“Fast Times at Ridgemont High” was quite a debut. When I saw it in a theater 35 years ago, it didn’t feel like a first-time director did it. The story is episodic, which is fine. But while most people went crazy for Sean Penn’s surfer dude Spicoli’s antics—like having a pizza delivered to his history class—I was more focused on Jennifer Jason Leigh’s coping with the pressure of losing her virginity at 15 and dealing with boys who were all too glad to take advantage of her but not take any responsibility afterwards. She delivers such a heartbreakingly real performance as Stacy that seemed unusual even back then. Did you add more to her character arc or was all that there in Cameron’s script?

There was a mention in the book, about the graffiti on the ceiling when she loses her virginity. And I had written a script before that movie came out where I had a person finally making love with the person they wanted, and while it is happening, they are starting to think about how to re-arrange the furniture in the room and their mind goes to all sorts of other places. So I when I read that in the book, I thought, “Oh, this I know what to do with.” It just made sense to me. There is this physical drive towards having sex and, initially, it is not always the most amazing thing in the world. And your mind wanders.

You must have gotten pushback about the scenes involving Stacy’s abortion.

They wanted to fire me. Because the way the shooting schedule worked out, we started in the house where Jennifer and Judge Reinhold as her brother lived. And those were the more emotional scenes. And there was a kind of heaviness. And Jennifer’s tendency is to be very dramatic and basically I wanted the movie to be a lighter film. Not like a disease-of-the-week movie on TV. I wanted to deal with real things but not like weepy. When they were seeing some of the footage, they thought, “Oh-oh, what is this?” They were thinking this wasn’t what we signed up for. I knew Jennifer’s story was this and Phoebe was going to bring that and Spicoli wasn’t in the dailies yet because he was in the school and the mall. They got worried that this was some girly movie about abortion. And, then, oddly enough they sent John Landis, who worked at Universal. One day I was shooting the scene where Judge is cleaning off the “Big Hairy Pussy” graffiti on the bathroom mirror and John comes by and says, “Hey, how ya doing?” Years later, I find out he had been sent to the set to see if I knew what I was doing because they thought they were going to get some depressing movie. He told me many years later about that. He went to them and said, “She’s fine, she’s fine. She knows what she’s doing.” I’m indebted to him for that.