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The film had already won the top critics’ and audience awards at Sundance and recently added SIFF’s Golden Space Needle Award for Best Director to its list of honors. That director, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, stopped by the station to talk about his very popular adaptation of a popular young adult novel.

With good-natured bluntness, the film’s title announces exactly what this movie is about: Two high school buddies become friends with a girl, a classmate, who’s dying.

Director Gomez-Rejon says he prizes the unfiltered honesty of his main character Greg.

“How refreshing is that?” Gomez-Rejon said. “Put yourself in Rachel’s shoes. She probably has received a hundred calls saying ‘Oh sweet heart, you’re gonna make it, this is God’s plan,’ whatever those things are.”

“And there is this kid who she barely knows who says, ‘I’m here because my mom is making me, please, she’s going to make my life a living hell if I don’t’ hang out with you,'” he said. “And that is very refreshing, that honesty is so refreshing, so she opens up to him, and laughs at his stupid jokes and there begins a friendship.”

This kind of plot has all sorts of pitfalls, of course. It lends itself to excessive sentimentality, not to mention gooey high school romance. But the movie does its best to fight the worst of our expectations.

“So if this was a touching romantic story our eyes would meet and suddenly we would be furiously making out with the fire of a thousand suns,” Greg, the lead character says in the film. “But this isn’t a touching, romantic story.”

Gomez-Rejon says he was very conscious of working against the cliches of the genre.

“Even though the script is telling you that it isn’t a love story, how do you cast a movie so that the audience doesn’t expect one anyway?” he said.

“There was something that was much, much bigger than a love story, and in a few years it could lead to something, but now it’s just about needing someone to trust, that would accept you as you are,” Gomez-Rejon said. “But how do you translate that in the movie so the audience doesn’t expect a big kiss? It’s a very different kind of movie.”

Another crucial way the film avoids becoming too cloying is through the dozens of classic film parodies that Greg and Earl make on a shoe-string budget.

“The idea being each one was: we took a film that we liked, we made the title stupider, and then made a new film to reflect the new title,” Greg explains on screen. “It’s a formula that only produces horrible films, but for some reason we keep using it.”

There are way more laughs than tears in “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,” primarily because these student movies are so fun and silly.

“A Clockwork Orange” is remade with sock puppets and called “A Sockwork Orange.” “Citizen Kane” becomes “Senior Citizen Kane.” And my favorite, “My Dinner with Andre the Giant.”

Coming up with these goofy titles must have been a film nerd’s dream come true.

“You should have seen my list,” Gomez-Rejon said. “I worked on this list until it came to a point when producers said, ‘we need that list, because we need to start building puppets.’ Every film had to be made by two 17-year-olds. It had to be in that zone…it had to be made by two kids in Pittsburgh.”

“The list had to be whittled down,” he said. “We made more films than the ones we ended up using in the final cut. We hope at some point in the future we find them on the DVD.”

“Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” cleverly blends the emotional resonance of John Green’s “The Fault in Our Stars” with the aesthetic sensibility of Michel Gondry’s “Be Kind, Rewind.”