ONLY a handful of films from the 1980s have the same legacy as The Breakfast Club.
The movie about five high school students – "a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal" – stuck together in the school library in detention on a Saturday is still beloved by audiences, some of whom weren't even alive when it was released in 1985.
While 35 years may have passed, the story about dismissing people as stereotypes, and then realising you have more in common than you first thought, still seems to ring true.
"It is surprising," admits Ally Sheedy, who played Allison Reynolds, the so-called "basket case". "As years have gone by people still love the movie so much. They identify with a time of their life, they actually relate to it, who knew that was going to happen?
"But it's nice to have something that I worked on that still feels relevant in some way."
It's hard to overstate how big the films written by John Hughes were in the 1980s. His hot streak included National Lampoon's Vacation, Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Pretty In Pink, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Planes, Trains & Automobiles, Uncle Buck and then Home Alone in 1990.
Sheedy's role in The Breakfast Club, opposite Hughes's frequent star Molly Ringwald, as well as Emilio Estevez, Judd Nelson and Anthony Michael Hall, put her right at the centre of popular culture.
"Nobody had any perspective on it then," says Sheedy, who is now 57. "It just seemed like his movies were just successful at that time. It didn't seem that it was a particular moment in the culture."
Even the theme music was hugely popular, Simple Minds' anthemic Don't You Forget about me providing the Scots with a US number one and staying in the UK charts for 65 weeks.
"I don't think anybody figures that out until a little bit later, or at least I didn't. I was definitely not thinking that at all, there is no perspective when it's happening at the moment."
The shoot, in an abandoned high school in Hughes's native Illinois, took the stars miles away from the hubbub of Hollywood fame.
"They built the whole set in there and I remember where we hung out, I remember the crew, I remember Judd playing basketball in a gym that was off to the side, where we filmed running through the halls."
But for all its staying power, Sheedy is also aware that the film is very much a product of its time, and would look different if it were made today.
"There would be a more diverse cast and there would be more political issues, cultural issues addressed. It's a completely different time now than it was then; it would be a completely different movie – absolutely," she says.
"Hollywood at that time, and still, to a great extent, was very much controlled by the white, straight, male perspective and that movie absolutely was. So that is where that voice was coming from, it was coming from John, he was writing from that point of view.
"I don't think anybody would be particularly interested in hearing a story like that yet again, yet again, yet again, right now, it would have to be a completely different movie, told from a different perspective."
The industry has changed a lot since 1985, and Sheedy is glad of it.
"I think things take longer than we want them to and I think as we all move along and the culture moves along and politics moves along, things have to change.
"There is no way we can go back to the 80s and, in many ways, I think thank God that times move on, and so does what's important to say, and what's important for writing, what's important to make as a film, to speak to what is happening right now, and that is the way it should be.
"Movies should reflect what is happening in the culture and right now we are at a turning point, especially in [the United States], where there needs to be other voices, there needs to be other issues addressed.
"It needs to speak to a wider audience, any piece of art. That movie was a little narrow, on the superficial side, and for the time that it was, it doesn't have a lot of relevance to me, to what is actually happening here in this country and in the world in general.
"It's a snapshot in a time when there was only really one story and one perspective being told and it's just not like that any more, and that's a good thing."
Sheedy has barely seen the film since it came out – she hates to watch herself on screen – but still has great memories of the time she spent in that high school.
"I was really happy during that period of my life, I loved the people I was with. It was a new world to me. I grew up in New York, I moved out to LA when I was 18. so this was all new. I loved making movies and being on the set.
"We were all staying in the same hotel and we were all on the set all the time, hanging out together and we never went anywhere.
"I think I took Molly to go and see a movie once, but apart from that we never went anywhere, we were just focused on the movie.
"There were people I didn't love, but the actors I really did, so I just felt that I had this group that I actually belonged to, in a special way. It wasn't always an easy time but there was a lot of joy in that time."
:: The Breakfast Club can be streamed on NOW TV with a Sky Cinema Pass.
