Since this is your feature film debut, give us the short story breakdown, from script to screen, of your typical film?

Well, in this case, I had been in New York doing some episodes of Upright Citizens Brigade. Right before I left to go to New York, I had read this script called Cheer Fever. It interested me because I love high school movies, and this high school movie really appealed to me because it wasn't just kids walking through hallways and talking about who's going to the dance with who or guys trying to get laid. [Laughs] It really had things that were like musical sequences and there's a lot of visual opportunity for a director. I really liked the story a lot. I read the script, I met with a couple of the producers, Caitlin Scanlon and Max Wong, told them what I thought of the script and what I would do with it, and didn't think much about it, then left to go to do Upright Citizens Brigade.

While I was there, I kept getting phone calls about it. I talked to Marc Abraham, the producer of the movie, and tried to convince him I was the guy for the job. By the time I was on my third episode of Upright Citizens Brigade, I found out that I got the movie. I wasn't able to finish editing my third episode of the show and sort of did it by mail and over the phone. The second I landed here, it was just a whirlwind. I flew back to L.A. and drove straight from the airport to a meeting with the line producer, and the casting agent already had, you know, “Here's some pictures” and blah blah blah. And so you just hit the ground running.

The next few weeks were preproduction, and we had sort of a compressed preproduction because we had to start shooting at the beginning of July and it was May when I came back. First, you have to cast the movie. Then you have to deal with getting the script in shooting shape. There were great things about the script, and I loved the script, but it needed some structural and character work and stuff like that. It was working on the script, at the same time you were trying to cast, at the same time you were trying to hire different crew members that you wanted. And then everything coming together and deciding where you were going to shoot the movie, because we were looking at various places from Florida to North Carolina. We decided on San Diego because it was closer and a real hub of cheerleading activity.

Then you had to figure out all these things about a lot of gymnastic stuff that people could consider stunts, so you had to hire choreographers. It wasn't a big budget movie, but it was a big production. It had a lot of extras and a lot of the extras in the scenes had to be cheerleaders and able to do that stuff. It's not stuff that you can learn quickly.

Director Peyton Reed with Kirsten Dunst in ``Bring It On''

Once we cast Kirsten Dunst, everything else fell into place. I'm so happy we were able to get Kirsten. She was in Czechoslovakia at the time doing a movie. She had been sent the script and had some issues with certain things in the script, so I was able to talk to her over the phone and figure out what we were going to do and tell her what I was going to do with it. So she signed on, which was great. And then we had to get our actors into cheerleading camp, because our actors who were on the main squads had to train for three or four weeks with cheerleading coaches and choreographers. That was really fun, because it's intense for ten hours a day, stretching and doing gymnastics and learning this choreography at the same time they were supposed to be learning their lines. It was amazing. We had this several week period before we even started shooting this movie where they got to hang out and bond, and I think it shows on screen.

So then I moved to San Diego. I told my wife, just after our one-year anniversary, “Uh, I'm going to be moving to San Diego this summer to be surrounded by cheerleaders. What do you think of that?” My wife is the greatest and is most supportive. She worked here in L.A. so she spent the entire summer driving down on Saturdays and she'd stay from Saturday through Tuesday. She was great.

We did all the preproduction, and started shooting in July 1999. We shot for 44 days. It was really fun. Coming from doing some of the TV stuff that I have done, the Disney movies, you have to shoot in 20 days and it still has to be a 90-minute movie that looks great. And especially Mr. Show and Upright Citizens Brigade, which were really sort of run and gun situations where there wasn't a lot of money but you had to make it look great and be really funny and we were working crazy hours. When we were doing this, it was like, “Oh, we have 44 days!,” and it was like a dream to me. It was never relaxed, obviously, because you had a lot to do, but I think in that way the TV stuff was a great training ground for doing this movie.

You've worked in television for many years, doing documentaries, music videos, television series, and made-for-television movies. What was the biggest difference in moving to feature films?

The biggest difference in television is the turnaround time. You do something for TV and usually there's an air date already set, so you have these deadlines and it has to get done quickly. And there's not as much money, so it has to get done quickly for that reason, too. In features, you have a little more money and you have a little more time. But that's not always the case. As I said, our preproduction time for Bring It On was really accelerated; given the size of what's going on in the movie, it was very much a hustle. Probably one of the other differences is in your head in terms of “Oh, I'm finally doing a movie, a theatrical film!” so you build it up in your head. I get pretty particular about things, anyway, in terms of being a control freak, so there's more pressure because there's more money at stake. So you try, obviously, not to think about that.

Director Peyton Reed with Director of Photography Shawn Maurer on the set of ``Bring It On''

When we were looking at cinematographers, I wanted to bring in Shawn Maurer, who shot almost all of my documentary stuff I did for ZM. He, over the years, shot so many -- most of those behind-the-scenes documentaries that you see. I did some music videos, like for the North Carolina band The Connells, and he shot three of my four music videos. He's a good friend of mine, but also a real good cinematographer. He's done some low budget movies but had never before done a really big big movie. This was not a situation where, you know, I got a movie and now I'm gonna use it as a chance to get all my buddies on. He's someone really, really great. I had to fight to get him on, because he's a first timer, but I'm really glad I did. We have a really similar visual sense and he gave me a lot of preproduction time that I think another cinematographer might not have. We had a great time working together. Almost more importantly, he was someone there on the set that I had known for a long time and could always trust their instincts. Not only trusting his visual instincts but just, there's always a lot of political stuff that goes on in movies and there's someone still you can turn to and say, “Does this make sense to you because it just doesn't to me.” [Laughs]

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