Name: Tina Fey Talks "Mean Girls," Says She Would Eat Her Own Face | Letterman
Uploaded: 2024-01-11T23:00:13.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Tina Fey Talks "Mean Girls," Says She Would Eat Her Own Face | Letterman' from Letterman on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-01-11. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Tina Fey Talks "Mean Girls," Says She Would Eat Her Own Face | Letterman' from Letterman on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-01-11. Transcript available.

Our first guest is a very funny and talented woman who wrote the screenplay for
the film
Mean Girls, which by the way is the number one film in the country.
Ladies and gentlemen, say hello to Tina Fey.
Congratulations, this is very exciting for you.
This is your first film that you've written, right?
Yes, yeah.
And the first film that you've starred in?
Yeah, yeah.
It's crazy, yeah, thank you.
We were so surprised and so happy with how well it did because you forget, like
you kind
of forget the movie's ever actually going to come out because you do all this
like nonsense
stuff for the weeks leading up to it.
Like we did these press junkets, which I never did before, which is you go and
you sit in
a chair and like 70 people come in and ask you the same question over and over
again.
And we did one day was an international press junket, which is there's
supposedly international
journalists, but I think it's a prank.
They're all just foreign weirdos.
We went into this big room to do a press conference with them and there was
like one old lady was
sleeping in the back on a cross of the chairs and the Spanish lady got up and
she was like,
I saw your film two nights ago and no one was laughing.
But I see the other film with the twins, with the blonde, with the also, yeah.
This one, the adolescents, they're laughing.
Terrible news.
Well, I enjoyed the film and people do laugh at the film.
Obviously, it's the number one film in the country.
And I liked it because it's a young person's film.
It's like a high school film, but it's also very, very funny.
And you can tell that some care has gone into the execution of the movie.
Well, thank you.
And many funny moments about it.
Tell me about the source material from which the screenplay comes.
Yeah, it's actually based on this book called Queen Bees and Wannabes, which is
a serious
non-fiction book about how to help your daughter through the terrifying middle
school and high
school years.
More terrifying now than ever, I would give.
More than ever.
Yeah.
Because everyone wears little tiny pants and little tiny halter tops, and they
spread
rumors about you, and it's scary.
And you believe, or the book suggests, that maybe girls are actually meaner in
this age
period than boys?
For sure.
Yeah.
Girls are way meaner than boys.
And sneaky.
Just awful.
You're lucky that you have a boy.
Yeah.
Oh, and I see this movie, and honest to God, I thought, I don't want to send
him to school
because people are going to make fun of him.
I was watching the movie just terrified.
I said, well, I can't.
I'll just homeschool him.
No, because he'll come out weird.
They always come out weird.
Well, look at me.
But your family and friends are probably just over the moon with the success of
you.
Oh, my God.
They're so excited.
My family in Pennsylvania, they all went to the theater on Friday night with
all my cousins
and my aunts and uncles, and my high school principal was two rows in front of
them, and
then they all went back to my cousin's house, and my cousin had a big sheet
cake made with
my picture on it.
Classy, and I was thinking, it sort of raises the ethical question of, you know,
would you
eat your own face if it was made of cake?
I think I would.
You would, huh?
Like, ah!
And as you're, um, and now you've been on television for a long time, so you
know what
that's like.
You know all about performing, and you've studied acting, I'm guessing, but now
you're in not
only a movie, it's a principal role.
You don't play the principal, you play a teacher.
Yeah.
And it's your material.
What was that experience like?
Yeah.
Well, I had never acted in a movie before.
I had done plays and stuff before, and you do the same scene over and over and
over again.
I would, by the fourth or fifth time around, I'd be, like, acting, thinking I
was acting
so good.
And then I would realize there weren't any cameras on me anymore.
That we were, like, shooting somebody else's close-up, and I was over here,
like, selling
it so hard.
And also, everyone in movies talks really quiet.
Is that right?
And they just talk like this, and I would come in and be like, hey, everybody!
And they're like, oh, God.
I was from the theater!
And if you watch the movie, you can sometimes see, uh, I watch myself, and I
see that I walk
in, and then I look down from my mark, and then I, like, move over to it.
You actually can notice that as you watch the film.
Oh, I'm a terrible actor.
I thought you played the part of the high school teacher very nicely.
Oh, well, thank you.
You did a very nice job.
And the cast was very impressive.
Talk a little bit about the people you worked with.
Well, uh, we have, in the adult roles, we have some of our SNL friends.
Tim Meadows plays the principal.
He's really, really funny.
And Amy Poehler plays a sort of a mom who, um, is trying to be too much like a
peer to
her kid.
Yeah, she's a cool mom.
She's a cool mom.
She lets kids drink in the house.
Even if they don't want to drink, she's like, oh, drink.
She's very creepy, wasn't she?
She's a creep, yeah, that character.
Yes.
And, um, and Anna Gasteyer plays the other, like, hippie mom.
And then the young actors are great.
Lindsay Lohan, who I think, you know.
Oh, she's lovely, lovely.
Beautiful girl.
Yeah, yeah.
Like, Ann-Margaret, beautiful.
And Rachel McAdams, and they're just, they're all these really great actors.
And, uh, Lindsay has been on Saturday Night Live, is that right?
Yeah, Lindsay hosted our show last week.
And what was, what was that experience like for her and for you guys?
It was great.
She was great.
She's, a lot of these people who started as performers really young, they're
great hosts
for us because they're just fearless.
And they go, okay, I'll do it.
And I was sort of, Lindsay's only 17.
And so I was on, like, perv patrol all week with the comedy writers.
I was just kind of wanting to be like, 17.
She's 17.
Take it down a notch.
Yeah.
Yeah, she's really pretty.
That's very nice of you.
Uh, let's take a look at the, uh, the, uh, clip of the movie.
It doesn't need this because it's already the number one film in the country.
But, uh, do you know what the scene is we're going to see?
I think this is, uh, the first day of school.
Uh, Lindsay's a new student.
It's her first day.
And, and I'm a teacher and everything's kind of going wrong.
Now, now, in the early scene when, uh, Tim Meadows comes in and, and he's
explaining
that he's got carpal tunnel syndromes come back.
Yeah, and his hand is all bandaged up.
Now, is that, what really happened to his hand?
Tim broke his hand three days before we started shooting.
See, I knew something was hinky.
And he broke it in the dumbest way.
He was moving his motorcycle from his front yard to his backyard.
And he clipped his hand on his mailbox.
What was he going, 90?
He might have been walking it, for all I know.
So we had to figure out what to do with it.
You know, I thought about it because the joke at the time, I thought, that's a
pretty funny joke.
His carpal tunnel syndrome came back over the summer.
And then the more I watched it, I said to myself, nah, there's something.
He's got a real injury there.
Okay, so here it is.
Mean Girls.
Let's take a look.
I'd forgotten about that point.
That's also very nice.
That's a little added minus.
Well, congratulations.
It's a wonderful career to, I guess, a wonderful beginning to what I guess will
be the second
part of your career now, more than likely.
I hope so.
I hope so.
Onward and upward.
Mean Girls in theaters.
It's the number one film in the country.
Tina, nice job.
Good to see you.
Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
Tina Fey, everybody.