The scene where Ferris lip-synchs “Danke Schoen” is somewhat choreographed, but for the unforgettable “Twist and Shout” sequence, Broderick says, “We were just making everything up.” And clearly, having an incredible amount of fun in the process. “It was really joyful,” Broderick says, “and you didn’t have to pretend to be joyful. It was a real parade; people were happy. That’s just how it was. They got, I think, ten thousand people. It was people who wanted to be there.”
Jennifer Grey was not a part of the parade scene, and she was bummed to be missing what she knew would be some of the most exciting moments of the entire shoot. So she came up with a plan that would allow her to be part of the parade festivities—or so she thought. “I went to Hair and Makeup,” she says, “and I had them secretly do this bouffant wig, like a beehive hairdo, and I went to a five-and-dime store and bought a hilarious outfit. I looked like a crazy autograph hound. I had an autograph book and bonbons in my bag.” During filming of the parade sequence, Grey remembers, “I showed up on the set and no one knew it was me. John Hughes and his wife were like, ‘Get security for that woman!’”
Everything worked out, of course: Grey revealed her true identity to the security guards, and Hughes got to film a scene with throngs of extras on Dearborn Avenue, the very street where he had once worked as an advertising exec (and where Ferris’s father worked), and where, in those early days of his career in the 1970s, he would sneak out of work to catch parades. “Here I am,” said Hughes at the time the film was shot, “ten years later, having my own parade.”
Art museums, parades, and baseball games are great fun, but they are also quite wholesome. One wonders, wouldn’t a bunch of teenagers left to their own devices do something that was just a tad naughty? Ruck says that they had planned to film a scene where the three go to a strip club, with Bueller turning to the camera and telling the audience, “This is the problem with Cameron…He’s going to fall in love with the first girl that he sleeps with, and it’s going to ruin his life,” as Cameron ogles a stripper. Hughes wanted to film it, but Paramount executives told him there were only so many shooting days left, so the scene was scrapped.
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While making Ferris, Hughes stuck to the very clear, verbally instructive directing style he’d developed over the course of helming three movies, offering very explicit instruction on how he wanted a line to sound, and how the actors’ faces should look while speaking the lines. Jennifer Grey found Hughes’s style to be a relief. “I was so happy to have somebody who was going to tell me exactly what he wanted me to do,” she says. “I was like putty in his hands. He would say, ‘Bug your eyes out,’ and it was so fun and freeing. He was so clear. It was a pleasure to try to fulfill his dream, and it was like a coloring book. I’d say, ‘What color do you want?’ and I’d paint in the lines, because his lines were so clearly drawn. I was like a puppy wanting to do the tricks that my new master was wanting me to do.”
Matthew Broderick was not so instantly enamored by Hughes’s explicit directing approach. “We took a little while to get used to each other,” he says. “When we started, he would tell me, ‘I like when you do the little smile and then open your eyes.’ He would be very specific about what face I should make. And it freaked me out. I said something to him, like, ‘It makes me self-conscious…’ And then he was really upset and didn’t speak to me for a day. Didn’t direct me at all. I had to go say, ‘You know, I don’t mean don’t direct me at all, John; I want help.’ But we gradually worked that out. We were,” Broderick says amusedly, “both quiet and crazy, I think.”
On the set, Hughes could also be found implementing another hallmark of his directorial style: the use of improvisation as a way to utilize the creative minds of his cast. “What happens,” Hughes told the Chicago Tribune, “is that I am on a set and I suddenly realize, this is the last time in my life that I am going to be right here doing this scene, and that gets me so excited that I think, we might as well do it once, crazy, just for the hell of it.” The first day actress Edie McClurg showed up to film her role as Dean Rooney’s secretary, Grace, she sported a bouffant hairdo, because she figured the character would’ve gone to high school in the sixties and would have stuck with that style. Hughes took one look at her mountainous coiffure and, like he had so many times before when presented with the quirky physicality of everyday life, instantly saw comedic potential. He asked McClurg how many pencils she thought she could get in there without them falling out or showing. The answer was four, as demonstrated to hilarious effect on-screen as she repeatedly pulls pencils out of her ’do.
Though he’d been a bit put off by it at first, Broderick got into the improvisational groove over the course of the shoot. “We would just improv and make stuff up,” says Alan Ruck. “Hughes encouraged it with me and Matthew. He wanted that layered quality that you get when you work on it on more than one level.” (Says Sara, “Matthew and Alan had great chemistry together. They had a full-on ridiculous shtick going all the time, and it was just endless farting.”)
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off taught its viewers the ways in which deep camaraderie could transform a young person’s life. Film critic Eric Hynes remembers admiring the unlikely yet steadfast friendship between Ferris Bueller and Cameron Frye: “These were friends that were like family to each other,” he says. “And I tried to cultivate friendships similarly.” Ferris gives a soliloquy in which he talks in plain but pained tones about the fact that high school will end soon, he and Cameron will go to different colleges, and “we just won’t see each other anymore.” For Hynes, the scene was chilling. “Ferris is essentially saying, we’re so close now, but who knows what the future holds.” Hynes had one close friend in high school, and because of Ferris’s speech, he says, “I sort of doubled up on my desire to keep that friendship. I lived in fear of that—the idea that I could’ve lost that friend because of college.”
The Ferris set was an atmosphere of creative freedom, to be sure, but there was, at times, also an undercurrent of tension. “[Hughes] was pretty demanding of people,” admits Sara. “It was his whole world, and he had a very specific way it had to be, and if it wasn’t that way, he would get angry and frustrated. And I am sure I wasn’t making it easier. I wish I hadn’t been so immature.”
Sara didn’t have much to compare Hughes’s directing style to. At the time, she had made only one other movie. “I was so inexperienced, and I don’t think I handled John very well. I am sure he would have agreed. If I could [have] apologized to him I really would [have]. It’s not like I behaved badly or anything, but I would get pissed off.”
Her frustration stemmed from a sense of feeling overwhelmed. “I was really nervous,” she admits. “I was the least experienced person of that main cast, and the only one who was still a teenager.” Of making Ferris Bueller, she says candidly, “It was disorienting for me. I wish I could say it was a really good experience, but it really wasn’t, mostly because of myself at that age. I was seventeen—and it was like having that most awkward year of your adolescence forever solidified.”
Sara, Broderick, and Ruck played characters on the brink of independence, facing the excitement and anxiety of life outside the protective bubble of adolescence, but Sara was the only cast member who was actually living through those issues offscreen. “I fancied myself very mature,” she says, “but I was wrong. It was my first time on my own, and I didn’t know how to drive at the time, because I am a true New Yorker, so it was a little bit just me sitting in the Chateau Marmont sort of festering away.”
Memories of working with Tom Cruise and Ridley Scott on the dreamy Legend shoot didn’t help her adjustment, either. “Because my first film experience was this realization of the fantastical romantic vision I’d had of life, I felt very shocked by reality. It was kind of hard for me.” It didn’t make matters easier for her when her romantic affections for another Ferris cast member went unreturned. “I had the biggest crush on Matthew,” she says, “and I threw myself at him
repeatedly, and he very wisely turned me down. I think I was pretty annoying, frankly.”
But the romantic rebuffing had nothing to do with Sara’s being annoying. At the time, Broderick was already spoken for: he was dating his costar Jennifer Grey. “Yeah, it was a tough life, back when I was twenty-three or whatever,” Broderick says, laughing. “Beautiful girls throwing themselves at me. Mia was absolutely lovely and gorgeous.” When told that Sara said he wisely rebuffed her advances, Broderick replies, with his trademark tongue-in-cheek charm, “I do not think I wisely [rejected her], but I was getting involved with Jennifer at the time, so I couldn’t figure out how to share myself. I couldn’t double it up, you know.”
Kidding aside, Grey and Broderick entered into a very serious relationship that ended up lasting for years. (They were engaged at one point, though they never married.) “It started while we made the film,” says Grey. “It was tricky,” she says, “because it was a secret. No one knew.” Comments Alan Ruck, “I don’t know who they were keeping the secret from, but I don’t think they did a very good job. Maybe it was Mia they were keeping the secret from, because she had a thing for Matthew. But, God, everybody else knew!” On-screen, Grey and Broderick play siblings and bitter rivals, which made for some interesting moments during filming. While shooting the scene at the end of the movie—when Ferris has made his mad dash home, hoping to get back into his “sickbed” before his parents catch him, and Jeanie helps him escape from the clutches of Dean Rooney—“I got the giggles,” says Grey. It was one of the few scenes she and Broderick shared together. “I got the giggles so bad that they had to basically stop production. I full on couldn’t get it together for anything. The producers were like, ‘Take a walk around the block,’ and I would, and it would start again. I remember that vividly, like it was yesterday. I had a bleeding lip from biting it. I tried to get through it; it was painful.” The giggling fit, she asserts, “was because of all the energy between us.” Broderick and Grey weren’t the only lovebirds on set: actors Lyman Ward and Cindy Pickett, who played Ferris’s parents, met on the set of that film, fell in love during production, and married.
On Ferris, says Grey, “I maybe had the best experience of my life, maybe of all time. We were all very tight, and it was a very special group. We would go to restaurants in Chicago, we’d go running around the lake.” Ruck remembers, with nostalgia in his voice, that the shoot was “a joy from beginning to end.” One inexplicably joyful moment stays with him, even now. They were shooting on Lake Shore Drive, and Ruck remembers thinking to himself, “I’m doing what I love to do. I’m with great people working on something really cool.” Then something happened that Ruck says “was just life-affirming. There was sort of an inlet, where the lake flows into a lagoon in one of the parks on Lake Shore Drive. And a young boy caught an enormous salmon. We were just setting up the cameras, and all of a sudden people were whooping and hollerin’. And this young boy pulled this enormous fish out of the water. I don’t know why it made me so happy,” says Ruck, “but it did. It was a beautiful, sunny day, and it was just kind of glorious.”
For Broderick, whose creative process had clashed somewhat with his director’s earlier in the production, some of the happiest times working with Hughes came toward the end of the shoot, when they were filming the sequences in which Ferris is alone at home talking directly to the camera and telling the audience ingenious ways to fake sickness. “By the end, we were at such ease with each other,” Broderick says of himself and Hughes. “Shooting all that stuff that’s just alone in the house, where I’m talking to the camera, coming out of the shower and all that. We would just make that up on the spot. It was almost all him, but I even made up some of the lines. We just enjoyed each other and we had absolute ease working together. By the end of shooting, we really did.”
There were indeed plenty of deeply happy moments on-screen and off. But this was a John Hughes movie, so searing, painful issues were at play just beneath the story’s jubilant surface. Hughes had already made films that dealt with the angst of being in high school, but Ferris was the film where he explored the angst of leaving high school, and of jumping into the unknown challenges of young adult life.
As rich with joie de vivre as the character Ferris Bueller is, he also possesses the smallest suggestion of sadness, a knowingness that has to do with the responsibilities, and perhaps disappointments, that await him and his friends after high school ends. It’s the underlying reason why Ferris creates the magnificent day off: to savor life while there’s still time. Of Cameron, Ferris says, “All I wanted to do was give him a good day. We’re gonna graduate in a couple of months, and then we’ll have the summer, he’ll work and I’ll work, we’ll see each other at night and on the weekends, then he’ll go to one school and I’ll go to another, and basically that will be it.” Underneath Ferris’s cocked eyebrows and zippy one-liners lies a pained awareness. It’s a comedy, yes, but Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is also, says producer Tom Jacobson, “about growing up.”
And as in all Hughes teen films, a big part of growing up in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off has to do with standing up to the authority figures who are crushing your youthful, independent spirit. There’s the cartoonishly inept authority figure Dean Rooney (to further humiliate the character, Hughes designed his chair to be far too low at his desk, making him look even more like a ridiculous, angry, impotent buffoon). But the movie’s most chilling authority figure is one who is never seen or heard.
Cameron’s father has really done a number on his son. Cameron must find the courage to stand up to the man slowly breaking his spirit, and helping Cameron do this is one of the main reasons Ferris creates the day of hooky. “The narrative of the movie,” says Jacobson, “is really about Ferris fixing Cameron, and about Cameron freeing himself from the shackles of a father we never see, but who represents the adult world.” At one point in the movie, Ferris tells his best friend, “I’m not doing this for me—I’m doing this for you.”
Ruck asked Hughes what Cameron’s father was really like, and, says Ruck, Hughes explained the character to him very specifically: “‘In Cameron’s house, if you opened a door and exposed the hinges, all the screws would be turned so that they’d be slotted all in the same direction, because the father was completely anal retentive and controlling.’ That was Hughes’s visual.” Hughes then referenced a man he’d known “who would come home, and his wife would bring him smoked oysters and crackers and a cocktail, and nobody was allowed to talk to him for an hour—nobody could disturb Dad in the den for an hour.” We see, in every pained movement of Cameron’s face, the effect of growing up with such a father. “Cameron’s problem,” says Ruck, “is that this guy really doesn’t love him.”
The result is Cameron’s fearful, nervous, anxiety-laden view of the world. “I meet people different places,” say Ruck, “and they say ‘My best friend was just like you, and I was like Ferris.’ But if most people are honest, they’re probably more like Cameron. When people come up and say, ‘I was just like Cameron,’ I find that touching, because that’s somebody who’s really being honest with themselves.”
Cameron gets his dad’s Ferrari home safely after the day out in Chicago, but then, through a series of escalating physical accidents, the car, which he lived in fear of even scratching, goes flying off the stilted garage, and is completely destroyed. The scene is not played for laughs. Ferris offers to take the blame, but Cameron, empowered by the bold lessons Ferris has taught him about grabbing life by the horns, finally realizes he has to rise up to his father, and insists on taking responsibility for the mishap. “I gotta take a stand,” says Cameron, with a newly brave voice at the movie’s end. “I’m bullshit. My old man pushes me around, and I never say anything. Well, he’s not the problem, I’m the problem. I’ve gotta take a stand against him.” Author Steve Almond has written that in this scene, “Ruck is doing so much as an actor the whole time, with his body, his eyes, his voice. It will seem an audacious comparison, but I was
reminded of those long, wrenching soliloquies at the end of Long Day’s Journey into Night…I have no idea who won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in 1986, but I can tell you that Alan Ruck deserved that statue. His performance is what elevates the film; allows it to assume the power of a modern parable.”
And oddly enough, once the Ferrari gets totaled, Cameron—for perhaps the first time in his life—will be noticed by his father. “Every parent has some precious thing in the house,” says Sloane Tanen. “In Risky Business it was the crystal egg. But for Hughes to then turn the object into the vehicle the kid uses to get the parent’s attention was brilliant.”
The car that goes crashing down the hillside was one of the production’s replicars, with no engine. Thanks to all the trouble it had caused, “when we sent that thing flying out the window, there were shouts of joy,” says Ruck. But the joy would be short-lived, for a problem arose when the fiberglass casing of the replicar hit the ground upon impact. “It didn’t crumple like a real car,” Sara explains. “It didn’t accordion.” When it hit the bottom of the ravine, remembers Ruck, “the hood actually ripped; fiberglass will rip like a cloth.” The filmmakers covered the tear in the fiberglass with some artfully arranged branches from a tree the car had supposedly flown over, “so you couldn’t tell,” says Ruck, smiling. “That’s movie magic.” It wasn’t the only bit of movie magic involving plant life on the set of the film: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off takes place in the late springtime, but was actually filmed in autumn, and the leaves had started changing at the end of the Chicago portion of the shoot. But this was nothing a little green paint couldn’t fix: “We actually had people painting out the red and yellow foliage in the background,” Jacobson recalls, grinning.
You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes, and Their Impact on a Generation Page 25
