Director Penelope Spheeris on Thirty Years of Black Sheep and Little Rascals [Exclusive]

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"As a child of the '90s I hold close the comedies of the era. Hell, I still quote them on the daily, specifically the films of director Penelope Spheeris. Drop by mine and you'll hear me say either, "Dear Darla, I hate your stinkin' guts" from Spheeris's 1995 movie The Little Rascals or "Thank you little roots, please stay strong" from 1996's Black Sheep. The fact that a director could helm two such different features – on an adaptation of the Hal Roach kids comedies from the 1920s and the other a Chris Farley movie about politics – is a testament to Spheeris's directorial range.

And yet to talk her she's open about had had to sell out in order to keep making features. Which she shouldn't have had to considering Spheeris was riding the wave of being the director behind 1992's Wayne World, the Mike Meyers/Dana Carvey comedy that saw their popular SNL characters transition to the big screen. "After I did Wayne's World I [had] a whole inventory of scripts that I had written and tried to get made into film," Spheeris tells The Film Maven.