Put Your Big Girl Pants On & Go Do Something: Susan Skoog on Whatever (1998)

Susan Skoog’s Whatever opens and closes on Anna (Liza Weil), its restless teen protagonist, biking through her quiet New Jersey suburb. In between, she’s experimented with drugs, had first-time sex, and watched her best friend, Brenda (Chad Morgan), slip through the cracks of a world uninterested in helping her carve a more stable path. All this to the tune of a punky soundtrack populated by the likes of Chrissie Hynde, Patti Smith, and Aimee Mann. “I don’t know what else to say,” the latter deadpans over the film’s final moments, “but I think you get it.” 

Though made in 1998, the film is set in 1981; its tagline boasts that “in the era of Just Say No, they said yes.” Often hailed as the anti-John Hughes picture, Skoog’s unsparing portrait of debauched kids and damaged adults does dig into the static of Regan-era disconnect. But it’s not so simple as just saying yes. Whatever’s quintessential gesture is the shrug. Anna wants things, sure, but what does that have to do with getting them? Grounded in both Skoog and Anna’s careful modes of observational attention—the latter dreams of being a painter, drafting still lifes of sunlit boots and purses—it's a film that traces the fine lines between apathy, autonomy, and acceptance. 

Now just past its 26th birthday, Whatever has grown up quite a bit since it first premiered at Sundance. Like its characters, it’s done most of that growing up alone. Rarely screened after its initial release with Sony Pictures Classics, a chance to catch Whatever on the big screen now is cause for some celebration—a smirk, at least, if not a full on smile. In honor of the film’s Sunday showing at Austin Film Society, we sat down with writer-director Susan Skoog, who currently teaches at NYU Tisch, to discuss all the hows and whys of Whatever. 

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

There was a 20th anniversary screening of Whatever (1998) at New York’s Quad Cinema in 2018. Is that the last time you saw it? 

It is, yeah. It was interesting to look at the film so many years later, when our culture has shifted so much. The character of Brenda felt more poignant and more primary. I had always felt it was Anna's story, but seeing it through the prism of where we're at today, culturally, and what we're aware of now, Brenda's story was much more prominent and emotional than any of us expected. All the cast and crew that were there, we all thought, “This feels different than it did then.”

That was just after or around the height of MeToo, right? Rewatching the film, Brenda does feel substantive—not at all the sidekick-best friend you sometimes get in coming-of-age stories. Was that heft to her character in the script or did it develop naturally on set?

I always envisioned it as the two of them, Anna and Brenda. Obviously, there’s one central character, but Brenda was such a major part. It was two visions of teen girldom, two separate experiences that I thought were equal. Brenda was the mentor, the one who was more risky out in the world, who wanted to capture life and experience things. Anna was the observer. So that was baked in, to a degree. But then the actors came in, and the two of them really bonded. We made this so low budget, it was like summer camp. 

There’s a credit at the end of the film that says: “The filmmakers would like to express their deepest gratitude and thanks to all who gave their time, their artistry, their technical abilities, their equipment, their clothes, their homes, their furnitures, their cars, their food, their pets, their children, their offices, their copy machines, their phones, pills and blankets, credit limits, lungs, patients, marriage…” And so on and so forth. It paints such a clear picture of the collaborative effort behind the movie. 

It was a labor of love, and it was a real communal experience. People just gave and gave. We had two DPs [directors of photography], for example, because the first one—Michael Barrow, we adored him—had to leave halfway through. His wife asked him for a divorce. 

The marriage! 

Yes. And we smoked cigarettes constantly. 

The lungs! 

Exactly. Michael ultimately did get divorced, but he had to go south to try and make an attempt to salvage it. Our production designer had a friend who was a DP who had just finished a job, and like a miracle, he came down to West Virginia, which stood in for New Jersey because it was cheaper. We didn’t even miss a day of shooting. So by the time he got there, we kept on schedule, which was insane, and he was amazing, too. It was a real gift. We felt like there was a lot of magic happening. 

You were a producer at VH1 prior to making this film, right? Was that where you were working when you started to think about the project?

I went to NYU, minored in film, and then I got a job working as a PA [production assistant] at VH1, worked my way up and became a producer. In those days if you had a heartbeat and half a brain, they would give you a show to produce at MTV. It was just telling stories with images and music. That experience brought me to the point where music became a big part of my process. Eventually, I moved to Los Angeles, and I worked freelance, as a producer for Turner Classic movies while I was saving money and writing my script and making short films. Eventually, I got it together to make Whatever.

Speaking of music, I would imagine you've never not been asked about the soundtrack to this film. I’m sure everyone wants to talk about the Pretenders, and the Bowie, and the Blondie. But I’m interested in Aimee Mann’s “I Should’ve Known.” That track came out in 1993, and Whatever is set in the ‘80s, so it’s the only anachronistic needle drop in the film—and it closes the movie! How did you end up deciding to incorporate it? 

I had finished a script, and I was getting notes from people. A friend of mine said, “Do you know who Aimee Mann is? Because she has an album called Whatever.” And I didn’t know that. I’d never heard of her. But then I went and listened to it, and I just fell in love with the whole thing. I became a huge Aimee Mann fan. Still am. That song in particular became, thematically, what it was all about for me and for the characters: the realization that you should have known. You’ve got no one to blame but yourself. You’ve gotta figure it out. I was like, who cares? So what if the song is from the ‘90s? I can do it. It's my movie. 

Whatever is screening alongside Annette Hayward-Carter’s Foxfire and Leslie Harris’ Just Another Girl on the IRT at Austin Film Society this week. Two films directed by women, centered on young women, made around the same time. Does it make you feel part of a cohort to see Whatever in that context? 

You know, there was this moment in the late ‘90s, from like ‘95 to, maybe 2000, where there were all these films being made about teenage girls from various perspectives. They were very different, but they were in one sort of genre. I went and saw every single one of them. I'm teaching at NYU right now, and I'm walking through the halls in Tisch, and they have all these posters. And I'm like, “Oh my god, I remember that movie! I went to see that!” And then I'm like, “Oh, they teach here. I want to call them up.”

What are some of the films you loved?

So many. Alex Sichel’s All Over Me and Ripe—a Mo Ogrodnik film, those were huge for me. There were a bunch of films that were looking at sexuality and offering a more truthful teenage girl perspective that hadn't been seen before. With Whatever, I set out to present an authentic depiction of what it meant to be female and be a teenager and dealing with the world at the time. I think a lot of women filmmakers at the time felt the same. They all were trying to show a more genuine voice. Then that fell away for a bit. Now there's more interest in women filmmakers again, but a lot of it feels like kind of lip service. It feels like, oh, we need some women directors. Let's throw them into direct episodic—which is great, but it's still not where it was.

You’ve mentioned Eric Rohmer as an influence of yours before. Were other filmmakers on your mind when you were making Whatever?

Well, it's funny, because I'm going to Austin, which is Richard Linklater’s town. Slacker was huge when I was working at VH1. I was producing a film show at that point, and one of our press publicists was like, “Hey, we have this indie guy coming to New York. He made this. It's weird. You want to go to a screening?” I went to the screening, and I thought, “This is amazing. This is what I want to do.” Then we interviewed him, and he told us the story about how he made the film, and again I thought, “Damn, that's what I want to do.” It took a few years after that to make Whatever, but that was the moment of, oh, this is possible. He did it, and it's about nothing, just weird people on the streets of Austin. That was huge, just in terms of getting Whatever made. The idea that it could have a life, because he’d gotten Slacker out there.The fact that he had done it pulled me through.

Whatever was made in the era of Larry Clark’s Kids (1995). There's a very different thing happening in your film, but it’s got shades of that same illicit teenage sexuality. Do you think that people found it shocking?

Yes. We cast a number of different young boys to play [Anna’s] brother whose parents read the script and were like, “No, we don't want any part of this.” Everything that's on the screen was in the script. It didn't read pornographically, but it was clear what was happening. And then when it was done, the ratings board gave the film an NC-17. I had to go in and shave off frames of the scene where Anna throws up during the blowjob scene. Sony had bought the film at the time, and so I would go to Sony lot in Culver City, into this old-timey edit room where there was this old-timey guy with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth who would cut a couple frames. Then he’d say, “All right, that's enough. You don't want to ruin the picture.” Then we’d ship it off back to the board, who’d reject it again. Back to the Sony lot. The editing guy is like, “That's ridiculous.” He shaved off two more frames, enough to get the R rating. But their issue wasn't violence, drugs, no. It was the sex. That was the big issue. 

Whatever takes place in 1981. Why that year specifically?

I graduated high school in ‘82, so I wanted that era of when I was a teenager. Then there was Nancy Reagan’s Just Say No thing, which really annoyed me. Like, you people are so clueless. I wanted it to be right smack in the middle of that bullshit. All the crap from that time. Of course, now it's really different. Now, you know, my children, who are teenagers and beyond, they long for that ‘70s, ‘80s, analog life.

It’s true that a ‘70s or ‘80s setting often gets taken up by contemporary generations of young people as somehow nostalgic, even though it’s not a time they lived through. Is that word at all applicable to Whatever for you? 

I don't know. I mean, I think it is nostalgic to some degree, just because I grew up then. I love anything depicted in the ‘70s and ‘80s, because I recognize it. So I’m nostalgic in a way. But it wasn't nostalgia that brought me to Whatever, or to that year. It was more straightforward: that was the time, it was like this. The reality of our lives was that people were doing drugs and trying to escape and not knowing what to do with their lives. And there was no support, there was no help. We didn't even expect there to be. It was just random. Anything could happen to you. You could end up running away and living in a house with a bunch of men. That happened. Getting drunk and your friend would end up getting gang raped. That happened. People did that and participated in that, because that was the attitude. That was how we saw ourselves. It was just part of the culture at the time. I don't think it was good, but that's what it was. 

So I don't think it's about nostalgia, necessarily. I think it's just that there was an inconsistency between the way the world was running and what was happening on the ground. I think that the older generation didn't recognize or have any sense of what was really happening, which was why I wanted to make it. I wanted to give voice to the truth. 

It makes sense that there was a culture of silence surrounding what teenagers were actually doing, and that parents were clueless. But the film also depicts some really lovely moments of understanding between adults and children. Anna’s art teacher is a positive force in her life, and there's that gentle beat with her and her mom at the very end of the film. What inspired some of those scenes of connection across generations? 

Well, I think that even if we don't like adults when we’re young, they have some value. I think part of maturing is recognizing that even though you hate your mom and everything about her, there might be a kernel of truth in something that she's saying. It's also about accepting people for who they are. Like the art teacher, a failed painter, you want him to be better. You want everyone to be better. Then there's this kind of awakening, and I've witnessed this with my own children, where you realize, oh, the structures and the and the authority figures that we rely on—they're fallible. They will let you down. They're human. 

One thing I realized in my 30s when I made this was that there has to be acceptance for the whole of people. That was something I wanted to convey. As much as you might chafe or have conflicts with someone, there's some value there. Because you can't hold everyone up to these impossible standards. Just to survive, you can’t. And not just people, but societies and structures and institutions that we're supposed to be able to look up to and respect and rely on, particularly in government. I tell my students and my kids: these people are bullshit. You think these people know what they're doing? They don't. They fake it. It's a crushing realization to know that these people don't know what they're doing either. Like, who's in charge here? Who am I gonna rely on? 

You're describing what sounds like an intense disillusionment, but then the result of that disillusionment is not apathy and rage, it’s a deeper understanding. I see that in the film. We sort of started off thinking about the last scene, with the Aimee Mann song. Anna bikes off into the horizon, which is the same way we meet her at the beginning of the film. Is it a happy ending? What's the takeaway from that final moment, for you?

It's acceptance. Part of my impulse in making this film was to show that things don't always work out, but you still have to move on. You'll have to find the wherewithal to figure out the next chapter of your life. That's where the Aimee Mann attitude of, like, “Yeah, you know, I fucked up, but I gotta keep going” comes in. This was the thing that annoyed me about Hollywood films: life doesn't always happen like that. Not everybody has that. I love a happy ending, sometimes, but life is more complex, and we don't often unpack the complexities of when things don't work out, and how. 

Part of why I love teaching is that I love examining structures of storytelling, and how stories impact us, and how they teach us. You understand a character, or an attitude, and think: I didn't know this then, but I know it now. We need to show different endings, to share different messages. Because not everybody's going to succeed. Not everybody's going to get into the Ivy League schools, not everybody's going to get into any of the schools. Some people are going to have different paths. And every path is okay. It's what you make of it. 

Whatever’s not a didactic film, but it does have a lesson. 

Exactly, right. I know. It’s: go do something. Put your big girl pants on, and go do something.

If you enjoyed this article, please consider becoming a patron of Hyperreal Film Journal for as low as $3 a month!