Late in Don’t You Forget About Me, Toronto-based director Matt Austin Sadowski’s documentary about the career and cultural legacy of John Hughes, one of the interviewees observes that though Hughes’s films (including The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Sixteen Candles) are beloved by moviegoers, they never received the same unabashed adulation from critics. Thus, critical re-assessment was in order. And, interestingly enough,
critical re-assessment came, though hardly under ideal circumstances, when Hughes died of a heart attack on Aug. 6. This sparked a wave of obituaries marked by overwhelming critical praise that had generally eluded Hughes during his career (which, aside from a few screenplay credits, had pretty much ended with 1991’s Curly Sue).
“I think death brings a lot of artists the recognition that they always deserved,” says Sadowski in an interview with The Varsity. “We wanted to make this film because people seemed to forget what a major contribution he made and put him off to the side. Like, ‘the major filmmakers of our time,’ they’d consider Woody Allen or Martin Scorsese or Quentin Tarantino, a whole bunch of people, and a year ago if I were to say, ‘…and John Hughes,’ people would be like, ‘Uh… I dunno. I’d put him on my B-list.’ And I think a lot of people didn’t realize how they felt about these movies until he passed away, and they thought about him when they hadn’t though about him in a long time. Or thought, ‘Oh my god, we’re never going to get another John Hughes film.’”
Don’t You Forget About Me has a nifty gimmick, following Sadowski and his three producers as they try to track down the reclusive Hughes ostensibly for an interview, but really just to tell him how much they miss him. Shooting over a period of two years, they also managed to secure an impressive assortment of interviewees, from filmmakers Kevin Smith and Jason Reitman to Hughes regulars like Ally Sheedy and Andrew McCarthy. “To call them and be like, ‘Hey, we’re a bunch of filmmakers from Canada, we’re making a documentary,’ the first question they ask is, ‘Well, where’s it gonna be shown?’ And we’d say, ‘Hopefully festivals… and we’ll hopefully sell it…’ And we’d say, ‘We’ll come to wherever you have time.’ I don’t want to speak for other documentaries, but I think there’s sometimes a schedule, and… we didn’t have any schedule!”
“Everyone was very generous with their time. I think they thought they’d come in and give us, like, five minutes and leave, but they ended up talking to us for a full hour.”
Particularly enthusiastic was Roger Ebert, who recorded his interview just a week before the operation that would lead to the removal of part of his jaw. “He was going in for his third and final surgery on, let’s say the tenth. And we had the interview scheduled for, like, the thirteenth. He called us to reschedule, and we thought he was going to say, ‘I’m having surgery, give me a call in a month and I’ll see how I’m doing.’ But he scheduled it earlier, because he really wanted to do our interview. So it was clear that he wanted to help us out, but also that he really wanted to talk about John Hughes.”
The most entertaining interviewee, however, is easily Judd Nelson, who comes across as a middle-aged version of his Breakfast Club character. “When he came to the interview, he was chain-smoking, and… he was Bender. And I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, is he gonna rebel against everything I say and be a smart-ass?’ So, he came in with the sunglasses, and then he took off his sunglasses and put on his eyeglasses, and he transformed into this incredible, articulate emotional person. His interview was definitely one of my favourites.”
The documentary doesn’t spend much time on later Hughes directorial efforts like Curly Sue and Planes, Trains and Automobiles, and even less time on some of his less dignified writing credits. “We just wanted to be specific. At one point we had a six-hour rough-cut, and then, y’know, you kill your babies as you edit. And one of the quotes that was cut was Roger Ebert talking about Baby’s Day Out, and how people generally go, ‘John Hughes? Baby’s Day Out?’ but Baby’s Day Out was one of Japan’s top-grossing movies in the two years it came out.”
“But we wanted to be pretty specific about what we talked about, and there’s really no other filmmaker who had such a focus on one sub-genre. There are directors who always do comedies, but there are very few directors that stick within such a specific genre and make films that aren’t sequels to each other.”
Throughout the documentary people talk about how they wish Hughes would return to make another teen movie. Having myself wanted to see Hughes come out of retirement, I ask Sedowski if this is perhaps a selfish desire. “There’s a teen towards the very end of the film who says, ‘Come back—we need you.’ We didn’t tell him to say that. And it’s kinda rare that you’d hear someone say they need a filmmaker.”
Don’t You Forget About Me comes out on DVD on Nov. 3.
