Bo Burnham on working with Scots musician Anna Meredith for his debut film, Eighth Grade

From left to right: Josh Hamilton, Elsie Fisher and Bo Burnham attend the 2019 Film Independent Spirit Awards on February 23, 2019 in Santa Monica, California. PIC: Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images

American comic Bo Burnham tells Alistair Harkness why he chose the coming-of-age story of a 13-year-old girl for his feature directorial debut – and why Scot Anna Meredith was the perfect choice to create the score

It’s easy to forget that American stand-up comic turned filmmaker Bo Burnham was a teenager when his career took off just over a decade ago. One of the first genuine YouTube superstars, he used the then-nascent social media platform to bypass all the traditional cultural gatekeepers and build a massive audience for his post-modern, musical-inflected routines. Album deals, comedy specials and the mentorship of Judd Apatow duly followed, and Burnham even celebrated the end of his teenage years in Edinburgh with an award-winning show at the Fringe. “I think I turned 20 when I was there,” smiles the now 28-year-old when we meet ahead of the Glasgow Film Festival premiere of his directorial debut, Eighth Grade.

Though Burnham had been doing live stuff for a while before making his Edinburgh debut, the Fringe did, he says, help him feel legitimised as a comedian. “No mechanism exists in America for taking comedy seriously. There’s no reviewing system; comedy isn’t really seen as an art form, so it was really wonderful at the Fringe to feel that people were taking my work as seriously as I was.” Still, it took him a few more years to realise that the online world from whence his act had sprung was the world and he’d actually been legitimate the whole time. “I don’t need to, say, make a movie in order to be real. The internet is not some starting place for people to then make ‘real stuff’ and work with a studio or a television channel. Internet content is as legitimate as anything else if it wants to be.”