Little White Lies Issue 76

Directed by DESIREE AKHAVAN Starring CHLOË GRACE MORETZ, SASHA LANE, FORREST GOODLUCK Released 7 SEPTEMBER o one ever warns you how much being a teenage girl hurts. The glossy pages of girly magazines explain how to navigate exams, fashion faux pas – even the experience of being coerced into smoking your first cigarette or necking a can of cheap beer at a house party. But what of the acute agony of trying to exist in a world that denies the validity of your existence at every turn? How do you safeguard against that? How do you explain that the world will eat you alive given half a chance, and all we have as a defence are the families we find for ourselves? There’s no easy answer, but cinema seems like a continuously safe…

Desiree Akhavan has a gift for mining her own experiences. From her cult web series The Slope, about “a pair of homophobic lesbians”, to her semi-autobiographical debut feature, Appropriate Behaviour, to The Bisexual, the London-set TV show she’s currently developing with Channel 4, and her soon-to-be published memoir ‘Late Bloomer’, the writer, director and actor is raunchy, candid and frequently hilarious. The deftness with which Akhavan uses comedy to process past humiliation is a feature of her work, not a millennial bug. Her second feature, The Miseducation of Cameron Post, swaps the self-selecting circles of her native New York City for the less progressive plains of a conservative community in rural Montana circa 1993. An adaptation of Emily M Danforth’s 2012 Young Adult novel, the film tells of a young…

On their first meeting Sasha Lane: Desiree brought me, Chloë and Forrest [Goodluck] together about a week before we started filming. I remember we were sitting at the table with Desiree and Forrest and they were super chipper and excited, and me and Chloë were just so hungry. We couldn’t talk, we just wanted food. So we had our food, and bam! We clicked right there and then. From that moment on we were just homies. Chloë Grace Moretz: The first time we met we had just gotten to New York to start our rehearsal process. We read part of the script and then we went to dinner and hung out. After that we ended up spending every waking minute together, pretty much. She’s now one of my closest and…

The colour pink and the aesthetic of shiny plastic are two of the main ingredients in Jamie Babbit’s cult lesbian classic, But I’m a Cheerleader, from 1999. It stars Natasha Lyonne as the blonde and bubbly Megan who is sent away to gay rehab at True Directions because her parents and friends suspect she might not be the conservative, white-bread conformist they want her to be. Initially unsure of her sexuality, Megan meets another camper, Clea DuVall’s Graham, and the pair gradually fall in love. Inspired by Barbie, John Waters and Edward Scissorhands, this campy and carnal vision of queer love has an awesome satiric kick which still resonates today. LWLies: But I’m a Cheerleader was your first feature as a director. Did you feel a lot of pressure to…

Calls for gender equality in the film industry rarely dip below the line. We want to see more women at the very top of the creative food chain – sitting in the director’s chair. We also want to see more women taking on roles that have traditionally been a male preserve, the vital technical jobs which occur behind the camera. Things are changing and the established order is crumbling, slowly but surely. So meet six amazing female cinematographers and discover how they established themselves working alongside some of today’s most exciting filmmakers.…

SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY Jackrabbit, Person to Person, Thou Wast Mild and Lovely, Madeline’s Madeline, The Miseducation of Cameron Post Who were your mentors when you were first starting out? You know, I wish I could say I had a mentor. I was certainly looking for one. My college professors really guided me, people like Cathy Crane or Jason Livingston. They made me the cinematographer I am today. In the early days, I don’t think I had much guidance. I had a group of supporters, women who I would babysit for and they would help me to get small jobs, shooting a fashion thing or something like that. I studied at Ithaca College in Upstate New York, but I grew up in a suburb of Los Angeles, and when I decided I…