From James Franco’s audition to secret arrests, director Peyton Reed tells BuzzFeed News what really went into creating the beloved cheerleading comedy.
Bring It On was supposed to be a documentary.
Screenwriter Jessica Bendinger first conceived of Bring It On as an MTV documentary before turning it into a feature film, originally titled Cheer Fever. "It was about this very specific subculture of competitive cheerleading and her original draft would have been a three-hour cheerleading epic," director Peyton Reed told BuzzFeed News during a phone interview. "It was dense."
Reed, who cut his teeth in music videos and television, was instantly hooked by the unique world portrayed in the script. "I had no idea I would find interest in competitive cheerleading, but I did in a big way," he said. "Jessica's writing has such attitude. I liked what it had to say about the dynamics of high school. It turned cheerleading on its ear and made them the underdogs; traditionally cheerleaders are the untouchables in the caste system of high school and this script made you really root for them. I like what it had to say about entitlement."
Universal
Marley Shelton was originally cast as Torrance Shipman.
When Reed came aboard as director, one actor was already attached to the project: Marley Shelton, who had previously starred in Pleasantville and Never Been Kissed.
"The first thing I did when I got the movie, after flying back to L.A., [was go] to a dinner with one of the producers and an actress they had offered the role of Torrance to: Marley Shelton," he said. "Marley Shelton is a terrific actress and we had dinner and talked about the tone of the movie. The script obviously needed work, but we were going to do rewrites, so we talked about what we wanted to do with the character and all the stuff. I walked away from that dinner thinking, I really love Marley Shelton. She's really terrific. She looks like a cheerleader to me. She'll be great."
But there was a hitch: Shelton was deciding between two films, Bring It On and Sugar and Spice, a 2001 crime comedy about a group of cheerleaders who rob banks in order to support a pregnant member of the squad. Shelton ended up choosing the latter and Reed began the search for his new leading lady.
"We started talking about who we could get to play Torrance and I immediately said Kirsten Dunst," the director recalled. "I loved Kirsten Dunst and she looked the part and is such a tremendous actor."
But the producers had already spoken to Dunst and she had passed. Reed, however, believed the script's revisions offered a new take on the role and they reached out once more. "Kirsten was making a movie, I think in the Czech Republic, and we sent her the new draft of the script once we had it," he said. "I got on the phone with her and she liked the changes — I talked more about what we were going to change — and she agreed to do the movie. Once we got her, everything else really fell into place."
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Buffy the Vampire Slayer played a huge part in Eliza Duskhu being cast.
For everyone involved, there was only one actor who could possibly play Missy, the squad's newest — and sassiest — member. "We knew we wanted Eliza because she'd been so great on Buffy," Reed said of Dusku's role as Faith, a morally flexible slayer on Joss Whedon's beloved drama. "Eliza just was Missy."
20th Century Fox
