Amy Heckerling was born in the Bronx, New York City on May 7, 1954, she is an American film director. An alumna of both New York University and the American Film Institute, she directed the commercially successful films Fast Times at Ridgemont High, National Lampoon's European Vacation, Look Who's Talking, and Clueless. Heckerling is a recipient of AFI's Franklin J. Schaffner Alumni Medal celebrating her creative talents and artistic achievements. Heckerling was born to a bookkeeper mother and an accountant father. She had a Jewish upbringing and remembers that the apartment building where she spent her early childhood was full of Holocaust survivors. "Most of them had tattoos on their arms and for me there was a feeling that all of these people had a story to tell. These were interesting formative experiences." Both of her parents worked full-time, so she frequently moved back and forth from her home in the Bronx, where Heckerling claims she was a latchkey kid sitting at home all day watching television, to her grandmother's home in Brooklyn which she enjoyed much better. Here, she frequented Coney Island and stayed up watching films all night with her grandmother. At this time Heckerling loved television, where she watched numerous cartoons and old black and white movies. Her favorites were gangster movies, musicals and comedies. She had a particular fondness for James Cagney. She graduated from high school in 1970, focused on directing and studying film at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. During her time at NYU, Heckerling was making mostly musicals. She said "I was the only one doing them and they were weird. It was the mid-70s and it was a bizarre combination of long hair with bell bottoms, the tail end of the hippie movement at its schlumpiest. With this, I sort of infused a 1930s idiotic grace that didn't go with the post-Watergate mentality that was prevalent at the time. They were weird films, but they got me into AFI." After graduating from NYU, Heckerling decided that she wanted to follow her friend Martin Brest to the American Film Institute in Los Angeles where she felt there would be more opportunities to break into the business. Heckerling experienced severe culture shock upon moving to LA from NYC, especially because she had never learned to drive before but was still used to navigating the city, free to go wherever she wanted due to NYC's public transportation. When she did eventually learn to drive, she adjusted to LA life and started working. Her first studio job was lip-syncing dailies for a television show, where she started making connections in the business. As a filmmaker with several box office hits under her belt, it's impossible not to view Heckerling through the lens of her industry, one where only seven percent of the highest grossing movies of last year were directed by women and where a rampant culture of harassment and abuse seems to be finally starting to crumble. "I'll believe it when I see it," Heckerling says ruefully. But she's clearly uncomfortable with the focus that puts on her to be a representative of some larger group. As one of just a small handful of female directors who have seen her films gross more than $100 million at the box office, Amy Heckerling is a force to be reckoned with. Today, she’s also a babysitter. Whether she's talking about the films that made her name in Hollywood or her most recent projects mostly TV, Heckerling is surprisingly low-key. There's no master plan checklist she's ticking off and no sweeping political statement that she wants to make. She went on to say: "From the first time I had a deal with a studio, people were like, 'What’s it like being a woman director?'" she says. "I’m like, ‘I don't know, I’m just doing what I do. I don’t really represent everybody’ ... I know other women directors, and I know other women who used to direct, and I hear their stories. But I’ve never been a spokesperson for anything. I’m not that kind of person. I’m just someone who holes up and scribbles and hopes that they’ll get to make something."

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