In 1985 zat ik met wat klasgenoten op een zondag in de Haagse Odeon bioscoop (die half gesloopt werd, want zo ging dat in die tijd) om daar te kijken naar de John Hughes film Weird Science, die ging over twee nerds die met magie en hacken hun perfecte droomvrouw tot leven brachten en hier door meer zelf vertrouwen kregen. De film is pure cult omdat het zo grappig en cool op vele fronten is, en in de jaren negentig zelfs een TV serie kreeg. Nu had de website Uproxx een interview met Ilan Mitchell-Smith over hoe zijn rol als Wayatt invloed op zijn leven heeft gehad, en dat is.... anders dan je denkt.

The scene where you're making Lisa, it's this very '80s interpretation of and commentary on the power of computers. What do you think of that scene now? And how was it to film?

It was very different to film. It's hard to explain what the set feels like when you're looking at a dead, unplugged computer screen and there's no music or sound, and they're just like, "Now react like there's something crazy going on in that screen." We didn't know what the crazy thing was going to be... Who knows, but it's going to be out there. That leaves it all up to you to be like, "Okay, let me run through the series of surprised and scared expressions that I have." Then you see it in the movie and it all makes sense. The screen is doing things and there's music and sounds in the background. Instead of the mundane whir of fans blowing at us, it sounds like a cyclone.

How was it filming that insane party crashing scene?

It was fun, but we were in a closet for most of that. Our two characters were not actually in the party til the very end, so for a lot of craziness of the party, we weren't even on the set. But I love that scene, I always thought it was great. One of the high points of that whole movie was meeting Vernon Wells. In The Road Warrior, there was a group of motorcycling wasteland scavengers. There were some that were much cooler and weirder than others. And the star of these bad guys was this crazy guy with a mohawk. The bad guy who leads the motorcycle gang in Weird Science is the same guy in the same outfit from The Road Warrior. That's why he has an Australian accent, that's why he's dressed like that. He had this wrist crossbow kind of thing that was in one of the scenes of The Road Warrior. The kind of nerd that I was, that was huge, I was squeeing. I kept my shit together at the time, I didn't completely lose it in front of him, but that was a really big moment for me.