She’s Too Young was the beginning of tackling darker aspects of the teen world. I was trying to play out things with realism but also with a film noir style. I couldn’t escape from that film noir look in those films, because to me it really reflected the subject matter. We were creating a world where the main character always suffers these feelings of alienation, loneliness and anger. And many of the girls were truly femme fatales.
Did you approach She’s Too Young with a sense that you were getting into new territory as a storyteller?
Yes and no. On one hand, I had done films with similar story dynamics involving younger characters — One Dark Night, Friday the 13th, even Date with an Angel (where the characters are older but still act like teenagers) — so that wasn’t unusual. The challenge on this was making a movie about teenagers and oral sex. I didn’t know of anything on network television that dealt with that. You have to remember that this was made just after the Clinton administration, when oral sex was a hot topic in the media. If you look closely, you’ll see that I named the school in the movie Clinton High.
Before I signed on, I did a lot of research on teenage sexuality, and was shocked by what I found. I talked with so many doctors who said, “You have no idea how many STD cases there are in the public schools these days…but it’s all kept under wraps. Nobody wants anybody else to know that their kid is having sex.” Halifax is probably one of the most squeaky-clean cities I have stepped into in the twenty-first century. You could fire a cannon ball down the streets on Sundays and not hit anybody. And the teenagers seemed like they had stepped out of some small town in the 1950s…But even at the school where we were shooting, I was hearing those same stories. There were posters on the walls about safe sex. The school clinic was giving out free condoms…but when I talked to the kids, they treated it like a joke: “Would I wear a condom that was given to me by a teacher at school? Hell no!” They’d take the condoms and put them on the antennas of their cars, or make water balloons out of them. One doctor told me about a school dance where all the adult chaperones stood around the perimeter of the gym, while the kids formed dance circles within that circle. In the middle, a girl would service her boyfriend while the others kept watch to make sure the parents and teachers couldn’t see them. Again, this was a very squeaky-clean community. That was a huge awakening for me as a parent.
You got such honest performances out of the actors. I’m assuming that most of them were older than the characters they were playing.
Megan Park, who played the Christian girl [Becca], and Miriam McDonald [who plays Dawn] were sixteen or seventeen. I was surprised by how willing they were to act out some of those very awkward scenes. They were both so innocent, but so savvy. So many child actors grow up really fast because they get thrown into this adult world and they have to adapt. I wanted them all to think about how they would personally handle these situations.
Alexis [Dziena, who plays Hannah] was amazing. She’s attractive and sweet and has incredible depth. She was a little older than the others — about twenty, I think, but still completely believable as a fourteen-year old. I really didn’t want to do the low-budget horror movie thing, where you hire twenty-eight-year olds to play seventeen-year olds. I needed them to look fourteen. Of course, today’s fourteen-year olds don’t look the same way a fourteen-year old looked when I was growing up. Kids mature so fast now.
The tough thing for me as the filmmaker was telling this story from all sides. I couldn’t just focus on my own agenda as a parent. It’s not Ward and June Cleaver sitting down and explaining things. I had to take a number of different characters with different perspectives, throw them all together and show everything — because the story isn’t just about any one position. I was always in awe of what John Hughes was able to do in his “teen movies,” especially with The Breakfast Club. He presented so many different perspectives and, even though nobody in real life is as articulate as his characters, it seemed like he always hit all the right notes.
Did the actors in She’s Too Young improvise some of their own lines?
A lot of times actors will look at the script and say, “I’d never say that.” They are convinced that the words just aren’t going to sound right coming out of their mouth or out of their characters. The trick is to avoid putting too much emphasis on any particular word. When they just throw it away, it usually works. Sometimes someone will come up with something new that sounds great. Many times, I don’t know if it’s a new expression or if they just made it up in the moment. It doesn’t matter as long as it seems organic to that character or the moment.
Are younger, less experienced actors more open to being directed than older, more experienced actors?
That depends. I’ve worked with many actors early in their careers who, because of some advice from a casting director or an acting coach, are very self-conscious. In general, it’s easier working with an actor who understands the circumstances of the scene and is not concerned with how you’re photographing them or how many takes you’re going to do or how they’re being lit.
I guess that has a lot to do with how comfortable people are in their own skin. In my opinion, that’s what the best parts of the She’s Too Young are about — Hannah becoming comfortable in her own skin.
One of Lifetime’s stock-in-trades for a while was the mother’s story about her daughter’s problems. She’s Too Young was part of the movement in that direction. Homeless to Harvard was an earlier movie that went that direction and did extremely well. Lifetime could have dismissed that movie as a fluke, but instead they allowed me to take the principal focus off of Marcia Gay Harden and put it onto the kids in She’s Too Young. I was really honored to work with Marcia Gay Harden. Without her, the movie wouldn’t have had the same dramatic weight. She was very supportive of my desire to put the emphasis on the teenage girls.
These scripts can be preachy, particularly in the scenes that focus on the parent’s point of view. As a soon-to-be mother, Marcia understood the importance of reaching the teenage audience. When we were shooting, we trimmed back any preaching as much as we could. She was really a creative collaborator.
There’s some really interesting character development in the movie. You seem to imply backstories for several of the supporting characters. You certainly gave Nick [Hannah’s boyfriend] more depth than the story required.
I tried to do that with images. Nick takes Hannah home to this cavernous, empty house. There’s no one there. He plays the phone message from his father, saying, “I’m not going to be home tonight, so use the credit card to order a pizza. Do whatever you want.” I know from my own experience how I sometimes, as a parent, absent-mindedly used money to make up for feeling like I have not spent enough time with my kids. Nick was the kid who is basically raising himself. And not in a good way.
He was also somewhat inspired by a real person. There was a great documentary on PBS about an outbreak of syphilis at a high school in the South. The school had something like eighty cases that broke out and the parents and administrators were all saying, “What the hell is going on? How can this happen here?!”
It turned out that the kids were organizing sex parties. If you participated, you were in the cool group. I put that idea into a scene in She’s Too Young. I purposely shot it handheld with night vision, so that greenish color makes everything even creepier. It adds to the “ick factor.” So does the fact that everyone except Marcia Gay Harden is totally blasé about what’s going on.
The documentary was a huge help. I could draw on the interviews with some of the young girls who were being coldly rational about what they had done and how many guys they had done it with. I used those influences when I was directing the actors. The note that I gave over and over again was “Just the facts.” The more casual their delivery, the more horrifying their stories sounded. Especially if you’re a parent.
I thought Miriam McDonald, who played Dawn, did an amazing job in the scene where she’s talking to the social worker. The social
worker asks, “How many boys were you with?” The entire time she’s explaining, she tries not to cry. But then it happens anyway. Miriam kept trying to wipe the tears away from her face while talking. I knew she could do that, because she did it in the audition. Things like that really grounded the movie in truth, for me.
That’s an interesting technique. It’s reverse psychology — you tell the actors “try not to be scared, try not to cry” and it makes it more realistic when they show fear or remorse.
I also tried to make the camera movement look more realistic. My son Shane was going to Providence High School at the time, and they had an incredible filmmaking class. His film teacher Mr. Durkin put together a program where the kids were shooting their own little films and editing them. When I was starting She’s Too Young, I went to speak to the class and watched some of their films…and what struck me was that those films had no rules. The teacher kept trying to emphasize structure and discipline in their storytelling, but the kids were just doing what they thought was cool. They were making movies based purely on their own instincts. Every so often, I would see something that was far more interesting and innovative than anything I’d ever seen from professional filmmakers. That was a real revelation.
That inspired me to bring a handheld consumer camera onto the set of She’s Too Young. When my son was on the high school set, I’d give him the camera and say, “Just go shoot whatever you think looks cool.” We shot a lot of the scenes revolving around the teenage characters — like the one where they are singing in the car — with consumer cameras. I felt that added a sense of realism, because it seemed as if one of the characters was recording what was happening. I kept telling my camera man, “Don’t worry about the rules. I just want color, energy, excitement and unpredictability. Don’t worry if it’s not in focus. Find focus during the shot. I’ll use those moments as cut points.” The producers said, “Lifetime is not going to like this.” But they did. They totally embraced it. In fact, they wanted more.
For me, it adds more than just energy. It gives you the feeling that you’ve been thrown into a world on the move. It adds a sense of unpredictability. Of course I had to be true to what each scene was trying to say. If it was a scene that was about the relationship between the characters — like the scene where Nick and Hannah are kissing on the couch, and in her mind it’s like this old fashioned romance — then I let that play true without adding any conflicting camera movements. The goal is to get the viewer to identify with the emotion in the scene on a personal level.
When I was a student in Paris, I went to Rodin’s Museum and I saw his sculpture “The Kiss.” I could not stop staring. It triggered a memory of my first kiss. I was twelve years old and on the Peter Pan ride at Disneyland. That was also the first time a girl grabbed my hand on a date…The specifics of these moments aren’t important. It’s the feeling. I was overwhelmed that this piece of stone, sculpted by an artist a hundred years ago, could have such a profound effect on me. Certain images resonate in your subconscious mind and stick with you forever.
Odd Girl Out is another movie about a mother and daughter, but this one is even more narrowly focused on the daughter.
That was based on the book by Rachel Simmons. She interviewed high school girls and their parents, and their stories all deal with feeling like an outsider. The book was enormously popular — almost as popular as Queen Bees and Wannabes, which was the basis for the movie Mean Girls. Lifetime bought Odd Girl Out with the intention of doing their own version of Mean Girls. The first thing I did with the script was remove everything that resembled Mean Girls. I did not want the audience to feel that we were just recycling the same theme, ideas, or story. Also, Odd Girl Out was certainly not a comedy [like Mean Girls].
The second thing I did was remove the father figure from the story. What happened in She’s Too Young was that the father became somebody for the mother to bounce ideas off of. That was his only function, because in the world of Lifetime the mother is the driving force. The father character had to offset her in certain respects — to be more open when she was more cautious, or more energetic when she would be more calm. I didn’t want to do that again. So I took him out. I thought that added another undercurrent of pain. I remember in E.T., when Elliot brought up his dad at the dinner table and everyone got quiet. There’s a scene later where he smells his dad’s cologne on a shirt he left behind. You never see the father, but his presence is strong in that movie.
Right up until we went into photography, we still had one scene in Odd Girl Out where the dad shows up in the hospital, after Vanessa attempts suicide. We cut that but kept a line of dialogue saying that he’d been there. I wanted the audience to feel that the father has nothing to do with the story’s outcome.
It helps the mother-daughter dynamic because they’re both on their own. Once they realize that, it strengthens their relationship. The lasting bond is between the mother and the daughter — as in She’s Too Young.
Richard Kletter wrote some really good dialogue that made the mother seem vulnerable — like when Vanessa asks her mom if she still has any friends from high school. Mom says, regretfully, “Not really.” I think that gave Vanessa more insight into her mom really humanized her and brought them closer together.
But to me, She’s Too Young and Odd Girl Out are worlds apart. In She’s Too Young, Marcia Gay Harden was actively trying to solve her daughter’s problems. In Odd Girl Out, the mother wants to be able to solve her daughter’s problems, but Vanessa really has to do it on her own. The movie was originally supposed to end with a big graduation sequence that I took out. I think it was so much stronger to end on the scene where Vanessa stands up for herself and tells her friend to fuck off. That unquestionably demonstrates the growth of her character. Viewers really responded to that scene because it’s one of those moments that doesn’t always happen in life, but you wish it would. Another example of movies as wish fulfillment.
Tell me about casting Odd Girl Out.
Alexa Vega was a child actress. She had done many things, including Robert Rodriguez’s Spy Kids. She’s a terrific actress and as sweet as can be. All of her sisters are actresses too, and their mother brings all the girls on location whenever one of them gets a movie. They’re all there as a supportive family group. They’re home schooled and they take day trips together on the days off. When the next one of them gets booked on another gig, off they go. They have the most incredible childhood. Her mother also acts as a kind of acting coach, so she was on set all the time, going over scenes with Alexa.
I also had some other fantastic young actors in that movie. Leah Pipes is amazing. Elizabeth Rice had played Natalie Wood in a TV movie directed by Peter Bogdanovich [The Mystery of Natalie Wood]. There is something about her eyes that is utterly captivating. Alicia Morton, the little blonde girl who played Tiffany, was a Broadway star from “Annie.” Tiffany’s sidekick was my daughter. Hannah was in a number of scenes throughout the movie. And as her father, I was amazed to see her make acting choices that were completely different than what I would expect from knowing my daughter. I thought she has very unique, totally honest instincts.
It’s easy to dismiss the guys in Lifetime movies, but they had some great moments. Chad Biagini was the boy who played the love interest and the one that the girls use as their reason for being pissed off at each other. I allowed him to improvise the scene with Alexa at the beginning of the movie. It was great!
The scene where he admits to liking “chick flicks”?
Yeah. We kicked around various ideas about what they could say. I thought that really added something to the scene — the fact he admitted that. I loved this sense of two people exploring each other. Elizabeth Rice’s character sees them flirting and says, “Oh look who thinks she’s all that.” Some great teen girl moments. In many instances, all they needed was a look. For those girls, staring was a weapon.
One of the most interesting things for me about making that movie was I learned the importance of tell
ing a perfect lie. To some extent, the better you lie the easier it will be for you to get through some of the harder situations in life. You have to be a good actor. More importantly, you have to somehow believe your own lies — because if you totally commit and believe them, then other people will tend to believe them too. It’s scary how much we all lie in situations where we feel we have to.
On this point, I worked particularly hard with Leah Pipes, who played Vanessa’s best friend. I made her convince me that she believed her own lies. What her character wants is to make sure her friend doesn’t think she would ever do anything wrong, so she has to be extremely intimate when they talk. I would get the camera as close to her as I possibly could, so you could see that she was being absolutely honest. You’d never suspect that she was lying…if you hadn’t just seen what she did in the previous scene! As a viewer, you think: Whoa! What a bitch! But at the same time, you have to think: I do that too, don’t I? We all do it to get out of certain situations without having to deal with a conflict or a confrontation.
To avoid being the bad guy.
That’s it exactly. That’s what it gets down to — nobody wants to be found out, punished, or feel unloved.
There’s a scene where Leah’s dad makes the joke, “Son, this is the way girls work.” I think maybe there’s some truth in that. Guys will exchange words or punch each other and then it’s over. Later, you can’t even remember what you were fighting about. Women often remember the year, the month, the day, the song that was playing, the perfume they were wearing, the dress she was in, what the other woman’s hair looked like when she said this to me…It’s burned into the hard drive in their brain and does not go away. Sometimes I thought: Are we going too far with this? Am I making these encounters too brutal? When I saw the feedback for the movie on the Internet, I realized we could have gone even further. A lot of people’s true stories were far worse than ours.
A Strange Idea of Entertainment: Conversations with Tom McLoughlin Page 23