In 2003, Mark Waters directed the wildly successful Freaky Friday (a 2003 remake of a previous Disney film), also starring Lindsay Lohan. Waters' experience at Disney working with younger actors and recent success generating a big box-office turnout helped make him a natural choice for Paramount Pictures to direct Tina Fey's script about double-dealing high schoolers. Waters once again cast Lindsay Lohan in the lead role as Cady Heron, and along with Fey herself and producer Lorne Michaels, assembled an ensemble cast that mixed Saturday Night Live veterans (Ana Gasteyer, Tim Meadows, Amy Poehler) with promising up-and-coming young stars (Rachel McAdams, Lizzy Caplan, Amanda Seyfried).
Coincidentally, Mark Waters's brother Daniel Waters wrote the script for the black comedy Heathers (1987), starring Winona Ryder and Christian Slater, which has a considerable influence over Mean Girls. In Heathers, Ryder's character Veronica, along with the help of an outsider, plot to sabotage a group of popular high school girls known as the Heathers: "If you wanna fuck with the eagles, you have to learn to fly," Veronica surmises. They stage the deaths of their popular classmates to look like suicide, but end up inadvertently glamorizing the act of suicide in the process. Mean Girls satirizes the absurdity of the herd instinct to worship and idolize in-group behavior in a similar way—for example, when all girls start wearing hole-ridden shirts after Janis cuts holes in Regina's gym shirt.
Heathers also informs the gallows humor that Mean Girls occasionally deploys, most notably in the bus collision scene. Although Mean Girls does not involve multiple premeditated murders like Heathers does, the script has a casual, comic relationship to violence, perversity, and death. After the bus blindsides Regina, Cady remarks, "And that's how Regina George died. No, I'm totally kidding. But she did get hurt." Several jokes are made about Coach Carr's child sex abuse and subsequent disappearance. When the junior girls riot in the hallways, knocking Ms. Norbury over and forcing Mr. Duvall to grab a baseball bat, the chaos retains comic overtones, like when Mr. Duvall finally snaps, "Oh, hell naw. I did not leave the South Side for this!"
Waters' direction firmly plants the viewer in Cady's perspective, given that she is the audience's primary point of identification. The first image of the film is a point-of-view shot of Cady looking up at her parents while sitting on the steps of her house. The shot parodies the fact that Cady's first day of public school is coming at age 16 (not age 5), but it also captures the awkwardness of adolescence more broadly, as a middle ground between childhood and adulthood. Flashes of Cady's fears (about what people think of homeschooled kids) and memories (snapshots of her time in Africa) quickly settle the audience into her voice, perspective, and background.
The sequence of Cady's first day of school, in particular, works to forge a strong emotional bond between Cady and the audience, drawing on the universal feeling of being alone in or unfamiliar with a new place. Waters uses inventive montage sequences to visually render many of the "crash courses" other students give her about aspects of the school's social landscape. An early montage of funny, outlandish rumors about Regina George, for instance, anticipates her intervention in the plot before she actually meets Cady, and conveys the level of influence she holds over the rest of the students. Another notable sequence uses an extreme close-up of Janis's hand-drawn map of the cafeteria as a transition to a long, tracking shot that catalogs each clique's lunch table, all of which make up the social ecosystem of North Shore High.
During the "three-way calling attack" scenes, Waters uses a split-screen technique popularized by Brian DePalma in such works as Carrie (1976)—another horror tale set in the world of high school bullying. The split-screen effect between Regina and Cady leads the viewer to suspect (as Cady would) that Regina is the only other person on the line; however, Regina reveals that Gretchen has been listening in. Thus, Waters uses the "split-screen" image as a tool for unreliable narration that places the audience in Cady's position, and provides a visual illustration of Regina's deceit. The second "three-way calling attack" scene takes the split-screen effect to even more absurd extremes, as characters begin to forget who is on the line.
Waters's occasional directorial flourishes such as these help Fey's script come to life, although Waters himself admits that he leaned heavily on Fey during production when evaluating the quality of various jokes. Mean Girls has held up in critical and popular esteem because so many of its actors deliver so many of its different lines impeccably, likely owing to Fey's on-set guidance and Waters's experience working with young actors.
