Watch an Awkward Party Scene in Are You There God It s Me, Margaret , Anatomy of a Scene

A party game becomes the source of dramatic tension in Are You There God Its Me, Margaret, the screen adaptation of Judy Blumes beloved novel about adolescence. In this sequence, Margaret (Abby Ryder Fortson) attends a party at the home of one of her classmates. Things get rowdy when Nancy (Elle Graham) proposes a game for the group: Two Minutes in the Closet. The girls are all given numbers. The boys draw those numbers from a bowl. The two people whose numbers match retreat to the closet, or in this case, a guest bathroom, for two minutes. The director and screenwriter Kelly Fremon Craig staged the scene in a heightened way, creating a thrillerlike intensity while also playing key moments for laughs. Where I placed all of the actors was a conscious decision, Craig said in an interview, because it was important to me how far they had to walk to get to each other, how far Margaret had to walk to get to the bathroom, all of those things. In addition to the blocking, the scen