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| Zap2it- "Emile Hirsch's Risky Business" by Vanessa Sibbald After playing leading roles in "The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys," "The Emperor's Club" and the independent 2003 Sundance film, "The Mudge Boy," the last thing on Emile Hirsch's mind was starring in a teen sex comedy. So, when "The Girl Next Door" landed in his lap, a film about a high school over-achiever whose life is turned upside down when a porn star moves in next door, he passed the project without even reading the script. "Before I read the script I was like, 'Well, I don't really want to do a teen comedy, you know? I was doing all these dramas," Hirsch tells Zap2it.com But director Luke Greenfield, whose previous credits include the Rob Schneider film "The Animal," had a plan. "When I first met him, I knew he was it," Greenfield says of Hirsch. "I actually wrote him a letter; I said, 'You've got to sit down with me, I'm not giving up -- you're going to have to kill me.' I sat him down at Jerry's Deli and walked him through visually what I wanted the movie to be tone-wise, and he got it. He read the script and he was on." But snagging Hirsch in the lead role presented a few problems for the director as well. Since the Hirsch was 17 when the film started, there were restriction on what the filmmakers could and couldn't do with the actor, especially when it came to sex scenes. Even though the actor turned 18 while making the movie, yet, for some unknown reason, all the sex scenes where scheduled at the beginning of the shoot, while he was still underage. For example, when Hirsch's character, Matthew, goes to a strip club at one point in the film and gets a lap dance. "Yeah, when I got a lap dance, because I was 17 they had to put a massive pillow between me and the girl when she was, like, grinding me. It was weird -- yet pleasurable," Hirsch laughs. "It was ironic because I could have done all the nudity in the movie, but because they scheduled that stuff first for some reason, I was 17, so they had to use a body double. I would have gotten naked or whatever, but ... ." Raised on '80s teen films, especially those by John Hughes, Greenfield never saw "The Girl Next Door" as a broad teen comedy in the vein of "American Pie" or "Road Trip," instead he was thinking of films he grew up with, like Paul Brickman's "Risky Business" and Jonathan Demme's "Something Wild." "I never even really saw this as a teen comedy, to be honest with you. I see this as a coming of age story about a kid who is an over-achiever striving to get into politics, who realizes he doesn't has the experiences that he shouldn't had in high school," Greenfield explains. In the endeavor to give his actor as much of a background in what he was aiming for, Greenfield made Hirsch watch a bunch of '80s movies, even if they didn't resonate as well with the young man. "I had already seen 'Risky Business' and it was always my wish that we surpass 'Risky Business' -- I was always like, 'This has to be better than 'Risky Business.' Let's make this better.' I didn't want to re-do it, make it for the ages, I wanted it to be better than 'Risky Business.' That was my goal from day one," says Hirsch, who also admits to falling asleep during "Something Wild." In the end, Hirsch thinks they were successful. "I watched 'Risky Business' recently and I was just -- maybe it's because I'm competitive with it, I don't know, but for some reason I don't 'click' with that movie," he laughs. Source: Zap2it.com |
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