Provocative,” “chilling,” “disturbing,” “emotionally wrenching,” “fiercely realistic” – just a few of the descriptions attached to this summer’s most talked about movie (as in, “Did you see Thirteen? Whoa,” said with a mixture of shock and concern). Perhaps more shocking is that this unrelenting portrait of young teenage girls is from a first-time director and was co-written with a then just 13-year-old girl. Production designer-turned-director Catherine Hardwicke and 13-year-old Nikki Reed, who also stars in the movie, took a week-long school break and created a drama that is being heralded as the next (but better) Kids, because of its raw look at adolescent culture.
“I saw [Nikki] go through this crazy, tough time, where she was just violently angry with her mom and her dad and everybody, and she was so upset, and all that teen angst was boiling over and spilling over and just going crazy,” says Hardwicke. “She just cared about if she looked right and if she fit the look for the school. She’d wake up at 4:30 in the morning, two hours of hair and makeup, the perfect J-Lo, ironing her hair. Her and her best friend did this whole thing, and that’s before seventh grade – that’s pretty extreme.”
Hardwicke, who became close with the young Reed while dating her father, decided she would try to reach out to her by doing something creative. Since Reed wanted to be an actress, Hardwicke thought writing a screenplay would distract Reed from her destructive behavior. “I [thought], what do you have to lose? If she and I talk through all these issues for a week, this will be interesting and fun for her and let’s just try it,” says Hardwicke. “But at the end of that week, when I saw what we had, it really did sort of come together, and I knew it was something, like an energy, like its own thing. There was something special there that was urgent, that I thought would be good to provoke discussions and for kids to relate to. And so I thought, I gotta make it. I really decided I had to make it. Even if it’s with my digital camera over at Nikki’s house, me making the sandwiches for the crew – I’m going to make this movie. And so I had that goal, and just set my mind to it and we made it four months later.”
A production designer on more than a dozen films, including Vanilla Sky, Three Kings and Tank Girl, Hardwicke started as an architect undergrad at the University of Texas-Austin before going into film in grad school. “People were like ‘wait, you’re an architect, why don’t you design my movie?’ And that was perfect. I got paid and had so much fun and got to build like crazy – like an Iraqi village in the middle of Arizona. It was really creative and fun.”
For fifteen years, Hardwicke had been on one movie set or another and was long ready for her chance at directing. When the opportunity finally came, she was undaunted by the challenge. “I felt really comfortable, because I worked with really great directors and watched what they did. And maybe it demystified that experience for me because I collaborated with them, and I saw cool, good things that they did, and some pitfalls that you don’t want to get into,” she explains. “I’d also been taking acting classes for the last four years, so that I would understand how to direct actors and how to work with actors. I figured out what I wanted to do more from the acting classes than from the other movies I was on, because in a way, this movie was different from the other ones I worked on. This one was a smaller, more intimate movie and very emotional. And with young kids having to do really difficult scenes…I hadn’t been on a movie like that.”
She recalls how she approached her own movie set with the thoughtful concentration of a woman whose been patiently waiting in the wings for her moment to come. “The smallest crew possible would be in the room, so that the two or three people acting could just really be with that person instead of just a zillion people standing around talking about ‘hey what did you do last night?’ You know, that kind of thing. And then I talked to the crew about concentrating on the acting, being quiet, and being focused. And also not to have their own bullshit – you know, sometimes this person will yell at this person, or be pissy at that person — [and we couldn’t] have that, ‘cause this is about the actors feeling safe. So I really tried to make that kind of a rule on set as much as possible.”
Part of the reason Thirteen has received so much praise from the press, and why it’s so jolting to an audience member is the performances by its lead actors, Evan Rachael Wood, Nikki Reed and Holly Hunter. The powerful subject matter is played out with fierceness as well as vulnerability. Which is no small thing given the sensitivity of the issues the movie deals with, such as sex, self-mutilation and drugs.
“Before [the girls] even signed onto the project they had to feel comfortable with the script and what they were going to do. And both of the girls had had experience, and this was not the first time either one had kissed a boy. And then Evan had already kissed a girl even on Once and Again, the TV show, so she’s really an old pro,” she laughs. Still, despite how true to life Thirteen’s story may be, the subject of teenagers and sex is never easy to come to terms with culturally or otherwise (re: denial, denial, denial). As a result, the actors’ movements on set are highly regulated and controlled. “The moms are both there whenever you’re filming any sensitive scene, and I’m there of course,” Hardwicke explains. “And then we talk about and rehearse with the boys or the girls, and then we have a welfare worker there the whole time and she gives you the rules. Like when the girls go next door to Kip, the neighbor, and they attack him, we had the exact [rules]: on Kip’s body you cannot get any closer to the nipple than this, you cannot touch the top of his pants but you can touch the bottom of his shorts. We had like zones marked off. And then the welfare worker is hiding behind the couch. And at one point, she jumped up in the middle of the thing after one take and goes, ‘did I see anyone getting anywhere near Kip’s nipple?’” she laughs. “That’s kind of a testament to the girls, how able they were to just go right into the character and just do it, knowing their mom was right over there – ahhh!”
“And you know, the movie feels almost more extreme than it really is, because really, [the girls] don’t do anything besides kiss and dance, but you still feel a little bit more shocked than is really called for, I think partly because the actors are so powerful and the way we filmed it like you really kind of feel like you’re in it.” Thirteen’s intensity is in great part due to Hardwicke’s Director of Photography, Elliot Davis. Davis, who has shot a variety of films including Out of Sight and I am Sam, is excellent at using a hand-held camera and instinctually latching onto the energy of a scene. What comes through on screen is an unwavering, volatile force that goes beyond the script.
“We had no money and we had no time, it was really like a race to get the film done. So part of it, you’ve got to be hand-held to move fast and we had a little camera, and we knew we wanted to film it so that you could just feel like, what is it like to be Thirteen? One minute you’re having like the best time of your life, ‘we’re going out with Havey!’ And the next minute, ‘I’m going to fucking kill my mother!’ You know – that doesn’t work, that idea with a static camera, that’s not how you feel when you’re going through that. Now it’s tough for [Elliot], cause a lot of times he’d be crashing into walls,” she laughs. “And sometimes when we’re editing we had to edit out the, ‘Ouch!’ It was just, you know, run and gun, and really just guerilla style, but that was the energy of the film.”
Thirteen’s uncompromising look at the life of 13-year-old girls gave it the R rating most directors and producers would shy away from. Yet Hardwicke made the decision that the rating would be necessary in order to make the movie true to its subject. “We had to make that choice — ‘are we going to try to make something on a difficult subject and then try to get kids to go with adults to see it?’ And I think that’s kind of a good thing because then maybe then they can talk to somebody about it afterwards. Use it as a talking point, you know, like neutral ground.”
Surprisingly, the parental reaction to Thirteen hasn’t been – surprise. “I was kind of worried when we did the Nantucket Film Festival and I thought people were going to try to say, ‘this is only LA,’ or ‘this is only a bad mother or a broken home,’ or something like that. But I think real parents are a lot hipper than that. They know more about what’s going on with kids, people who have kids this age. And a lot of parents come up to me and say ‘yeah, we’re going through that with this kid,’ ‘We had worse than that with my daughter.’ There’s a lot of issues that touch a lot of families. And I think a lot of people want to take their kids and want to know, and want to find out ways to make it better.”
