Andrew McCarthy was not a fan Pretty in pink at the beginning.
The brats The documentary filmmaker, 61, shared in an interview with PEOPLE that while he “loved making” the iconic 1986 film. Pretty in pinkhe didn’t really understand the story the filmmakers were trying to tell at the time.
“I didn’t think it was that interesting,” McCarthy says. “I didn’t really understand the film at the time. I thought, this is a movie about a girl who wants to go to the dance and make a dress, [and] if so who cares?”
“I was wrong,” he adds. “I finally got it years later, but at the time I didn’t think it was very interesting. It just kind of escaped me.”
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Andrew McCarthy and Molly Ringwald in the ‘Pretty in Pink’ promotional photo. Everett
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He went on to compare the film to a “fairy tale”, citing the film’s original ending in which Molly Ringwald’s character Andie ends up with Jon Cryer’s character Duckie instead of his character Blane.
“I ended up nogging Molly, and then she went with Jon Cryer to the prom, and they did a test screening of it – and the audience loves the film – and they came up with [scene]then the audience hates the film,” he recalls.
“She wants that guy,” he says, referring to his character. “You have to give her that guy. She doesn’t want a best friend. She wants [romance].”
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Almost 40 years later, the film is still considered a teenage classic.
McCarthy credits the film’s popularity in pop culture in part to the emotions it captured in a young person’s life — something he said writer John Hughes was able to capture so skillfully.
“They gave people credit for [being] young people deserve real emotions and they took them seriously,” he explains. “That’s why those movies stick because of the emotion.”
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He continues: “The hairstyles are funny, the music is kind of old-fashioned, but the emotions are the same.”
He says that if a person who has never seen a movie before can get through the older style of film editing and say, “Oh my God, that was so cool” by the end of the movie, then their mission has been accomplished.
“And that’s all at the end of the day, what you want, you just want to feel the identification,” he tells PEOPLE. “It makes us feel less alone and we feel seen, which is all any of us would ever want to feel seen.”
Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education