I don't turn Britney Spears into a star. I have to spot that these people are going to be stars, in the future, and say, "Okay, these guys have cultural validity and they're going to pop."
Joseph M. KahnI'm imagining there's a particular audience out there that's younger and older, too. It works on two levels. Do they exist? I don't know. I had to make it to find out if it does. When you do something this experimental, that's part of the process and part of the risk. I only spent my own money, so that I'm the only person that gets hurt, if it fails.
Joseph M. KahnEven the way the kids react with media today is so completely different than what most movies have. We just wanted to make a movie that challenged them.
Joseph M. KahnOn a certain level, the film retains a cultural memory. It may be meaningless to some kids, but it doesn't matter. A lot of the '90s references will be meaningless, but do some of these kids really understand what they're wearing when they wear a Led Zeppelin shirt? No. But, it looks cool and it seems to have some sort of cultural cache.
Joseph M. KahnWhen I see a kid in a movie theater texting, I think it's a failure of the movie. It's not a triumph of the Apple iPhone. It's a failure of Warner Bros. and Sony, and all that, because they haven't kept their attention and challenged them. They're smart little kids that are bored, and I wanted to challenge them.
Joseph M. KahnIt's a fusion of almost everything, in the way that I think society today tends to take cultural memory. Because there's an internet, it's on there forever. I think that's the way kids see the world today. They actually speak to each other using retro concepts now because the internet culture has kept that memory alive, constantly.
Joseph M. Kahn