Jonathan Levine (All The Boys Love Mandy Lane) Interview

Smart, sexy and savvy, All The Boys Love Mandy Lane is a brand new horror thriller from director Jonathan Levine, recent winner of the Audience Award at Sundance for The Wackness, and will be released to own on DVD and Blu-ray from 21st July 2008.


We’ve heard that you’ve described high school as a terrifying experience. We hope it wasn’t as gory as Mandy Lane’s…

It wasn’t so much short of that. For me it was a very socially oppressive time. People who I thought were my friends ended up not being such. The entire social structure really causes people to act in ways that I don’t think a lot of them would now be proud of. Not me of course!

Was there a Mandy Lane at your school?

Yeah, I think every school has that, that girl who’s unobtainable that everyone wants to be with. She gets mythologised in that way. Every social environment would have a girl like that.

Amber Heard (who plays Mandy Lane in the movie) has said that you two had an instant connection – did you know immediately that she was Mandy Lane for you?

I did, I really did. I knew pretty much as soon as she walked in and basically I took her tape over the weekend and you never want to make a rash decision with actors… Whenever I get super-excited, I always end up kinda taking a deep breath and backing off for a second to make sure I still feel the same way a few days later. I showed her audition tape to Jacob, the writer, and he said “I never thought I’d see someone so close to what I’d written”. So after that I just made the call that we wanted her.

What was it like working with Jacob? We’ve heard that you’re old friends, how did that affect your working relationship?

We were friends from film school so I wasn’t too worried about it. I came into the project a couple of years into its existence, so you want to be very sensitive of his process before I came in. I didn’t want to come in and completely change everything because I really liked the script. But there were things I wanted to magnify, so I worked with him for a couple of months and we managed to actually do it without ruining our friendship! As much as the movie is the number one priority, the movie always comes out better if you treat your friends with respect. I think a lot of directors probably don’t do that, but it’s important to me. Maybe I’ll change my strategy at some point!

The twist at the end is one of the biggest parts of the film. Was that always planned?

That was in the script by the time it got to me, but I know that was something that came on about halfway through the development process.

What do you think will be the next big trends in the horror genre?

I think that the genre has to be at a crossroads. The thing about horror is that it dies if it doesn’t continuously reinvent itself, because you can’t keep scaring people in the same way as then it’s not scary anymore. I know that in the States there’s been this backlash towards the ‘torture porn’ way of doing things, so I hope that it would go back to the original pieces of the genre which are using it to investigate things that are going on in society. God knows, there’s enough of that right now.

Can you tell us a bit about your next project, The Wackness?

Well, it’s coming out in the UK in late August and it’s a coming-of-age buddy movie with Sir Ben Kingsley, in which he plays a therapist who counsels a trouble teenager who trades him therapy for marijuana - the teenager is a drug dealer. I’m happy with it, it’s very different from Mandy Lane, but it’s a high school world as well so it’s somewhat similar. Although fewer people get killed – no one in fact!


Find out Jonathan Levine's Top Five Teen Horror Movies.