How did you first get in to writing and directing? Did you study film while you were deejaying during school in Chapel Hill, North Carolina?

Director Peyton Reed & Director of Photography Shawn Maurer with Kirk Cameron on the Universal western street for ``The Secrets of the Back to the Future Trilogy''

Yeah, I was a deejay at WXYC while I was in college at the University of North Carolina. They had a program at the University of North Carolina called "RTVMP", which was Radio, TV, and Motion Picture. I was an RTVMP major, and at the time, the university had these courses that were less hands-on production and more theory, so I decided to double-major in English so I could get out of school with something of value. [Laughs] I'd always loved English -- that was my favorite subject in terms of storytelling and literature and things like that. I think I found that more valuable. You can come out here and you can get the practical experience. You can work on low budget movies and things like that and see how things are done. But, you know, you can't get experience writing unless you write. I think that for somebody who's trying to break into the film business, if you can break in as a writer, well, then you're set because no matter how big you get to be as an actor or as a director or producer, the one thing that everyone is looking for is a good script. And I know that sounds extremely clichè, but it's true.

Do you have anyone in your family who works in the film industry? What inspired you to go into that line of work?

I had always been a film buff. I grew up in North Carolina, most of my family is still in North Carolina, except for a brother in Pennsylvania, and nobody's in the film business. I was the youngest of three boys. I watched a lot of television, of course, as many of us did. I just always loved movies, especially as a kid; science fiction, horror movies, and especially Planet of the Apes. That was the one movie that made me decide, “Gosh, I would really love to do that!”

Then my mom and my dad gave me a great movie camera for Christmas `77. I just made Super 8 movies all through junior high school, high school and throughout college. I would wrangle my friends and make ridiculous movies like the “Ten Million Dollar Boy” and stuff like that. I was just having a great time making Super 8 films. At the time we started out with silent movies and then I ended up getting a Super 8 sound camera and you'd edit your own movies on a Super 8 editor. This was all sort of pre-video. Those cameras weren't common place like now.

I recently read about a short film that you had directed called “Almost Beat.” Was that a student film?

Almost Beat was a movie I made, actually, after college. I had moved out to Los Angeles in 1987 and I worked my first job out here as a production assistant for ABC television. I worked for most of `87 out here, then, at the end of the year, I met, through someone who'd gone to UNC, this guy named George Zaloom from the company ZM Productions. George offered me a job at the time as an assistant editor. He said, “I won't lie to you, it's gonna be long hours -- six, sometimes seven days a week, 10 - 12 hours a day and I can only pay you $200 a week and that's the job.” At the time I really wanted to get into editing, but I could barely live on, you know, $200 a week. At the same time, a friend of ours said, “Hey, I'm transportation coordinator on this movie that's shooting back in North Carolina” and there was a friend of mine, John Schultz, who said, “Well, why don't you guys come back and you can live at home and drive vans on this movie called Bull Duram? And I can pay you $700 a week!”

So my friend John Schultz and I, who's another director out here, decided to go drive vans and save a bunch of money, because we both wanted to direct these short films. For the fall of `87, we were in North Carolina being van drivers on Bull Duram, driving Kevin Costner, Tim Robbins and Susan Surandon around. We were able to save enough money so that the following summer, the summer of `88, John was able to get a bunch of 16 millimeter film, and I was about to borrow a 16 millimeter camera, and we went to North Carolina and each directed a short film that we shot back to back. We each worked on the other guy's film.

The film I did was called Almost Beat. We shot it and the following year we had edited the movie and everything and it had been in film festivals. We had a big screening in the summer of `89, when the movies were done, in North Carolina. But that movie helped me. I was able to go back to ZM and I started doing some editing work for them and I think the fact that I had, you know, shown some initiative and made this movie and that the movie made sense and held together showed them that maybe I had what it took to direct stuff for them. So that was a fun movie to do. It's really short; it's only about 12 1/2 minutes. It's played at some film festivals over the years and won some prizes and I think, actually, UNC is having some kind of film festival where they're showing old movies of people who are working in Hollywood. So I'm going to let them show Almost Beat, even though it's pretty cringe worthy.

What's the basic premise behind your new film, Bring It On?

Well, Bring It On is a competitive high school cheerleading comedy, which has always been my favorite genre. [Laughs] It tells the story of this girl, Torrance Shipman, played by Kirsten Dunst. It's her senior year of high school and she's taking over as captain of the cheerleading squad, and she has to deal with all these things. They're the five time national champions and she finds out the previous captain, as it turns out, had stolen all of there prizewinning routines from this other cheerleading squad, the East Compton Clovers.

The main thing in the movie is all the things this girl Torrance has to deal with her senior year. There's this new girl who moved in from L.A. who's kind of tough and who's joined the squad. There's this new guy who moved to town. He's kind of a punk kid, the kind of guy she normally wouldn't find herself attracted to, but she does. And then there's this rivalry between her squad, the Toros, and this inner city squad, the Clovers. The Clovers only want to prove themselves on the national level because all there routines had been stolen over the years, and Torrance just wants to prove herself capable of leading her squad.

Writer/Director Peyton Reed and Host Kirk Cameron act like they're discussing a shot on the set of the documentary ``The Secrets of the Back to the Future Trilogy''

This is something that actually happens in the real cheerleading world. This is not just the cheerleaders who are on the sidelines at high school football games with pompoms. If you watch ESPN, there's this whole field of competitive high school and colligate cheerleading. You have these cheerleading squads who are coed, usually ten or so guys and girls. A squad can be as big as 20 people. It combines cheerleading and gymnastics and dance. It's got this athleticism to it, but it also combines the mania of beauty contests. They're really sort of starting to be taken seriously as athletes, not just as people who cheer for other athletic events. It takes place in this world. I didn't know much about it before I read this script and started researching it. I had flipped around on TV and seen these things, and they had fascinated me, and when you get into that world, it's a really big business. I had no idea how wide ranging the cheerleading was.

It's also, again, really, really fanatical and has these really interesting sort of aspects to it. For example, when we were scouting high schools in San Diego, where we shot, you would meet these guys who, during football season were on the football team, and during the off season would cheer with the cheerleaders. The guys have to be very athletic and agile, and have to be able to lift girls over their heads with one arm. The other guys, who are tumblers, have to be able to do all these amazing gymnastic things. It is a fascinating world, and this is the world this movie takes place in.

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