Why ‘You Were My First Boyfriend’ director wanted to relive her terrible first kiss, teen bullying
nypost.comon Max), Aldarondo and her co-director, Sarah Enid Hagey, explore humiliating moments from Aldarondo’s youth through a mixture of voiceover narration, interviews with old classmates at her 20-year high school reunion and taking the unusual step of hiring young actors to reenact her memories.“What inspired [this film] was a combination of petty resentment and morbid curiosity,” Aldarondo, 43, told The Post. “I grew up in a very white suburb [Winter Park, Florida], I’m Puerto Rican, I was a misfit.
I hated high school. And my 20th high school reunion was coming up. As I started thinking about going, I had this very visceral ‘Over my dead body!’ response.”Around the same time, she said, she also found her old diary from when she was 14 years old. “Where I cataloged all these obsessive thoughts about this boy I had a crush on.
I thought, ‘I wonder where he is now? Did he know [about my crush]?’ It became interesting to me. The intensity of my feelings of not wanting to go back there made me ask myself, ‘What if I forced myself to relive my worst teen memories?’”In the film’s “reenactment” scenes, she dons a wig and 1980s clothing to pose as her teenage self, surrounded by actors playing her teen classmates.
This even included having a sloppy makeout session with a 19-year-old actor to revisit her first kiss. “We wanted it to be awkward, but we didn’t want it to feel illegal and gross,” she said. “I needed somebody who was a little bit more of a young adult.“Throughout this movie, I put myself in very silly situations — there’s a degree of absurdity.
