Were you able to stay on budget and on schedule?

Director Peyton Reed with 'Herbie' on location for ``The Love Bug''

Yeah. We were budgeted, really, for 45 days, and what I wanted to do was something I'd kind of learned on The Love Bug; I saved a day, so that you can shoot and spend time in the editing room. Once you've got a cut of the picture, you have this one day where it's like, “Hey, it'd be great to get this one actor back to shoot this!” And they weren't reshoots; they were just things I wanted to add or jokes I wanted to have in the movie. It was in January that we shot what's called a 'pick-up day', where we got everybody that we needed together for a day in L.A. and shot one additional scene and a handful of little scenes and things that I wanted. And that was great.

What does a budget of $11 million entail? Does that cover everything up to the point where you finish filming and the movie is ready? Does it cover the cost for film print and advertising?

Printing and advertising are separate costs. This budget covers all the filming and paying the crew and everything, and all the post production, which, on a movie like this, is pretty involved. The music is a very big part, too; you have a music budget. Not only for your score, but for your songs. For example, on our movie, Epic records is putting out a soundtrack of pop songs from the movie and you have to stay within your music budget to afford all these songs. This is a very music-heavy movie for all those final cheerleading sequences and everything.

I've seen the trailer off the official site. It looks really great, and one of the first things I noticed was that it is a very music-oriented and uses the cheerleader-themed song “Mickey” by Tony Basil, plus the recent hit by the group Blaque, who are in the film.

I think only one song in the trailer is in the movie. The girls from Blaque recorded a new song for our film that'll be on the soundtrack, and this group B*witched did a remake of the “Mickey” song. At the end of the movie, there's this end title sequence with it that was pretty fun.

Bring It On was filmed under the name Cheer Fever, but changed a couple of months ago to its present title. I read somewhere that it had also been changed ever-so-briefly to Jump, but was quickly changed back to Bring It On. What was the initial reason for it being changed from Cheer Fever to begin with?

Cheer Fever had always been the working title of the movie. I don't think anyone was ever completely happy with the title. Even during the time we were shooting, we would have contests on the set: “Rename Cheer Fever”! Everyone in the cast and crew would submit lists; I have pages and pages of potential titles for this movie, just millions of them. All the time, through post and even when we were doing the first test screenings, it was still Cheer Fever. Once Universal marketing got involved and you really have to nail down a title, they went through lists and lists and had these sessions where we would show early cuts of the trailer to these teenage focus groups and get their feedback on titles and things.

In the movie, it's very much about competition between Kirsten Dunst's character, Torrance, and Gabrielle Union's character, Isis. I like to think of it almost like Magic Johnson and Larry Bird at their peak, where these were two great basketball players who loved competing against each other. One of them was white and one of them was black, but that's not really what it was about; it was about these two great athletes. And this whole notion of, “Come on, bring it on! Show me your best; don't hold back!” And it just seemed to sort of fit. I resisted it at the beginning because there's so many high school movies that have three word titles: She's All That; Down to You; Drive Me Crazy. I didn't want it to fall into Genericland. When they were testing titles, we were looking at the title Jump, but I think Sony owned that title or something like that.

In Bring It On, you worked with some very talented people, particularly Kirsten Dunst, and the pop trio Blaque. Was that intimidating as a first-time director in this arena, or were you able to put the "star-factor" in the back of your mind as you gave them direction?

I think the joy of getting someone like Kirsten Dunst, who you know is a good actor and will deliver what you need, far outweighed any sort of intimidation. One of the great things for me, too, is that the bulk of the actors in this movie range from 17 on up through the mid-20's, so I was older then all of them and I could yell at them a lot and they'd do what I'd tell them to [Laughs]. There was something really fun about that.

We really got a great cast. Kirsten's great, and Eliza Dushku, who's in True Lies and Buffy the Vampire Slayer -- she's terrific in the movie. I think this is a real breakout role for her. Gabrielle Union is amazing, and Jesse Bradford, who plays the character of Cliff -- he's just a really, really good actor.

I got lucky in terms of my cast. Not only did they have to be able to act and do some comedic acting, but these are very physical roles and we didn't audition anybody who didn't have some sort of dance or gymnastics background. Obviously, I erred on the side of good acting. But I really didn't want to use stunt doubles or things like that. For the most part, what you see on screen is the actors doing their thing. The teams in the movie are made up of our actors and of our real cheerleaders and I think in the final movie you'll be hard pressed to tell the difference.

It seems these days, directors have an additional task at hand when making a movie -- leaving some extra material on the cutting room floor so that it will find its way to the DVD release later. How early in the process do you even begin considering the home video & DVD release for a film?

Being a video geek, it's a dream come true to have a DVD and video commentary. And, actually, we haven't even started... I haven't even had discussions with Universal Home Video. I guess a lot of it has to do with how the movie does at the box office with how much they're going to put into it. We certainly never cut anything from the movie thinking, “Oh, that'll be great on the DVD.” We did the movie and got the movie where I wanted it. But there are things, obviously, that did get cut from the movie. And before we closed up the editing room, the assistant editor and I went through and made up a master tape of all these scenes that we thought might be possibilities for a supplemental DVD. So yeah, I think I very much had that in mind.

L-R: Writer John Loy (with daughter), Writer John Luden, Executive Producer Bob Gale, Director Peyton Reed, and Host Christopher Lloyd at the first season wrap party for ``Back to the Future - The Animated Series''

Before DVDs hit, I was a big laserdisc fan, which is a now dead format [laughs] and I have two shelves full. I still watch them. Laserdiscs started that thing, and it was sort of a niche market for film geeks like myself. I'm really happy now to see that the DVDs are catching on with mainstream America, and you can rent them at Blockbuster, because I do find it fascinating and I do think it's going to breed this entirely new sort of film literate generation. If I was coming up now and trying to decide whether to go to film school or not... I mean, film school is great, but it's also very expensive. To sit there and listen to these laserdiscs, to hear John Sturges audio track talking about Bad Day at Black Rock, or listening to Scorsese talking about any of his movies.... You have audio commentaries on almost every movie now. It's such an interesting format. If I was a kid, I'd say “Forget film school, I'm just going to rent a bunch of DVDs to learn all that stuff and start making movies.” They're a great combination of practical stuff and I just find it fascinating.

I'm also torn, too, coming from the world of behind-the-scenes documentaries and having done a bunch of those. It's always really, really fun. When ZM started doing them, there weren't that many going on. And now we live in a world where the E! Channel is on 24 hours a day and you've got Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood and you've got all these DVDs. There's a point where, oddly, when we were doing this movie, it was like, “Do I want to do a behind-the-scenes documentary?” In a way, I really want to re-mystify the process.

So you don't have a documentary on this film?

No, we actually do! [Laughs] I think there was talk of the E! Channel doing a half hour thing, but Mark Cowen's guys actually shot a behind-the-scenes thing. They only shot for three or four days. This is not an effect-heavy movie or a big sci-fi event, so there's not a lot of explaining to do in terms of how we did stuff. A behind-the-scenes on this would be more sort of looking at that world of cheerleading and seeing how much darn fun we had!

In terms of the DVD, yeah, it's premature, because we haven't had that conversation yet, but I want to do a great DVD for this, put on supplemental stuff. There's a whole ending sequence we cut from the movie, and various little scenes that you cut for time or for pace or for clarifying a character arc. Editing is a really interesting process because you really find these great moments that were strictly created in the editing room and I love that.

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