teenager just trying to survive high school, the film’s director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon said.
"I wanted to shoot the high school the way it felt to him, like terrifying, like an institution, like a prison with fluorescent lights and kind of desaturated colors with very wide angle lenses," Gomez-Rejon said. "So wide sometimes that you can’t even find Greg in the shot, which is exactly what he wants."
Greg’s M.O. is to be casually acquainted with all the cliques at school but not maintain membership in any particular one, that way he can fly under the radar and never be noticed by anyone. But then his mom changes everything when she pulls him aside for a family huddle to say, "I want to talk to you about something that’s very sad. Rachel’s been diagnosed with leukemia."
His mom wants him to spend time with Rachel (Olivia Cooke). But Rachel’s not keen on the idea.
She dismisses Greg's attempt at hanging out by telling him bluntly, "I don’t need your stupid pity just go home." Greg's response is honest: "I’m here because my mom is making me. My mom is going to turn my life into a living hell if I don’t hang out with you."
How can Rachel resist that? So the two reluctantly hang out.
Gomez-Rejon identified with Greg along with Rachel and Earl (R.J. Cyler) in Jesse Andrews script based on his own novel.
"I was just surprisingly moved by the way that the teenagers were portrayed so honestly and with so much respect, the parents, also their flawed parenting was quite refreshing and humor was pervasive," Gomez-Rejon said.
That’s one of the surprises of the film - humor in the face of what could be a somber subject. Gomez-Rejon never flinches from showing how difficult life becomes for Rachel but he also takes the time to appreciate how spending time with Rachel changes Greg in a positive way. Because of Rachel, Greg develops the courage to open up and reveal who he really is.
"As they find each other he starts to lose control but at the same time starts to learn how to pay attention so the film gets quiet and still and by the end hopefully we can kind of see his coming of age, see visually and feel it, as well as through his performance," Gomez-Rejon said.
In addition to the winning performances of the film’s three young stars (Mann, Cooke, and Cyler), there’s another aspect of the film that proves irresistible. Greg and Earl collaborate on making movies. Greg, in his emotional quirkiness, refers to Earl as a "co-worker" rather than a friend. He justifies the label by the fact that the two make films together.
"Yeah," Earl confesses in the film, "we’ve been making them for a few years, we have 42 in total. We never told nobody. They suck, I mean they’re terrible."
But of course they're not. They're amazing! Greg and Earl’s oeuvre includes works like "A Box o’ ‘lips Wow," "Death in Tennis," and "The Seven Seals" – all riffing on the art house titles that they have a geeky passion for. We get to see snippets of these films and they are both hilarious and sweetly endearing. "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl" recalls the recent coming of age film "Submarine," both are colored by their characters' love of cinema. "Submarine" is informed by French New Wave Cinema and "Me and Earl" takes its inspiration from the foreign and independent films that the main characters adore.
Gomez-Rejon expanded on the film references that were in the book.
"I had to come up with the list, the references, and who am I to select who to pay homage to so I put them all in or as many as I could and they took different shapes and forms, some of them are sections in the DVD shop, some are the parodies that they make, some of them are posters or props that appear in the movie," Gomez-Rejon said. "I was lucky enough to be there for some of the shoots and pre-production, and some of them, mainly the animated works happen in post-production, the sock puppets and all that. But Ed and Nate deserve so much credit for that."
That would be Pittsburgh-based filmmakers Edward Bursch and Nathan O. Marsh who got to create Greg and Earl’s impressively outrageous body of work. The short films not only reveal the inventiveness of the teenage boys, but they also infuse the film as a whole with a youthful energy, Gomez-Rejon said.
"That kind of energy of making a short film was very infectious and the bigger movie had the feeling of a student film," Gomez-Rejon said.
That is a major part of its charm. The film feels like Greg and Earl could have made it. It feels fresh, sincere, and personal. There’s a meticulous sense of detail that makes this feel very specifically Greg’s story but it also feels completely universal – who didn’t feel awkward in high school or who hasn’t been scared of intimacy. In the end, “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” is about the unexpected ways people can connect and change each other — even after death. (That's not a spoiler if you remember the film's title.)
"People’s lives can continue to unfold after they die, you just have to pay attention," the director added.
“Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” (rated PG-13 for sexual content, drug material, language and some thematic elements) is about coming of age and coming out of your shell, and it’s rendered with a joyous appreciation of cinema itself.
P.S. The Blu-ray will contain more of the Gaines/Jackson oeuvre, the director said. Sweet!