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Interview: Matt Austin Sadowski

DON’T YOU FORGET ABOUT ME: A TRIBUTE TO JOHN HUGHES directed by Matt Austin Sadowski. An Alliance release. 73 minutes. On DVD Tuesday (November 3).


This is not how Matt Austin Sadowski wanted to release his John Hughes movie.[rssbreak]

A couple of years ago, the Toronto actor-filmmaker decided to make a documentary about the writer-director who defined the 1980s teen movie with Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and vanished from sight in the early 1990s.

“Everyone had a visceral reaction to these movies,” Sadowski says over the phone as he packs for a long-awaited vacation, “but I think they sort of put it to the side and didn’t realize how important [the films] were or how important John Hughes was until he passed away.”

Hughes’s death at age 59 earlier this summer casts a pall over Austin’s film. Don’t You Forget About Me combines clips from Hughes’s high school movies with contemporary interviews with the filmmaker’s colleagues and boosters like Roger Ebert. The documentary was completed last fall, but now a poignant undercurrent runs through everything about it – even the title.

The movie’s not a downer, though. Sadowski wanted to celebrate the enduring nature of Hughes’s teen films and his unique connection to young audiences.

“At a John Hughes film festival at a college in Maryland,” he says, “first-year students were citing those films and the characters in them as being more representative of them than anything else they’d seen in the last decade. And when we went to high schools and spoke to younger kids, they said the same things.”

Watching the doc, it’s interesting to note which of Hughes’s collaborators were willing to appear, and which ones weren’t. Breakfast Club stars Judd Nelson and Ally Sheedy are more than willing to discuss that film, but Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall are absent. Ferris Bueller co-stars Alan Ruck and Mia Sara turn up, but not Ferris himself, Matthew Broderick.

“We didn’t speak personally to Matthew, but his representation was really nice to us,” Sadowski says. “It was just a scheduling thing. Molly and Anthony chose not to participate, and we don’t really know why.”

Hughes’s absence from the documentary – although Sadowski and his friends drove to his Chicago home with the aim of snagging an interview – is perhaps more understandable. Hughes hadn’t spoken publicly since recording a commentary track for a Ferris Bueller DVD in 1999, and he ultimately refused to participate in the project. Even so, Sadowski says he hoped the message of Don’t You Forget About Me would eventually find its way to the man responsible.

“All I wanted was for him to see the film,” Sadowski says. “We’d have a screening somewhere and we’d be watching the film. Maybe it would be in Chicago, and I’d look over my shoulder and see a shadowy figure in the back and know it was John Hughes. That’s what I was hoping for. We all just wanted him to see it.”

Interview Clips

Matt Austin Sadowski on putting the project together:

Download associated audio clip.

Sadowski on the lengths he’d go to bag an interview:

Download associated audio clip.

Sadowski on the universal appeal of teen movies:

Download associated audio clip.

Sadowski on his own favourite Hughes movie:

Download associated audio clip.

normw@nowtoronto.com

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