Director Howard Deutch woke up on a couch in the early hours of the morning. He had come the night before to claim the rewrites on his latest film, “Pretty in Pink,” from the screenwriter, who was known for working late into the night. But when the writer, John Hughes, finally came bounding down the stairs, it was not with the desired changes, but with something else all together.
Hughes, it turned out, had been inspired with a new idea, and spent the entire night writing about 40 pages of a script called “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”
The script for that film, which celebrates its 25th anniversary with a Blu-ray release this Tuesday, was completed by Hughes in about five days, fueled by the same youthful vigor and enthusiasm that defined his now-classic title character. Matthew Broderick plays Ferris Bueller, a mischievous charmer who uses a series of elaborate ruses to play hooky so he can take in Chicago’s greatest attractions with his best friend (Alan Ruck) and girlfriend (Mia Sara).
“Bueller,” as with its predecessors “Sixteen Candles” and “The Breakfast Club,” showed how writer-director Hughes, who died of a heart attack in 2009 at age 59, understood teenagers better than just about any filmmaker in Hollywood history.
“Adults ask me all sorts of baffling questions, like, ‘Your teenage dialogue — how do you do that?’ and ‘Have you actually seen teens interact?’ And I wonder if they think that people under 21 are a separate species,” Hughes told frequent muse Molly Ringwald in an interview for Seventeen magazine in 1986. “We shot ‘Ferris’ at my old high school, and I talked with the students a lot. And I loved it, because it was easy to strike up a conversation with them.”
For the suave title character, Hughes needed an actor who could revel in life’s privilege without seeming obnoxious and entitled.
“Certain guys would have played Ferris and you would have thought, ‘Where’s my wallet?’ ” Hughes told the Chicago Sun-Times. “I had to have that look. That charm had to come through. Jimmy Stewart could have played Ferris at 15. I needed Matthew.”
Just as Hughes had an instinctive bond with teens, he had the same with actors in general, and with many of the film’s iconic moments evolved from his own spark of collaborative inspiration.
Broderick’s break of the fourth wall in the film’s end credits was a last minute Hughes epiphany.
“There’s a shot where Ferris goes to and from the shower,” says Tom Jacobson, who co-produced the film with Hughes. “They finished that shot, then John runs up to Matthew and whispers something. So Matthew comes around the corner and says, ‘What? You’re still here? It’s over. Go home.’ That became the very end of the movie, but John thought of that right then.”
“I loved working with [John] — I loved his playfulness,” Jennifer Grey, who played Ferris’ sister Jeanie, says in an interview for the Blu-ray extras. “He would make the face he wanted me to make, and I would mimic him, and [he would say], ‘Bug your eyes out, bug ’em out more, bug ’em out more,’ and I’m like, ‘Really? Do you think this is just gonna look really bad?’ And he’s like, ‘Just do it.’ I was so nuts for him, I would do anything he said.”
“I teased up this big bubble hairdo [for my character], and arrived on the set with that hairdo,” says Edie McClurg, who played Grace, the school secretary. “John looked at it and said, ‘How many pencils can you stick in that hair?’ So I said, ‘Let’s try.’ I put one in and it didn’t fall out, and we tried another, and another. The fourth fell out. So he said, ‘OK, we’ll go with three.’ And that’s how we started that scene, with me finding pencils in my hair.”
While Hughes’ genius, spontaneity and empathy were paramount in creating the film, he sometimes lived the other side of that coin as well, exhibiting a teenager’s brand of hyper-sensitivity.
“You had to be careful with him,” Broderick told Vanity Fair. “I remember him taking me to one location and saying, ‘This is where you and Mia kiss.’ I had not been reading the stage directions carefully, and I was like, ‘Oh, we kiss at the museum?’ To him, it meant that I was not prepared, and he took that as a personal affront — that I didn’t care about him: ‘OK, so we won’t be friends. We’ll just do our work.’ ”
While filming her famous line about Bueller being liked by “motorheads, geeks, wastoids,” and more, McClurg took the opportunity to delve into Hughes’ psyche.
“We were hanging in the office while they were setting a light, and I said, ‘Which one were you? Were you a dweeby, a d – – khead or a wastoid?’ And he kinda grinned and said, ‘Wastoid.’ ”
But as “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” proves, Hughes was so much more than that, as a visionary who understood a generation of teens like no one else before.
“John was really a poet,” says Jacobson. “He took these American characters, and elevated the trials and travails of their everyday lives to poetry. He was a great observer of life around him, and he took those [everyday] qualities and made them sing.”