Do you have anyone in your family who works in the film industry? What inspired you to go into that line of work?

I had always been a film buff. I grew up in North Carolina, most of my family is still in North Carolina, except for a brother in Pennsylvania, and nobody's in the film business. I was the youngest of three boys. I watched a lot of television, of course, as many of us did. I just always loved movies, especially as a kid; science fiction, horror movies, and especially Planet of the Apes. That was the one movie that made me decide, “Gosh, I would really love to do that!”

Then my mom and my dad gave me a great movie camera for Christmas `77. I just made Super 8 movies all through junior high school, high school and throughout college. I would wrangle my friends and make ridiculous movies like the “Ten Million Dollar Boy” and stuff like that. I was just having a great time making Super 8 films. At the time we started out with silent movies and then I ended up getting a Super 8 sound camera and you'd edit your own movies on a Super 8 editor. This was all sort of pre-video. Those cameras weren't common place like now.

I recently read about a short film that you had directed called “Almost Beat.” Was that a student film?

Almost Beat was a movie I made, actually, after college. I had moved out to Los Angeles in 1987 and I worked my first job out here as a production assistant for ABC television. I worked for most of `87 out here, then, at the end of the year, I met, through someone who'd gone to UNC, this guy named George Zaloom from the company ZM Productions. George offered me a job at the time as an assistant editor. He said, “I won't lie to you, it's gonna be long hours -- six, sometimes seven days a week, 10 - 12 hours a day and I can only pay you $200 a week and that's the job.” At the time I really wanted to get into editing, but I could barely live on, you know, $200 a week. At the same time, a friend of ours said, “Hey, I'm transportation coordinator on this movie that's shooting back in North Carolina” and there was a friend of mine, John Schultz, who said, “Well, why don't you guys come back and you can live at home and drive vans on this movie called Bull Duram? And I can pay you $700 a week!”

So my friend John Schultz and I, who's another director out here, decided to go drive vans and save a bunch of money, because we both wanted to direct these short films. For the fall of `87, we were in North Carolina being van drivers on Bull Duram, driving Kevin Costner, Tim Robbins and Susan Surandon around. We were able to save enough money so that the following summer, the summer of `88, John was able to get a bunch of 16 millimeter film, and I was about to borrow a 16 millimeter camera, and we went to North Carolina and each directed a short film that we shot back to back. We each worked on the other guy's film.

The film I did was called Almost Beat. We shot it and the following year we had edited the movie and everything and it had been in film festivals. We had a big screening in the summer of `89, when the movies were done, in North Carolina. But that movie helped me. I was able to go back to ZM and I started doing some editing work for them and I think the fact that I had, you know, shown some initiative and made this movie and that the movie made sense and held together showed them that maybe I had what it took to direct stuff for them. So that was a fun movie to do. It's really short; it's only about 12 1/2 minutes. It's played at some film festivals over the years and won some prizes and I think, actually, UNC is having some kind of film festival where they're showing old movies of people who are working in Hollywood. So I'm going to let them show Almost Beat, even though it's pretty cringe worthy.

What's the basic premise behind your new film, Bring It On?

Well, Bring It On is a competitive high school cheerleading comedy, which has always been my favorite genre. [Laughs] It tells the story of this girl, Torrance Shipman, played by Kirsten Dunst. It's her senior year of high school and she's taking over as captain of the cheerleading squad, and she has to deal with all these things. They're the five time national champions and she finds out the previous captain, as it turns out, had stolen all of there prizewinning routines from this other cheerleading squad, the East Compton Clovers.

The main thing in the movie is all the things this girl Torrance has to deal with her senior year. There's this new girl who moved in from L.A. who's kind of tough and who's joined the squad. There's this new guy who moved to town. He's kind of a punk kid, the kind of guy she normally wouldn't find herself attracted to, but she does. And then there's this rivalry between her squad, the Toros, and this inner city squad, the Clovers. The Clovers only want to prove themselves on the national level because all there routines had been stolen over the years, and Torrance just wants to prove herself capable of leading her squad.

This is something that actually happens in the real cheerleading world. This is not just the cheerleaders who are on the sidelines at high school football games with pompoms. If you watch ESPN, there's this whole field of competitive high school and colligate cheerleading. You have these cheerleading squads who are coed, usually ten or so guys and girls. A squad can be as big as 20 people. It combines cheerleading and gymnastics and dance. It's got this athleticism to it, but it also combines the mania of beauty contests. They're really sort of starting to be taken seriously as athletes, not just as people who cheer for other athletic events. It takes place in this world. I didn't know much about it before I read this script and started researching it. I had flipped around on TV and seen these things, and they had fascinated me, and when you get into that world, it's a really big business. I had no idea how wide ranging the cheerleading was.

It's also, again, really, really fanatical and has these really interesting sort of aspects to it. For example, when we were scouting high schools in San Diego, where we shot, you would meet these guys who, during football season were on the football team, and during the off season would cheer with the cheerleaders. The guys have to be very athletic and agile, and have to be able to lift girls over their heads with one arm. The other guys, who are tumblers, have to be able to do all these amazing gymnastic things. It is a fascinating world, and this is the world this movie takes place in

Since this is your feature film debut, give us the short story breakdown, from script to screen, of your typical film?

Well, in this case, I had been in New York doing some episodes of Upright Citizens Brigade. Right before I left to go to New York, I had read this script called Cheer Fever. It interested me because I love high school movies, and this high school movie really appealed to me because it wasn't just kids walking through hallways and talking about who's going to the dance with who or guys trying to get laid. [Laughs] It really had things that were like musical sequences and there's a lot of visual opportunity for a director. I really liked the story a lot. I read the script, I met with a couple of the producers, Caitlin Scanlon and Max Wong, told them what I thought of the script and what I would do with it, and didn't think much about it, then left to go to do Upright Citizens Brigade.

While I was there, I kept getting phone calls about it. I talked to Marc Abraham, the producer of the movie, and tried to convince him I was the guy for the job. By the time I was on my third episode of Upright Citizens Brigade, I found out that I got the movie. I wasn't able to finish editing my third episode of the show and sort of did it by mail and over the phone. The second I landed here, it was just a whirlwind. I flew back to L.A. and drove straight from the airport to a meeting with the line producer, and the casting agent already had, you know, “Here's some pictures” and blah blah blah. And so you just hit the ground running.

The next few weeks were preproduction, and we had sort of a compressed preproduction because we had to start shooting at the beginning of July and it was May when I came back. First, you have to cast the movie. Then you have to deal with getting the script in shooting shape. There were great things about the script, and I loved the script, but it needed some structural and character work and stuff like that. It was working on the script, at the same time you were trying to cast, at the same time you were trying to hire different crew members that you wanted. And then everything coming together and deciding where you were going to shoot the movie, because we were looking at various places from Florida to North Carolina. We decided on San Diego because it was closer and a real hub of cheerleading activity.

Then you had to figure out all these things about a lot of gymnastic stuff that people could consider stunts, so you had to hire choreographers. It wasn't a big budget movie, but it was a big production. It had a lot of extras and a lot of the extras in the scenes had to be cheerleaders and able to do that stuff. It's not stuff that you can learn quickly.

Once we cast Kirsten Dunst, everything else fell into place. I'm so happy we were able to get Kirsten. She was in Czechoslovakia at the time doing a movie. She had been sent the script and had some issues with certain things in the script, so I was able to talk to her over the phone and figure out what we were going to do and tell her what I was going to do with it. So she signed on, which was great. And then we had to get our actors into cheerleading camp, because our actors who were on the main squads had to train for three or four weeks with cheerleading coaches and choreographers. That was really fun, because it's intense for ten hours a day, stretching and doing gymnastics and learning this choreography at the same time they were supposed to be learning their lines. It was amazing. We had this several week period before we even started shooting this movie where they got to hang out and bond, and I think it shows on screen.

So then I moved to San Diego. I told my wife, just after our one-year anniversary, “Uh, I'm going to be moving to San Diego this summer to be surrounded by cheerleaders. What do you think of that?” My wife is the greatest and is most supportive. She worked here in L.A. so she spent the entire summer driving down on Saturdays and she'd stay from Saturday through Tuesday. She was great.

We did all the preproduction, and started shooting in July 1999. We shot for 44 days. It was really fun. Coming from doing some of the TV stuff that I have done, the Disney movies, you have to shoot in 20 days and it still has to be a 90-minute movie that looks great. And especially Mr. Show and Upright Citizens Brigade, which were really sort of run and gun situations where there wasn't a lot of money but you had to make it look great and be really funny and we were working crazy hours. When we were doing this, it was like, “Oh, we have 44 days!,” and it was like a dream to me. It was never relaxed, obviously, because you had a lot to do, but I think in that way the TV stuff was a great training ground for doing this movie.

You've worked in television for many years, doing documentaries, music videos, television series, and made-for-television movies. What was the biggest difference in moving to feature films?

The biggest difference in television is the turnaround time. You do something for TV and usually there's an air date already set, so you have these deadlines and it has to get done quickly. And there's not as much money, so it has to get done quickly for that reason, too. In features, you have a little more money and you have a little more time. But that's not always the case. As I said, our preproduction time for Bring It On was really accelerated; given the size of what's going on in the movie, it was very much a hustle. Probably one of the other differences is in your head in terms of “Oh, I'm finally doing a movie, a theatrical film!” so you build it up in your head. I get pretty particular about things, anyway, in terms of being a control freak, so there's more pressure because there's more money at stake. So you try, obviously, not to think about that.

Were you able to stay on budget and on schedule?

Yeah. We were budgeted, really, for 45 days, and what I wanted to do was something I'd kind of learned on The Love Bug; I saved a day, so that you can shoot and spend time in the editing room. Once you've got a cut of the picture, you have this one day where it's like, “Hey, it'd be great to get this one actor back to shoot this!” And they weren't reshoots; they were just things I wanted to add or jokes I wanted to have in the movie. It was in January that we shot what's called a 'pick-up day', where we got everybody that we needed together for a day in L.A. and shot one additional scene and a handful of little scenes and things that I wanted. And that was great.

What does a budget of $11 million entail? Does that cover everything up to the point where you finish filming and the movie is ready? Does it cover the cost for film print and advertising?

Printing and advertising are separate costs. This budget covers all the filming and paying the crew and everything, and all the post production, which, on a movie like this, is pretty involved. The music is a very big part, too; you have a music budget. Not only for your score, but for your songs. For example, on our movie, Epic records is putting out a soundtrack of pop songs from the movie and you have to stay within your music budget to afford all these songs. This is a very music-heavy movie for all those final cheerleading sequences and everything.

I've seen the trailer off the official site. It looks really great, and one of the first things I noticed was that it is a very music-oriented and uses the cheerleader-themed song “Mickey” by Tony Basil, plus the recent hit by the group Blaque, who are in the film.

I think only one song in the trailer is in the movie. The girls from Blaque recorded a new song for our film that'll be on the soundtrack, and this group B*witched did a remake of the “Mickey” song. At the end of the movie, there's this end title sequence with it that was pretty fun.

Bring It On was filmed under the name Cheer Fever, but changed a couple of months ago to its present title. I read somewhere that it had also been changed ever-so-briefly to Jump, but was quickly changed back to Bring It On. What was the initial reason for it being changed from Cheer Fever to begin with?

Cheer Fever had always been the working title of the movie. I don't think anyone was ever completely happy with the title. Even during the time we were shooting, we would have contests on the set: “Rename Cheer Fever”! Everyone in the cast and crew would submit lists; I have pages and pages of potential titles for this movie, just millions of them. All the time, through post and even when we were doing the first test screenings, it was still Cheer Fever. Once Universal marketing got involved and you really have to nail down a title, they went through lists and lists and had these sessions where we would show early cuts of the trailer to these teenage focus groups and get their feedback on titles and things.

In the movie, it's very much about competition between Kirsten Dunst's character, Torrance, and Gabrielle Union's character, Isis. I like to think of it almost like Magic Johnson and Larry Bird at their peak, where these were two great basketball players who loved competing against each other. One of them was white and one of them was black, but that's not really what it was about; it was about these two great athletes. And this whole notion of, “Come on, bring it on! Show me your best; don't hold back!” And it just seemed to sort of fit. I resisted it at the beginning because there's so many high school movies that have three word titles: She's All That; Down to You; Drive Me Crazy. I didn't want it to fall into Genericland. When they were testing titles, we were looking at the title Jump, but I think Sony owned that title or something like that.

In Bring It On, you worked with some very talented people, particularly Kirsten Dunst, and the pop trio Blaque. Was that intimidating as a first-time director in this arena, or were you able to put the "star-factor" in the back of your mind as you gave them direction?

I think the joy of getting someone like Kirsten Dunst, who you know is a good actor and will deliver what you need, far outweighed any sort of intimidation. One of the great things for me, too, is that the bulk of the actors in this movie range from 17 on up through the mid-20's, so I was older then all of them and I could yell at them a lot and they'd do what I'd tell them to [Laughs]. There was something really fun about that.

We really got a great cast. Kirsten's great, and Eliza Dushku, who's in True Lies and Buffy the Vampire Slayer -- she's terrific in the movie. I think this is a real breakout role for her. Gabrielle Union is amazing, and Jesse Bradford, who plays the character of Cliff -- he's just a really, really good actor.

I got lucky in terms of my cast. Not only did they have to be able to act and do some comedic acting, but these are very physical roles and we didn't audition anybody who didn't have some sort of dance or gymnastics background. Obviously, I erred on the side of good acting. But I really didn't want to use stunt doubles or things like that. For the most part, what you see on screen is the actors doing their thing. The teams in the movie are made up of our actors and of our real cheerleaders and I think in the final movie you'll be hard pressed to tell the difference.

It seems these days, directors have an additional task at hand when making a movie -- leaving some extra material on the cutting room floor so that it will find its way to the DVD release later. How early in the process do you even begin considering the home video & DVD release for a film?

Being a video geek, it's a dream come true to have a DVD and video commentary. And, actually, we haven't even started... I haven't even had discussions with Universal Home Video. I guess a lot of it has to do with how the movie does at the box office with how much they're going to put into it. We certainly never cut anything from the movie thinking, “Oh, that'll be great on the DVD.” We did the movie and got the movie where I wanted it. But there are things, obviously, that did get cut from the movie. And before we closed up the editing room, the assistant editor and I went through and made up a master tape of all these scenes that we thought might be possibilities for a supplemental DVD. So yeah, I think I very much had that in mind.

Before DVDs hit, I was a big laserdisc fan, which is a now dead format [laughs] and I have two shelves full. I still watch them. Laserdiscs started that thing, and it was sort of a niche market for film geeks like myself. I'm really happy now to see that the DVDs are catching on with mainstream America, and you can rent them at Blockbuster, because I do find it fascinating and I do think it's going to breed this entirely new sort of film literate generation. If I was coming up now and trying to decide whether to go to film school or not... I mean, film school is great, but it's also very expensive. To sit there and listen to these laserdiscs, to hear John Sturges audio track talking about Bad Day at Black Rock, or listening to Scorsese talking about any of his movies.... You have audio commentaries on almost every movie now. It's such an interesting format. If I was a kid, I'd say “Forget film school, I'm just going to rent a bunch of DVDs to learn all that stuff and start making movies.” They're a great combination of practical stuff and I just find it fascinating.

I'm also torn, too, coming from the world of behind-the-scenes documentaries and having done a bunch of those. It's always really, really fun. When ZM started doing them, there weren't that many going on. And now we live in a world where the E! Channel is on 24 hours a day and you've got Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood and you've got all these DVDs. There's a point where, oddly, when we were doing this movie, it was like, “Do I want to do a behind-the-scenes documentary?” In a way, I really want to re-mystify the process.

So you don't have a documentary on this film?

No, we actually do! [Laughs] I think there was talk of the E! Channel doing a half hour thing, but Mark Cowen's guys actually shot a behind-the-scenes thing. They only shot for three or four days. This is not an effect-heavy movie or a big sci-fi event, so there's not a lot of explaining to do in terms of how we did stuff. A behind-the-scenes on this would be more sort of looking at that world of cheerleading and seeing how much darn fun we had!

In terms of the DVD, yeah, it's premature, because we haven't had that conversation yet, but I want to do a great DVD for this, put on supplemental stuff. There's a whole ending sequence we cut from the movie, and various little scenes that you cut for time or for pace or for clarifying a character arc. Editing is a really interesting process because you really find these great moments that were strictly created in the editing room and I love that.

You shot this film on location in San Diego at locations such as Kearny High School and San Diego State University, with principle photography beginning on July 12, 1999, and wrapping on September 10, 1999. With the film slated for an August 25, 2000 release date, that seems like a lengthy post-production process.

We finished mixing the movie, the movie's done, the final cut print's done, so now, I've been an extreme control freak for a year, getting the movie the way I want it, and I have to let go and let it do what it does. [Laughs] Which is a weird feeling. We had preview screenings in January and February, then the rest of that time we've tweaked the movie and locked the picture, which is the final edit. We could've either really rushed and gotten it out in the spring, but then once you get past spring you get into the crowded summer. A film like this probably wouldn't stand a chance going up against those giant summer movies.

So then it becomes Universal Marketing and the producers figuring out the smartest time to release it. They talked about October or September, and then they moved it to August, which I think is great. It's very much a back to school movie, so I'm really happy.

It's been a relatively painless process for me, I have to say. It was kind of surprising. I think young filmmakers today come out and assume “I'm either going to get the financing or I'm going to do my movie as an independent. That's where I'll have creative control, on an independent movie.” And they're right. If you start going to a studio sometimes, you get involved in lengthy development processes and stuff, but it's interesting because Beacon has a relationship with Universal where they finance and make the movies and Universal distributes them. So Universal didn't even see the movie until we had our first preview screening. They had a few notes on that, and that was it. So I was really lucky to be working for Beacon and was really sort of shielded. They were very protective and very supportive of the filmmaker. It was a great situation.

Beacon does big movies like The Hurricane and End of Days, The Family Man with Nicolas Cage coming up, 13 Days with Kevin Costner, Spy Game with Brad Pitt and Robert Redford.... They make these giant, star-driven movies, and at the same time they make these smaller movies, and I hope they keep doing that because I definitely benefited from the experience.

Let's back up a minute, and talk about some of your most recent projects. Probably the most recognizable project you've worked on in the last few years was The Weird Al Show. I've been a fan of Weird Al since he first debuted on the Dr. Demento Show in 1981. Tell me about working with such a zany guy, and what it was like with that series.

Al is great. How I got hooked up with The Weird Al Show.... actually, my wife Beth has a music video production company called Daisy Force, and she represents a handful of music video directors. She also reps “Weird Al”. He directs his own videos and he's also directed videos for John Spencer Blues Explosion and Hanson and various other people. And he's a really good director.