She was an American teen, too
Director-writer's film chronicles high school life
Nanette Burstein admits that high school was tumultuous for her. When she left for a junior year abroad in Spain, she was the popular girl. She came back for senior year a free-thinking bohemian.
"I wasn't in the closed world of my high school anymore; it really changed who I was," says Burstein, 38, of living a continent away from what she calls the pressure-filled caste system of high school in Buffalo. "Ultimately, it's what made me decide to be a filmmaker," she says.
To borrow the personas from her latest documentary, "American Teen," which opens locally Friday, she left a Megan and came back a Hannah.
Hannah (real-life last name: Bailey) is the protagonist of Burstein's tale of universal high school woe, timed to the rhythm and rituals of a senior year in Warsaw, Ind. Hannah paints, plays guitar in Battle of the Bands, and wants to move to California and make films. She worries about the distraction of boyfriends, but falls hard and fast anyway. When she tells her parents on screen that she doesn't want their life, audiences stand and applaud. (At least they did at this year's Sundance Film Festival, where the film earned Burstein a directing award.)
In "American Teen," Hannah's story unfolds alongside that of Megan (Krizmanich), the reigning princess. Jake (Tusing) is the nerdy boy, desperate for a girlfriend; Colin (Clemens) is the scholarship-seeking basketball star.
If the teens sound archetypal, it's because they are. So much so that the movie poster casts them in their parallel identities from "The Breakfast Club" - a film that a 13-year-old Burstein adored in 1983. And while critics have had a love-hate response to "American Teen" for this precise pairing - calling it enormously entertaining on one hand, slickly packaged and reminiscent of MTV's "The Hills" on the other - there's more to the story.
Burstein didn't find Hannah and company in a stack of 8-by-10 talent agency glossies. She traveled to 10 different high schools in Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania and interviewed every entering senior who expressed interest in participating in her intensive shooting schedule: daily for 10 months. On average, about 40 percent of every class turned out, she says.
Warsaw Community High met Burstein's criteria for a representative high school. It was located in the Midwest, in a one high-school town, ("so the kids could not escape the social situation," says Burstein), and it had the most crucial element: willing participants - not just administrators, teachers, or vengeful custodians, but also the kids.
"My friends and I were really into movies but I hadn't heard of Nanette," Hannah says, moments before her dad saw the film for the first time at the
Burstein set out to shoot over one school year, following as many as 15 students with a small camera and a one- to three-person crew. Some scenes, like establishing shots of Hannah looking over the river, or moments with actions and instantaneous reactions in multiple locales - like Megan sending a gossip e-mail to the entire school - were staged. Burstein believes the set-up vs. candid shots are easy to tell apart. "The more spontaneous shots are handheld," Burstein explains. She used a tripod for the set-ups.
Burstein cut the 95-minute "American Teen" from more than 1,000 hours of footage. "You shoot scenes for one hour and edit them down to a minute," she says, likening editing to sculpting.
For her first two feature films, Burstein shared directing responsibilities with one-time boyfriend Brett Morgen. "We really saw eye to eye," says Burstein, noting their story interests gravitated more toward "the pathos of real people" than politics.
Their first collaboration, an in-depth character study of three Bedford-Stuyvesant boxers titled "On the Ropes," was nominated for a 2000 Academy Award for best documentary. After its success, she and Morgen "got offered the same jobs." And though the romance fizzled, ("We fought a lot more," she says) they worked together again on "The Kid Stays in the Picture," which tackled the most Hollywood of subjects: the life of infamous producer Robert Evans, as told by Robert Evans.
So professionally speaking, Burstein is single for the first time as the writer/director/producer/editor of "American Teen." "I like working on my own, making my own decisions," she says.
The idea for "American Teen" had been dogging her for years. In college, she was captivated by "Seventeen," an intimate cinema verite doc about high schoolers in Muncie, Ind.; from then on, she wanted to make her own version of "the ultimate teen film." But studios were wary of marketing feature docs to teens, so she also pitched "American Teen" as a television series. Still no takers. Finally, she secured funding for her established genre, but just to scout characters and locations.
Incidentally, "American Teen" was the first of her three films, all of which premiered at Sundance, that didn't arrive with secure distribution, a process Burstein calls "terrifying." But soon enough the film was at the center of a bidding war, was one of the few to sell at Sundance in 2008, and was one of a handful of documentaries this year to get the ooh-ah treatment normally reserved for fictional feature films: the coveted theatrical release.
The young subjects of "American Teen" also reaped the benefit of studio support: They spent the summer in LA interning and helping to promote the film. Hannah's involvement went even further, igniting filmmaking hopes of her own. "Before this, I liked documentaries but I didn't realize their impact, or what it takes to make one: how dedicated you have to be, or what moments make a film so great."
"American Teen" catches the kids in vulnerable moments (cheating on boyfriends, vandalizing houses, breaking up by text message), a fact that Burstein attributes to a documentary tradition of total immersion. But Burstein also genuinely liked her subjects. "It would be hard for me to gain trust if I was disingenuous," she says.
Hannah says that Burstein would often show up without a camera and they would talk, "not as a filmmaker or director, but as a close friend or big sister or role model. She'd tell me, 'Stick with it, stay in the game, and graduate please.' "
At one point during production, Burstein says, "I worried [Hannah] would go down a potentially harmful road." She encouraged her to see a psychologist.
Hannah didn't want to let Burstein down. She says, "When you're in high school and you have trouble with your boyfriend or girlfriend, you feel like you are the only one, it can be really lonely. [Nanette] was there to say, 'It's normal, but look where I am now. I went through the exact same thing; I had the same reservations and qualms.' "
So is documentary filmmaking in Hannah's future? "You could say I'm leaning in that direction," she says.
Burstein says her next project is fiction. 