Mean Girls Directors Compare Making Music Videos to Musicals

Mean Girls (2024) is now available to watch digitally, so ComicBook.com spoke to the film’s directors, Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr. about the musical numbers and their hopes for the future. Mean Girls marks the first narrative feature helmed by Jayne and Perez Jr., but they do have some interesting experience helming short films and music videos. Perez Jr. directed Justin Timberlake’s “Say Something” video and Paul McCartney’s “Grand Central” music documentary. During our interview, we asked Perez Jr. if his music video history helped when making Mean Girls. 

“Everything,” Perez Jr. said when asked about pulling from music videos. “I started coming up through a blog called La Blogothèque, the Takeaway shows. And I would hold my own camera and I would do live improvised music videos with all these bands that came from doing the indie scene. So Lumineers, Edward Sharpe. The blog did Arcade Fire and Phoenix and Bon Iver and everybody. The exercise was just, ‘Think as quickly as you can, you get one…’ Because the idea was in between sound check and the show, there was a little bit of time and we could just improvise a music video. And it was so much fun. So that gave me the confidence to think outside the box a little bit.” 

“And to not be afraid of live performance and capturing it all in one take,” Jayne added. 

“Yeah, so I think that that was my film school,” Perez Jr. shared. 

What Is Mean Girls About? 

You can check out the official description for Mean Girls here: “From the comedic mind of Tina Fey comes a new twist on the modern classic, Mean Girls. New student Cady Heron (Angourie Rice) is welcomed into the top of the social food chain by the elite group of popular girls called ‘The Plastics,’ ruled by the conniving queen bee Regina George (Reneé Rapp) and her minions Gretchen (Bebe Wood) and Karen (Avantika). However, when Cady makes the major misstep of falling for Regina’s ex-boyfriend Aaron Samuels (Christopher Briney), she finds herself prey in Regina’s crosshairs. As Cady sets to take down the group’s apex predator with the help of her outcast friends Janis (Auli’i Cravalho) and Damian (Jaquel Spivey), she must learn how to stay true to herself while navigating the most cutthroat jungle of all: high school.” 

You can watch our interview with Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr. at the top of the page.