WOW!
Did you know that Tina Fey‘s infamous film Mean Girls will be 10 years old in April!?!
What the SHIZ?!?!
With it celebrating this milestone, the director, Mark Waters, has revealed some preeeetttyyyy innnneresting facts about the film!
Like, for instance, did you know that Lindsay Lohan didn’t want to play Cady Heron in the movie?!
Scandalous!!
He said:
“When I gave it to her, she was like, ‘I fucking love Regina George! This is exactly the part I want to play.’ So we did a read-through, and we were trying to look for somebody to play the role of Cady, but frankly, we didn’t find anyone we liked who felt strong enough to go up against Lindsay…[So,] Lindsay kind of begrudgingly said, ‘Okay, I guess I’ll play the lead. At least I get to have more lines.'”
WOW! Who’d have guessed that! But what other juicy secrets has he dished?
Well, there’s some involving Rachel McAdams, Amy Poehler, and even Scarlett Johansson!
Ch-ch-check out the rest of the facts, along with Mark’s commentary…AFTER THE JUMP!!!
Rachel McAdams was one of the many girls who auditioned for Cady against LiLo.
“I told her, ‘I think you’re a movie star, but you’re way too old for this character. You just aren’t going to be able to play the ingenue.”
But Rachel still had some unexpectedly HUGE competition for the Regina role; Amanda Seyfried!
“She tested for Regina and was kind of brilliant, and very different than Rachel’s approach. She played it in a much more ethereal but still kind of scary way. She was more frightening, but oddly, less intimidating.
Scarlett Johansson did NOT audition for Mean Girls, as everyone thought.
“That’s not right. I did test her for something, but not Mean Girls ├óΓé¼ΓÇ¥ I actually tested Scarlett for The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, when I was going to direct it with Owen Wilson in the lead.”
The now infamous “Boo, you whore!” four-way phone call involved some major camera tricks.
“Lindsay was still a minor when we shot the movie, so we only had about nine hours of shooting time with her. The trick behind that scene was that I shot everything at 48 frames per second, which is basically a slow-motion rate, but we recorded synched sound. If I needed to mess with the time compression, I’d slip into slow motion. Your eye goes to the person who’s talking, but for the people who aren’t talking, unless they’re doing some sort of vigorous activity, you won’t notice if it goes into slow motion for a little bit. That’s the magic of movies: You put it all together and nobody knows.”
Paramount was incredibly uneasy about casting Tim Meadows and Amy.
“They’d been burned on some Saturday Night Live movies that had come from Lorne, so they didn’t want many Saturday Night Live actors in Mean Girls, because then it might feel like an SNL movie and people might shy away from it.”
Amy had a preeetttttyyy big hand in the Kevin Gnapoor rap.
“She’ll actually give credit to Amy for this, because Amy is more of the rap person. Amy definitely coached him on how to do the rap, and she actually gave him some of the moves and choreography for it.”
The MPAA wanted to give Mean Girls an R-rating, but they clearly didn’t succeed!
“We had lots of battles with the ratings board on the movie. There was the line, ‘Amber D’Lessio gave a blow job to a hot dog,’ which eventually became ‘Amber D’Lessio made out with a hot dog.’ Which is somehow weirder! That’s the thing we found: When you’re trying to make a joke obey the rules and not use any bad words, it can actually become seamier, even. We ended up playing the card that the ratings board was sexist, because Anchorman had just come out, and Ron Burgundy had an erection in one scene, and that was PG-13. We told them, ‘You’re only saying this because it’s a girl, and she’s talking about a part of her anatomy. There’s no sexual context whatsoever, and to say this is restrictive to an audience of girls is demeaning to all women.’ And they eventually had to back down.”
Mark has an AH-MAZE reason why he makes movies about strong women.
“I find women much more interesting than dudes.”
Apparently, it’s taken A LOT of time for him to realize how big Mean Girls is. Awks.
“It’s really kind of seared into their brains. It was fascinating to see how important it was to them ├óΓé¼ΓÇ¥ they’re kind of obsessed with it. I always knew that it would have a cult following, but it wasn’t until it was in my face, seeing these kids quote it back to me, that I realized it had this profound effect on people.”