Clea DuVall on Working With Tegan and Sara to Create ‘High School,’ Getting Nirvana’s Music and Never Watching ‘My So-Called Life’: ‘I’m a Bad ‘90s Kid!’

variety.com:

Kate Aurthur editor SPOILER ALERT: This interview contains light spoilers for the first four episodes of “High School,” now streaming on Amazon Freevee.  When Clea DuVall first met the Canadian indie musicians Tegan and Sara Quin years ago, “I was not familiar with their music,” she recalled in an interview this week.

Nonetheless, after DuVall — a prolific actor in movies such as “But I’m a Cheerleader” and “Argo” — was introduced to the duo when she joined some friends who were seeing them perform, the three women eventually all became good friends “through being in the same circles.” As DuVall began to explore directing, the first things she ever did were promotional videos for Tegan and Sara’s “Heartthrob” record, released in early 2013.

Since then, she’s collaborated with them a number of times: Among other things. Sara Quin scored DuVall’s 2016 feature debut as a writer-director “The Intervention,” and Tegan and Sara wrote the Christmas song “Make You Mine This Season” for her second film, 2020’s lesbian romcom “Happiest Season.”   So when DuVall read an early version of “High School,” the Quins’ 2019 memoir recounting their teenage years in Calgary, it only made sense that she envisioned adapting it herself. “The way they captured what it was like to be a queer teenager coming out and coming of age in the ’90s, it mirrored my experience so much,” she said. “Even though I was a woman in my 40s reading the book, feeling seen at that time — who I  was at that time, it was just so powerful.”   The chapters of the book are divided between the sisters, and for a television show about identical twins, that format would eventually serve as the template to keep track of whose eyes the audience is seeing the story through.