Alexa Vega gives a harrowing performance.
She did. I remember two scenes where I was really pushing Alexa. One was the scene where she completely freaks out on her bed, after learning that she’s been betrayed by her friends, and her mom is trying to calm her down. I wanted a gut-wrenching scream at her mom. And there seemed to be nothing in Alexa’s life that she could draw on for that. Very few of us ever get to that point in life (thankfully), but I kept pushing and pushing until finally she screamed and it had this chilling crack. It’s funny how a little touch like that can make all the difference. She pushed herself so hard that her voice cracked. She also had a completely insane look in her eye. I went, “That’s it.” And kissed her on the top of the head.
The other scene was the last scene in the movie. She had to be completely grounded in what she was saying. It’s not just the words that convince Leah Pipes’s character that her friend doesn’t need her around anymore — it’s the fact that Alexa says it with total conviction and complete confidence. It sounds simple enough, but it’s not that simple to do — especially take after take, when you’re repeating the same material again and again, trying to make it sound fresh and at the same time filled with 100% confidence.
I think we did the highest number of takes that I’ve ever done on a scene. We were going into overtime. That’s not what you want to do with a sixteen-year-old actress, because not only are you costing the company money but you are also breaking the law. The only thing that made me comfortable with it was the fact that Alexa’s mother was right there, being an active part of the process. She understood what I was trying to do. Most importantly, Alexa wanted to get to the point where I was happy with the performance. After every take, we’d talk about what else we needed and then try again. All the while, the producers and crew were watching the clock.
Finally, Alexa nailed the scene — as I knew she could — and we got her off the clock. Then I had to shoot the mom’s reaction. I needed Lisa Vidal to react to Alexa and Leah’s performances without Alexa and Leah being there. I went to her and apologized profusely. I said, “I’m really sorry about this, but I’m going to have to get the script supervisor or one of the extras to read Alexa’s part, and I’m so sorry but you’ll to react to that.” She said, “I’m really not comfortable with that.” I said, “I understand, but we need to try because we’re behind schedule.” We had two extras deliver the lines, while the camera was pushing in on her face. At first she seemed like she was doing okay, but at a certain point I saw her eyes glaze over. She said, “Tom, I can’t do this. This is impossible without the other actress.” I felt horrible. She was right that I was asking too much — especially at the end of a long day, for the end of the movie, and such an important scene. I have to give Lisa credit for trying. She’s a pro. But this was ridiculous.
So I scrapped her reaction and came back the next day and shot her reaction when we had Alexa and Leah on set. Thank God the line producer was supportive of that. And luckily we were still shooting at the school location. You never want to go back and re-light if you don’t have to. But Lisa was right. This was a big, big moment for her character. She’s seeing her daughter now as a stronger person. We had to get it right, and she was 100% correct to say, “I can’t make this moment honest without seeing it unfold in front of me and letting myself react.” It was one of those situations where art and commerce — show and business — conflict. For me, art has to win.
At least you’d done enough films to recognize that she didn’t have what she needed in order to do justice to the scene.
I’m sure that if you talked to 100 different actors, you’d get various opinions about what’s needed to perform a scene like that. One might say that the editing could play a big role in it. That’s Eisenstein’s theory that if you show a close-up of a face, cut to a shot of what they’re seeing, and then cut back to the exact same shot of that person, the audience will swear that they’re reacting to what they’re seeing, even though it’s the exact same close-up.
Another actor might say, “I understand the time restrictions. How about I give you a series of reactions? You pick the one you like best.” That might work in editing, or it might not. Actors have to do casting auditions all the time, where they’re reacting to a casting director or script reader who isn’t connected to the scene at all. We somehow expect them to be not only good, but so good that they nail the role. But as a director on a movie, I don’t want to put my actors in that position. I don’t want them to walk away from a scene feeling like they didn’t connect. It alienates them from the process, and it can affect their overall performance. I think I learned that from Nancy. I have learned a lot about acting by being married to an actress. Nancy has great insight.
You talked about using handheld cameras to add realism to She’s Too Young? What were your aesthetic plans for Odd Girl Out?
After seeing the movie, a few people said to me, “Why was it so dark at the school?” I intentionally made it dark because I was going for a film noir look. I had an amazing Director of Photography, John Bartley, who created the look of The X-Files.
The scariest thing for me and John technically was that it was the first time I shot on HD, using those big-ass cameras. I’m used to having the freedom of 35mm, 16mm, or smaller video cameras. John had never shot HD before either, so it was the blind leading the blind. We both went in with the same attitude: Let’s make the movie we want to make, shoot it the way we want to shoot it, and figure it out in post. We had a digital imaging person on set that was constantly telling us what to do and what not to do. He was always trying to get us to register the image right down the center so that it wasn’t too bright or too dark. As a filmmaker, I’d look at the monitor and think, “That doesn’t look dramatic,” so we were constantly changing things to get the look we wanted, and driving this poor guy crazy.
In the end, you have to embrace the possibility of being hated. It’s not easy when the people who are paying you are saying, “This just is not going to work.” But you need to fight to put the film first and do what you know is right. Then pray that you are right. Unfortunately when we got to color timing, we were assigned to a guy who believed that the network would reject the movie if the bright white colors were blasted out or there wasn’t enough detail in the black. So now at this part of the process everything we had tried to do became a quality control problem. Since that time the standards have loosened up, but I found myself at that moment regretting our rebellious nature. Ultimately, with compromises from both sides, we got the look we wanted. But it took a lot of work.
How did you get involved with Cyber Seduction?
Richard Kletter wrote that one as well. I actually recruited him into the project. At that point we had done She’s Too Young and Odd Girl Out together and the script for Cyber Seduction needed a page-one rewrite. The original script was horrible. I had my agent saying, “Lifetime really wants you to tell them what to do with this.” And I was thinking: Throw it in the trash. I remember pulling off the road one day, to talk to the head of Lifetime movies and saying, “I don’t know what I can do with this. I understand the story you want to tell, but it’s just not there.” I convinced him to hire Richard Kletter to do a total rewrite. I said if he could make it work, I’d do it.
One of the best things about Cyber Seduction was casting Jeremy Sumpter. My daughter, and countless other teenage girls, fell madly in love with this kid in Peter Pan (2003). He’s terrific — he has this wild energy and spirit. I knew that if Lifetime publicized the movie correctly, and really got his face out there, it would draw a huge teenage audience. Unfortunately, a new network administration came in when we were in post-production, and they backed away from the movie. The new execs thought the subject was too slimy.
What made you want to tell this story?
The original title of the movie was Addiction. I kind of liked the drama of that. At one point, Kelly Lynch explodes at her son, “Justin, you’re addicted!” Addicted to porn?
The truth is, yeah, you can be addicted. There are a lot of people addicted to porn. I wanted to show — and this is the message of the movie that I stand by — that porn can be dangerous for a particular personality type. Internet porn is not a very dramatic story, but it becomes a problem for this kid because he has an addictive personality. He has this constant need for something that excites him. The only time he has access to the Net is at night, so he starts Red Bulling to stay awake. It doesn’t make him want to go out and molest or rape girls, but it does affect the more important things in his life — his school work, his involvement in sports and his relationship with his girlfriend. And his lack of sleep has serious ramifications.
In retrospect, I realize that it was a big mistake to try and show anything on the computer screen [representing Internet porn]. Since this was Lifetime, we had to restrict ourselves to Frederick’s of Hollywood-type images, which was laughable. I should have just had him staring at something on the computer that we never saw. Let his reaction tell us that what he was looking at was far worse than anything we could show. The network censors kept cutting down the images until they became so tame that it looked like a joke. But the truth is that there is something in this story that can affect your life. In making the film, I really understood how guys can start looking at females as body parts instead of seeing who they are. It’s wrong, but we do it all the time.
To the mother, porn is an addiction. To the kid, it’s an obsession…at least until he gets so absorbed in that fantasy world that he starts losing his connections to the real world. That’s a recurring theme in a lot of your movies: the main character is put in a position where he has to make a choice between the real world and the fantasy world. My favorite scene in the movie is the scene in the pool. It looks like something out of a Hammer movie about Dracula’s brides, and it conveys the sense that the main character’s fantasy world is just as alluring as it is dangerous.
That was a scene I added that production really objected to. It required underwater gear and more time to shoot, so the producers were saying, “Do you really need this scene?” I said yes. I wanted a scene that had that dreamlike, sensual fantasy quality to it. I wanted a type of female who were attractive enough to be Sirens. Obviously they should have been naked. But since we couldn’t show nudity on TV, I was hoping that the poetry of the image would be sensual enough. But you bring up an interesting point about the difference between addiction and obsession. What are the differences to you?
I think of “addicted” as a kind of judgment call — “you’ve got a problem.” I don’t think “obsession” necessarily has the same negative connotations.
I think that’s an excellent distinction, because here you’re getting at the basic component of drama, which is conflict. Is obsession as scary as addiction? If you’re physically attacking a woman because you’re obsessed with her, that’s pretty scary. But if you just can’t stop thinking about her, is that obsession or addiction? Have you really lost control? To me, an obsession is an intense love for a particular movie or person or whatever. But you don’t necessarily think about it 24-7.
I think what we were trying to do with this movie was show an addiction. He was certainly more interested in porn than he was in getting into college. Everything in his life was suffering because of it. If it had been just an obsession, where he was able to get it out of his head and go to sleep at night, then it wouldn’t have been a major conflict. Certain types of individuals just aren’t able to stop. Their need becomes too strong.
The people who slammed the movie were mainly young guys. There were parents who saw this movie and emailed Lifetime, saying thank you. One woman wrote, “As soon as that movie was over, I went up into my son’s room and I found a bunch of porn on his computer. Thank you, because I had no idea he was hiding this from me. I sensed something was going on with him.” I’m sure her son sent a pissed-off email to Lifetime.
The main focus of She’s Too Young and Cyber Seduction is responsible parenting. Both say that you have to be very aware of what your kids are doing. You have to trust them, but you can’t blindly trust them.
Right.
So, naturally, any kid who wants to get away with anything is going to hate a film that prompts their parents to start going through the files on their computer.
Yes, but I’m thinking like a parent. That’s our responsibility. To protect our children. For me, porn is sort of like horror movies…Critics say that horror movies cause violence in society. I don’t believe that, but I do believe they can throw gasoline on fires that are already burning. We’re so Puritanical about sex in our country, to the point that we sometimes suppress the beautiful aspects of it, and that is part of the problem. Making something forbidden only makes it more attractive. (I know that from being raised Irish Catholic.) Setting boundaries for your kids can also mean that they might only want to break them. The hardest thing in parenting is establishing boundaries that you believe in and can maintain.
I grew up saying to my parents, “What do you mean? Why can’t I do that?” I have that same fight with my kids. My daughter says, “I’m eighteen…” My son says, “I’m twenty-one…” And I think: God, I wish I’d had somebody giving me strict advice in black or white terms when I was that age. It doesn’t mean I would have always taken the advice. But I think it would have helped me to consider both sides and make better decisions. I know my kids are going to fuck up and make wrong choices, as I did. I know there will be repercussions — if not now, then down the line. I’m not trying to make their decisions for them. But I know there’s value in setting boundaries and telling them how their mother and I see things.
Of all your films dealing with twenty-first century teenagers, my favorite is Not Like Everyone Else. In a way, it starts where Odd Girl Out leaves off — the main character, Brandi Blackburn, has already embraced the role of outsider.
You know, the real Brandi loved reading Stephen King. The day she visited the set and she said to me, “All I wanted to do when I was growing up was write horror movies.” She actively tried to stand out — adopting the punk look, dying her hair black. I could understand why people in a Bible-Belt Oklahoma high school were picking on her. She looked like a runaway druggie on Sunset Boulevard. Since she stayed to herself, she was considered very suspicious. After Columbine, those outsider qualities were now perceived as threatening. Brandi was deemed guilty because she was different.
One of the things I kept thinking of while I was watching the movie was King’s early novel Rage, which is about a teenager who brings a gun to school and takes his class hostage. I kept expecting Brandi to turn violent — to act like a monster because everyone was treating her like a monster. But she turned out to be much more grounded than that…
We were working completely off of the true story. Brandi didn’t lash out and there are always limits to our artistic license. The real story was an ongoing conflict with the school authorities that didn’t end until she graduated. I don’t know what the real principal was like, but I opted for casting a little guy with a Napoleon complex.
I also played up the witchcraft thing. When the movie was first pitched to me, I was told it was about teenage witchcraft. When I read it, I was surprised. She’s not a witch. It’s about being different in a society that doesn’t like anything outside of the accepted norm. It’s a story about a witch hunt, not a girl who’s a witch. It had a bit of that Stephen King / Carrie quality to it. She fights back, but not to the extreme that Carrie did. In fact, at the end, she doesn’t tell off the bitchy girls.
The thing is, Brandi didn’t really want to belong. That’s what was cool about her. Her mother encouraged her outsider mentality. She would look at her daughter’s crazy drawings and joke, “Who are you? You can’t be my daughter.” But you could tell her mom was proud. She thought her daughter was really cool. I love the actress who played that part — Illeana Douglas. I was extremely excited to work with her because she just lights up the screen. She’s so committed
to whatever she’s doing, and she was 200% committed on this film.
In real life, Brandi’s father was the opposite of the character in the movie. He did fight for his daughter, but it wasn’t because he had a personal agenda. He just felt that his daughter was being singled out unfairly. Ironically, at home, she was not allowed to take part in some of the cultural traditions that her brother took part in — like going to see a medicine man. I wanted to expand on the distance between the father and daughter for dramatic purposes. I felt like I needed more conflict, so I added that subplot. And I think that, just like in the movie, the real father and daughter were closer after the experience of this movie.
At the end of the movie, Brandi’s father wakes her up one morning, and she thinks he’s just asking her to make breakfast like she usually does. Instead, he takes her to see the medicine man. We actually shot that at the end of one of our shooting days. We had a very small window of opportunity to get the scene before nightfall. Our casting director had gone to New Orleans the previous weekend and found a real Native American medicine man. We paid him to come and teach the actor how to say the lines in native dialect, and to play the role of the medicine man at the end of the movie. My favorite experience on that shoot was the ride back from that location after we shot the medicine man’s scene. I got to talk to him about his life and his travels. He, his wife and kids basically lived in their car. They were so grateful that we were putting them up in a hotel for the night. I managed to get them an additional night at the hotel. He really looked at this experience as a great blessing. His gratitude was overwhelming.
A Strange Idea of Entertainment: Conversations with Tom McLoughlin Page 24