“You have no idea what you’re doing”: How John Hughes stumbled into an immense directorial career
When people set their minds on a dream career, the first thing they tend to do is go looking for role models. For a Type A sort of person, having a plan to follow is comforting. They want to find someone to look up to who has achieved what they desire; then they want to plot out an action plan with steps to take that will all, hopefully, build up to their ideal future. But, it so rarely works that way, and for any future directors looking for an example to rigorously follow, John Hughes would you’ve told them to look elsewhere; his career was all accidental.
There are few directors who have managed to make a legacy quite like John Hughes. While some filmmakers are categorised as cinematic outsiders focussed on aesthetics and visuals as they make arthouse movies, and others exist in the realm of the big-time box office hits that break into the mainstream, Hughes managed to be both. Across films like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Pretty In Pink, The Breakfast Club and more, he crafted his own visual and storytelling niche. He created more than his fair share of truly iconic scenes that are written into cinematic history, but he also made his movies appeal to everyone as some of the most broadly beloved flicks ever put onto the screen.
Part of that comes down to the perspective he chose to take, seemingly being fascinated by the world through the eyes of a teenager. Even back in the 1980s and ‘90s, the very idea of a teenager was something that perplexed swathes of the country. Before the 1960s, people were either kids or working adults. It was only when the world modernised further, when things like counterculture sparked up, education became more accessible, and further freedoms like contraception became readily available, that there was even such thing as this interim age. Not a boy but not yet a man, or, as Britney Spears sang, not a girl, not yet a woman – the teenager is a phenomenon of its own, existing in this strange midground between youth and maturity.
To Hughes, that was fascinating from the beginning. His directorial debut Sixteen Candles immediately dove into the teenager’s perspective, exploring it further on his follow up The Breakfast Club. Later, after working on the 1989 film Uncle Buck, this interest was expand even further.
“Macaulay Culkin was in the movie, and I really had fun working with a boy,” he explained, praising the actor who was only nine years old in the movie. He continued, “That’s one age group I’d never worked with. So I finished the movie. I was editing and watching all the footage, and when I tested the picture, they loved Mac, so I put more of his scenes back.” For Hughes, watching the young boy act made him nostalgic. He explained, “I went through the outtakes that he and [John] Candy had improvised, and I just remembered what it was like to be nine.”
This sparked an idea that would lead to his most successful project as a writer. “What if I did a movie that starred a nine-year-old, like let the kid carry the whole movie,” he said, “I had the idea for Home Alone and knew Mac would be good.”
It was a total happy accident, getting the spark of an idea from the pile of discarded scenes on the cutting room floor. “That’s really where it started,” Hughes said, “I stumbled into it.”
But stumbling into it is exactly what made his career. “I stumbled into teen films, too, because if I was gonna direct, I wanted to make sure that I didn’t have an actor say to me, ‘You know, you have no idea what you’re doing’, because I didn’t,” he explained, hoping that teenagers might afford him a bit more slack when he was starting out. There was also a sense of kinship there, too, as he joked, “I figured maybe if they’re like 15, they won’t ask that question, or at least I can say to them ‘Do you know what you’re doing?’ and they wouldn’t know either.”
I guess there is something to say here about how when Hughes made his first movies, finally taking the step out on his own in the film world, he was a teenager. No longer a kid working on other people’s sets but also not yet a fully fledged adult with all the experience necessary, Hughes stumbled into a career telling the stories of kids and teens as a perfect happy accident to match his own state.
