Kate opened the discussion, asking why upon moving behind the camera he had chosen to focus on a 13-year-old girl. “It just seemed like a natural next step,” he quipped as the audience laughed. He had some more insightful responses to this too – moving on to describe a desire to work with people, to spend less time talking about himself. In fact, according to Burnham, one of the major benefits of writing about a teenage girl was that he could explore his own anxiety without projecting his own life experience onto her.



Then, there was the advantage of the wealth of emotional online material from young girls, which inspired Kayla’s vlogs. As Bo observed, “I watched hundreds of videos of young kids talking online… the boys tended to talk about video games, the girls tended to talk about their souls”. These videos helped him make a film that explored the highly specific experience of being young now, without nostalgia.



Finally, Bo talked about his own anxiety about performance, and specifically being onstage. The girls whose vlogs he watched, and the young girls who approached him after shows, seemed to share his fears in a way that his peers didn’t – as Bo put it, “I felt understood by people like Kayla”.

Having comprehensively answered Kate’s question, he joked, “Is five enough answers for you?”