Elizabeth Griffin talks to Catherine Hardwicke and Holly Hunter about Thirteen.
"I think this rite of passage has always been something worth remarking on in an artful way. People have been commenting on it and arguing about it and trying to unveil the mysteries of it forever. Different cultures ritualise it, but we don't really have that any more. We just know it as adolescence, a time of tremendous upheaval in all sorts of different ways." - Holly Hunter
Winner of the Directing Award at this year's Sundance Film Festival, Thirteen explores the preoccupations of a girl in transition to her teen years. In London to promote their film, first-time director Catherine Hardwicke, and Holly Hunter (one of the film's stars) spoke about the origins of Thirteen, and the struggles it depicts.
Thirteen-year-old Tracy lives with her hard-working mother Melanie and her brother Mason. Tracy is a good student and has several friends but she is desperate to get to know Evie Zamora, the most popular and grown-up girl in school. After an initial cruel rejection Tracy is thrilled to be accepted by Evie's fashionable clique who hang out on Melrose Avenue. Under Evie's influence, Tracy begins experimenting with body-piercing, sex, drugs and shoplifting, all of which she conceals from her mother. The girls spend more and more time with each other, to the exclusion of Tracy's old friends and her family, and it's not long before Evie (whose 'guardian' is away) has moved her things into the house. Tracy is very angry when Mel (a recovering addict) allows her ex-boyfriend Brady (also an addict) to move back in with them. Mel is hurt by Tracy's hostility and becomes increasingly concerned about her daughter's changing personality and behaviour.
The story-line may read like that of many a moralising one-dimensional TV movie - good girl meets bad girl, teenage angst and parental anguish ensues - but from the first seconds, Hardwicke warns us to expect something different. Thirteen opens with its two young stars sitting on Tracy's bed, giggling hysterically and punching each other repeatedly in the face. The scene is both shocking, and massively intriguing - what has brought the girls to this horrible moment? The rest of the film depicts the weeks that have led up to the girls' drug induced brutality, and also the days which follow it. The darkness of this and other scenes was one of the things which drew Evan Rachel Wood (Tracy) to Thirteen: "Everything you see right now is sugar-coated and this wasn't the fluffy pink version of being a teenage girl I'm used to seeing. It was about the people I really know - girls I've seen who have fallen into this same kind of black hole."
That Thirteen struck such a chord with Wood may well be attributed to the fact that her co-star Nikki Reed (fourteen at the time of filming) also co-wrote the screenplay. Hardwicke explains the origins of Thirteen and the way in which it is grounded in her young co-writer's experiences: "I've known Nikki since she was five years old because I used to go out with her dad. And I knew her as a cute little fun kid with the Barbies. Then I went out of town. I came back one day and I'm sitting over at her mom's house, and I see this new person walk in the room. She is 12, and she suddenly looks like a supermodel and fabulous. And I'm just kind of shocked cos there's a new Nikki there. Her world had shrunk - it only mattered what about three kids at school thought of her, and she wasn't really reading or doing anything else and she was waking up every morning at four thirty to do two and a half hours of hair and make-up and she looked great, she did it perfect, you know, better than J-Lo's team could have done and everything. She was very angry with her mother, her father, herself - everyone."
Hardwicke wanted to get Nikki interested in creative activities: "I taught her to surf, I took her to museums and art galleries and we did drawings and read Jane Austen - she hated that. Then she said she was interested in acting. We took it very seriously, reading about acting and listening to professional workshops in order to run with this idea that she was excited about." Hardwicke says that she and Reed felt that there weren't any good acting parts for a 13-year old to play, and that this compelled them to write something themselves, a project which eventually led to the screenplay of Thirteen. The two did not originally envision such a hard-hitting story, but found themselves drawn to the serious side of growing-up: "We started to write a teen comedy, but we didn't quite get the funny bits in there. When I started watching all the things going on in her life and her friends' lives and her Mom's life I started seeing all these pressures they were under. And they would open up to me. So we decided to write about the real stuff which was more compelling than anything we could make up."
The resulting story is indeed a compelling examination of the complex pressures on a teenage girl, and also on her mother. The active involvement of Reed, both behind and in front of the camera, as well as 13-year-old Wood in the central role of Tracy, lend the film a real sense of credibility. Both young actors give energised and wholly believable performances. Through Wood and Reed, Hardwicke expresses not only the danger of the girls' behaviour but also the excitement of being young and being bad - the exhilaration they feel when they steal a woman' purse is palpable. In another, beautifully filmed scene, the drugged-up teenagers run around a playing field after dark and are drenched by the sprinkler system.
Some may find the frank portrayal of sex unsettling - the episode where the girls jump Tracy's twenty-something neighbour (Kip Pardue) like some deranged teen-sex tag-team, for example. However Hardwicke avoids the kind sensationalism of underage sex seen in films like Larry Clark's Kids, and instead exposes the forces at play on her young protagonist - Tracy is influenced by the media pressure to be sexually attractive, peer pressure to be sexually active, as well as her own growing curiosity about sex - and the tone of the film is one of concern rather than judgement.
Similarly Hardwicke makes us revise our judgement of her characters throughout the film. Tracy's dislike of Mel's boyfriend is initially presented as selfishness, but in one vivid and frightening moment we are made to see him through the 13-year-old's eyes. Tracy glimpses Brady (Jeremy Sisto) through a doorway and has a flashback to seeing him in the middle of a wide-eyed binge when she was younger. And yet we're also encouraged to like Brady, who is shown to be kind and supportive. The complexity of the film's characters was important to Hunter: "the movie doesn't stand in judgement on any of its characters, even my character's boyfriend. You kind of like the guy even though he's very damaged and broken, and a practising addict. You see that he has an ability and a desire to love, and I think that's true of all the characters. It makes it difficult to categorise these people and stand in judgement on them. And you can more or less see yourself in each of the character's situations." This reservation of judgement also extends to the 'bad girl' of the piece, Evie, who is selfish and manipulative but ultimately shown to be badly neglected.
Holly Hunter's moving performance as Tracy's mother likewise draws our sympathy and is central to the success of the film. When we first see Melanie, she is busy getting ready to go out for the evening, but pauses to listen to a poem Tracy has written at school, and promises to find time to discuss it with her later. Juggling the demands of children, friends, work and money, Mel is under pressure, but she is holding everything together and manages to keep a smile on her face. She appears solid and reliable, a model 'make-do' American mom, who runs a hair salon in her home and modifies Tracy's clothes to help her keep up with new styles her friends seem able to afford. But as her daughter's behaviour spins out of control, we learn that this surface is brittle - that Mel is terrified of breaking under the pressure that surrounds her as a mother, and as a recovering addict. With small inflections of incomprehension and concern Hunter conveys the pain Mel feels as she sees her sensitive and affectionate little girl turning into a stranger. Whilst Tracy was once keen to have her mother's approval of her poem, her attitude towards Mel becomes increasingly provocative and dismissive.
Hardwicke and Reed's script has a great ring of authenticity, with dialogue full to the brim with casual cruelty and teenage petulance. In one scene Mel is berated by Tracy, in front of Evie, for coming in to the bedroom whist she is changing. Mel gives a hurt little laugh and asks "am I not allowed to see your body anymore?" and Tracy snaps back "no". As the film goes on Hunter allows us to glimpse more of Mel's own vulnerability, and of the quietly escalating panic behind her motherly pragmatism. Hunter explains how she prepared herself for the role: "The feeling that the movie evokes is exactly what the script evoked as well. It has a sense of emergency, and on the page it had that same kind of urgent, uncensored, very detailed description going on. What I try to do when I act is think a lot, an awful lot, before I show up on the set. And then I try not to think at all when she [Hardwicke] says action. I really want to just obey my own impulses when the camera is rolling." Hunter's natural and instinctive acting style is apparent in the film's climatic episode. Having fought with Tracy, a physically drained and passive Mel is undressed by Brady and put in the shower. She is naked and weak, and it is the moment in which we fully understand the powerlessness Mel is feeling.
It is unfortunate that a film co-written by a 13-year-old, about 13-year-olds and staring a 13-year-old has been rated 18. This will of course act as a warning of the serious subjects - including self-harm and drug abuse - depicted in the film. And there's certainly enough sex, drugs, violence and shopping to keep most self-disrespecting teenaged girl entertained. But the certificate seems somewhat excessive for a film that, for all its depiction of excess, carries a strong cautionary message for an age group who will now be unlikely to see it. As Evan Rachel Wood says, "Thirteen is a movie that really holds a mirror up to your face if you're that age. it will open a lot of teenagers' and parents' eyes to what kids are going through today. It's good for people to see how someone like Tracy gets to rock bottom and how she has to finally make a choice: can I get my life together or will I stay lost forever?"
Elizabeth Griffin
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