Trivia & Facts
Filming Locations:
- Texas, USA
- The main ranch house in the film used to belong to Hilary Duff's family.
- Fire ants were an enormous problem for the cast and crew during the shoot.
- Writer Jacob Forman and production designer Thomas S. Hammock play the firework salesmen.
- A little girl died in the upstairs bedroom in the ranch house after asphyxiating. Locals claim she still haunts the house. It is claimed a little girl in a white dress was seen several times in the ranch house during night shoots, even though there were never any children on set.
- The Ranch used for shooting had a cemetery with over 60 graves from the 1800's next to the house. The graves were from a town, which no longer exists.
- Local legend has it that John Wilkes Booth evaded capture in Virginia after his assassination of Abraham Lincoln and was the caretaker on the ranch property. He told the property owners his true identity as he was dying. They buried him in an unmarked grave next to the oak tree which Mandy Lane walks by to see Garth.
Film Quotes
Bird: "You know we are all trying to get you right?"
Mandy Lane: "Get me?"
Bird: "Get with you. Here's the deal, I'm not like the other guys."
Cast and Crew Quotes
"I've never done anything as low budget as this film and that's something I'm proud of. I read the script and it wasn't about the money. It isn't your average horror; it has the potential to be a cult classic."
- Amber Heard
"I didn't want people to think I was underacting and not putting anything into it! It was so difficult because this character's so different from myself - I'm quite outgoing."
- Amber Heard
"They send scripts to my house all the time. My agent says, "Oh, flag this one, look at it this time, let's talk about this one..." I read them all. Just endless prom-queens, scream-queens, drama-queens or the blonde, hot girlfriend. That girl. The girl that doesn't have anything, doesn't have a second layer. But stupid girls sell. And then a script like All The Boys Love Mandy Lane comes in..."
- Amber Heard
"It's unique. Really unique. When I read that script and I thought, "I need this." But it was so under the radar, because it had no money and no name behind it. The director was first time, the producers were no-name, no company, no money."
- Amber Heard
"It's funny. It's my first leading role, I'd just gotten to Hollywood pretty much and I had expectations, like everybody does when they move out to [Los Angeles], about the glamour of the lifestyle. I remember standing out in a field, ready to go into hair and make-up. And they said, "We'll do your hair and make-up right here." And they dumped a bucket of mud on me. Literally. And I'm like, "Oh, OK." And they were like, "Wait, we haven't given you the blood yet...""
- Amber Heard
"It does say great things about the director, I must say, because we made it for no money and in a very short amount of time in the middle of nowhere. It was really, really difficult in terms of how they make things comfortable for big-budget films. This lacked everything and yet it is so much better than 99% of the things out there that are made for ten times as much. It's just a testament to its artistic merit and the director's brilliance."
- Amber Heard
"I got the script in LA and I loved it. This was a movie that was really under the radar; no one was really talking about it. It didn't have much money and subsequently it didn't get much attention right off the bat. I found this script and I said, "Whoa, I want this movie, I have to do this." And it's different; there are so many things you get where it feels like you're reading the same girl over and over again. And then I read this script and I thought it was truly different and that it could be done well."
- Amber Heard
"The director and the writer went through great pains to put into the script some of the descriptions of the shots and the direction they had artistically but a lot of it came when I met Jonathan Levine, the director, and talked with him about the part. There was a connection and that's what it's all about; the director's collaboration with the actor. My vision and his vision, the collaboration and the connection can make or break a film and in this case it made it. I knew instantly from meeting him that I had so much trust in him. I was like, "OK, I'll be your scream queen." We just connected, and I'm very proud."
- Amber Heard
"That's what's really brilliant about it, it kind-of mocks you a little bit and your expectations. It plays into, "Oh, you wanted to see a teen slasher film with the hot blonde," and it mocks you for that in a sense. It's brilliant, because it plays into the expectations and it plays into the fact that you went and saw it with those expectations and how wrong you were and how simple your expectations were for what it could have been."
- Amber Heard
"Well, for this film I didn't really spent a lot of time with the other actors. I isolated myself to maintain some sort of organic sense of the character. In general, especially with an independent film, no one's there to make money, or to be famous even, they're there to make a piece of art because they liked the project most likely. If you're not going to make a lot of money and you're not going to go to a beautiful exotic location and you're not necessarily going to be a celebrity from it, there's a real sense of camaraderie that you have with the other people that are in the situation you are. You're like, "We've been filming in a field for sixteen hours, I'm not making any money, but I can sleep well at night." There's a camaraderie there that's subsequent to a sense of just sharing a connection with other artists."
- Amber Heard
"It's funny that you say that; everyone has these expectations, whether they're subconscious or not, of the glamour and how much fun that you can have in LA and I went with those same expectations. This was my first shoot, my first leading role. I fly to my hometown, funnily enough, to film and I stand out in this field waiting for my hair and make-up. Instead of the chair, instead of the lights, I stand in the middle of a field and have, literally, a bucket of freshly-dug mud dumped on my head. I thought to myself, "This isn't exactly what I expected!" As I'm lying in a mud-pit having fake blood squirted in my mouth, I think, I love my job!"
- Amber Heard
"It is, I had a great time. It was particularly amazing and I had a blast doing it. How could I not? There was a lot of physicality involved, which was fun, and the special effects that were done during production, and the blood and the mud, all that stuff's great."
- Amber Heard
"She's a fictional character that encompasses and embodies - or represents, more - a bunch of real girls. Many, many real girls. Many real teenagers - high-schoolers - especially in America. There are a lot of incicdents of this kind of violence in school with the perpetrators being cute teenagers against their classmates. Their victims are their classmates and they're often their bullies. They're tired of everything that they've been given up until that point. In the first part of the movie she's a great representation of all those girls who are insecure and uncomfortable with their sexuality and their power and yet they're strangely intrigued by it and tempted by it. And then she changes, and she develops and as we get to know her more we come to realise that she's a representation of this society that's very real, especially in America. She represents quite a bit of reality."
- Amber Heard
"That’s a big part of the reason I gravitated so much towards the script and committed so much and had so much trust in the project. It’s a first-time director, no one had a name that was a part of the decision making process, and it was low budget but the script spoke for itself and it’s very different. I thought it was a unique character and a unique script – a true one of a kind."
- Amber Heard
"It’s great because she’s such a strong female character – she always had so much potential from the way she was written and the capacity to be a real person with layers. I found that really unique because there’s not really that many female characters out there. Here, you look at the film and think: “Scream queen!” Or: “Blonde girl!”... *spoilers, highlight to read if you wish to be spoiled/have seen the film* ... But in the end it mocks you for thinking like that in a way. And I liked that a lot." *end spoilers*
- Amber Heard
"The opening scene means a lot and it’s a testament to his true genius. If you want to just wrap it up, go to that first scene… the camera in all films takes on a point of view that you as an audience take on, so you see things as if your eyes are the camera. But what’s so brilliant about that scene is that he just sort of presents you with a whole scene where your eyes could go anywhere except that he tells you where to look. He literally takes the camera and does this [gestures towards her chest] to put the audience in the scene brilliantly. So, we in turn, as audience members, see that and become instantly one of the members in the hallway. It gets a really strong message across of how she’s being objectified and how she is being looked at by the people in her class. I’m glad you pointed that scene out because it’s a great moment."
- Amber Heard
"I think it was built in the Civil War era of the United States and it’s a very traditional, post-Colonial home. It’s a huge mansion out in the middle of nowhere – which was kind of creepy but on a film set you’re never alone so nothing crazy happened! People ask about it all the time, whether anything strange happened because it’s a horror film but no..." [On the film's house.]
- Amber Heard
"Everyone talked about it being haunted but my opinion on that kind of thing, personally, is that it would have to slap me across the face, literally [for me to believe it], or if something supernatural came and offended me, then maybe I’d believe. But I was never alone – everybody followed you around and there was always someone watching, so I’d have been lucky if I could get away to have something like that happen, otherwise it would have been recorded. But what I loved about the house was that it had these huge wooden shutters over the windows with holes in them the size of the barrel of a shotgun – not from a shot, but basically so that people could protect their homes during the Civil War. They’d shut these huge wooden shutters over the windows and would still be able to fire through the holes. I thought that was really neat." [On the film's house.]
- Amber Heard
"It’s funny because Mandy Lane is one of my first movies. It’s actually my first leading role and I’d never been on a set for more than a week or two – that was how long it took to do my specific roles – and I remember I’d just got to Hollywood and jumped into a lead role like this and was thinking about all the glamour and potential that LA had. But then I got on set and my hair and make-up literally included for a long time being taken out into the middle of a field – because it was low budget too – and having a bucket of blood and mud dumped on top of me for continuity. I remember thinking as I was covering my eyes to have this dumped all over me: “I really didn’t know it would be quite this glamorous!”"
- Amber Heard
"Running and screaming in the hot Texas sun in the middle of summer is a challenge. I’d get home and my voice would be gone and I’d be sunburnt. Running around and screaming for 16 hours is exhausting. It felt good, though."
- Amber Heard
"I don’t believe in that stuff. Until a ghost jumps up and introduces themselves to me I won’t believe in them. The house had its own graveyard because there was an abandoned town nearby. We shot there at midnight on Hallowe’en and still nothing happened. We just all said: ‘Oh, look, we’re in a graveyard in the middle of nowhere on Hallowe’en,’ but that was as spooky as it got." [On the house they filmed in being haunted.]
- Amber Heard
"Mandy Lane is the essence of the unobtainable. She is utterly desirable in the most classical sense. Women want to be her; men want to be with her. She is unreachable and beautiful but what really gets the boys in the film is that there’s something enigmatic and different about this character, something mysterious, innocent, pure... But also, what I think it really is, is that enigmatic quality you can’t put your finger on."
- Amber Heard
"I did my own thing in high school. I stayed out of that world because I didn’t really see it as important as everyone else – not that high school isn’t important, but everything that comes with it. When Jonathan [the director] describes it as terrifying, I know what he means; I think everyone does. Even if you are the ‘Mandy’ – the most popular girl or boy in school – you still walk away injured in some way. It’s a tough experience, I think, especially in America, where we can see what’s happening through current events and how teenagers are dealing with that… But I dropped out of high school and I never thought that all the BS that went with it was important. It was never something that affected me. Thankfully, I walked away unscarred."
- Amber Heard
"It’s the most unique script. I was young, I’d just gotten to Hollywood… It was my first movie role, so I didn’t expect that it would be so good, so brilliant, so artistic and I could never have expected how well Jonathan would direct it, because he was a first time director. I couldn’t see anything beforehand, so I had to go on trust. But I had a strong instant connection with Jonathan in the first meeting when I read through the script – and opportunities to play a strong female character are few and far-between. They don’t write young female characters, especially beautiful ones, as interesting, intelligent people... But when I read it, I saw this amazing character and so much could be done with her through an amazing, intelligent script. So, I met with Jonathan and I had an instant connection with him, and that’s what it’s about – the collaboration of an actor and the Director and their vision. It can make or break a film. I knew instantly that I could trust him and my expectations were surpassed."
- Amber Heard
"As an actor I can never see it objectively, but I was impressed and pleasantly surprised. He didn’t let the genre or the studio’s editing affect his artistic vision. I always think it’s funny that they call it a ‘slasher’ film because it’s so much more than that. But call it what you may, it’s still a good movie. I think people will be surprised how much they like it even if they’re not fans of the horror genre." [On seeing the final product.]
- Amber Heard
"People ask me a lot about the location, which was a creepy old house in the middle of nowhere. But you’re never alone on set, people are always watching you, following you around and keeping tabs on you – it’s the least scary thing you could possibly ever do. We were actually shooting in a graveyard on Halloween eve, in the middle of the night, and I remember thinking to myself, “I could not be scared even if a ghost came out of one of these graves”. It’s like when you shoot a sex scene: it’s the least sexy thing in the whole world. It takes it out of it!"
- Amber Heard
"My favourite, I guess, would have to be seeing it when it was done and how well it was done." [On her favorite Mandy Lane memory.]
- Amber Heard
"When I got the script it was like falling in love. It was one of those moments when you read something and you instantly know it's really special. It was so different. As a young actress just starting out in Los Angeles, you read so many scripts that want to pigeonhole you. They put you into a category as the pretty, young girl and nothing more. You're always the girlfriend, there to support the rest of the characters. I read so much of that stuff when I moved here and Mandy Lane was just the opposite. The writing is so beautiful, so brilliant. I read the script and I knew there was something different about this character."
- Amber Heard
"No, generally speaking horror films are not my favourite. I do get a lot of those kind of scripts handed to me but I don't watch them particularly often. I'm not a big fan of the genre so it's not something that I go out and look for, but as with all films, it depends completely on the script. It's about what can you imagine in your head as the final product."
- Amber Heard
"It's a shame that there aren't more powerful women written into scripts, more powerful women characters like Mandy Lane, but then that's what's so brilliant about Jacob Forman's script."
- Amber Heard
"It was an amazing shoot in the middle of summer in Texas, which is where I'm from. I felt quite at home, running home around those fields, although normally I'm not running around with my clothes torn and covered in blood. It was a lot of fun. We became a really close family unit filming out in the middle of nowhere for so long."
- Amber Heard
"You are close to the people you work with, especially on set, because it's such long hours. It's practically the place you live. In the case of this film, I chose to be isolated from the rest of the cast, in a social aspect, because I wanted to maintain a sense of genuine disconnect, in the same way that Mandy is disconnected from the other kids."
- Amber Heard
"She appears unattainable. Men seem to always go for what they can't get. She's really an enigma, so complex - *spoilers, highlight to read if you wish to be spoiled/have seen the film* ... there's all these secrets buried deep behind here eyes which nobody quite gets until the end of the movie." *end spoilers*
- Amber Heard
"Like most people, I've been the girl who walks down a hallway and isn't aware how I look and how other people perceive me. When you walk down a hallway as Mandy Lane in those slow motion shots, you become very, very conscious of how you look. But that was perfect for the character - this introverted, painfully shy, insecure girl."
- Amber Heard
"It's impossible to watch a movie objectively, especially your own scenes, but if it's a piece of work and I'm proud of it, as I am with Mandy Lane - I love the movie - then it's a little easier."
- Amber Heard
"That's what I love about the film. Jonathan Levine, the director, and Jacob Forman, who wrote the script, did such an amazing job of portraying American teens, and encompassing how high school society functions. The girls in the film are amazing representatives of the girls who are generally considered to be popular and cool in school. Then you've got the other characters who are the insecure, nervous girls, who care about what other people think about them more than anything."
- Amber Heard
Critics Quotes
At the center of the story is Amber Heard who clearly handles the most difficult role in the film—where each of the other characters is in many ways a stereotype of what you’d find in any given high school in America, Heard had to be so much more. She is required to embody an archetype that can hardly be described—A Helen to the people of her high schools Troy. I cannot stress enough how clearly she needed to be the absolute physical and spiritual embodiment of perfection to play this part. And to her undeniable credit Amber Heard rose magnificently to that occasion. It’s obviously a handicap to title your film All The Boys Love Mandy Lane if you can’t deliver that promise. Levine and his crew did that first aspect of their jobs with resounding success.
- Bloody-Disgusting.com
Amber Heard (Mandy Lane) was the big revelation of the film. Innocent yet sexy looks, able chops and a great ass! Star in the making! Anson Mount (Garth) was ideal casting as the stand up older dude. Whitney Able (Chloe) was perfect as the slut-hut of the group. It should be said that all of the teen actors in this film did a bang on job. Very credible! Props!
- Arrow in the Head
Links & Research
» PICTURES
... View pictures of Amber Heard playing Mandy Lane.
» VIDEOS
... Download trailers, film clips, featurettes and more!
» IMDB.COM
... Additional information at the Internet Movie Database.
» OFFICIAL
... Check out the official film website.
All the Boys Love Mandy Lane 
