Watch an Awkward Party Scene in ‘Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret’

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A celebration recreation turns into the supply of dramatic stress in “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” the display adaptation of Judy Blume’s beloved novel about adolescence.

In this sequence, Margaret (Abby Ryder Fortson) attends a celebration on the residence of one in all her classmates. Things get rowdy when Nancy (Elle Graham) proposes a recreation for the group: Two Minutes within the Closet. The women are all given numbers. The boys draw these numbers from a bowl. The two individuals whose numbers match retreat to the closet, or on this case, a visitor rest room, for 2 minutes.

The director and screenwriter Kelly Fremon Craig staged the scene in a heightened manner, making a thriller-like depth whereas additionally taking part in key moments for laughs.

“Where I placed all of the actors was a conscious decision,” Craig mentioned in an interview, “because it was important to me how far they had to walk to get to each other, how far Margaret had to walk to get to the bathroom, all of those things.”

In addition to the blocking, the scene comes collectively by way of a mixture of efficiency, lighting and tune choice, with the Dusty Springfield hit “Son of a Preacher Man” serving to to additional elevate it.

“This was the luckiest I’ve ever gotten on a needle drop,” Craig mentioned, recalling that she and her editor haphazardly added the tune throughout the modifying course of. “It wound up that it scored the moment so perfectly that we couldn’t believe it. And actually, we have never moved it, even a single frame from that very first time we dropped it in.”

Read the “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” overview.

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