Shooting Shakespeare with Jean-Luc Godard

The year was 1986, and I had just graduated from high school—both in real life and in the films of John Hughes. Onscreen, the high schools I attended were big and Midwestern, mostly situated in the suburbs of Chicago. In reality, if I wasn’t filming or ditching class, I went to a small French school on the west side of Los Angeles called the Lycée Français, an institution I had so rarely attended in person that when I flew back from New York for one day to accept my diploma my mother referred to it as my “honorary degree.” At the time, I was arguably one of the most recognizable high schoolers in America, but it had been a while since I had felt my age. When I left school a few weeks early to star in “The Pick-up Artist” with Robert Downey, Jr., in New York, I was already incorporated—and yet I still couldn’t legally order a drink in a restaurant.