MOVIES ; Director’s Strategy: Point and Clique
By TENLEY WOODMAN
Academy Award-nominated director Nanette Burstein went back to school for her documentary “American Teen,” in theaters today.
The New York City-based filmmaker, who earned an Oscar nod for “On the Ropes,” her 1999 film about a group of young boxers, brought her camera to Warsaw, Ind., to follow the lives of five high school seniors.
“I didn’t want to do this really dark movie – `look at where our teenagers are today’ – because what I discovered is they really aren’t that different from how I was,” said Burstein, 38. “Some things have changed, technology has changed and made things more vicious and crazier and amped up, but the general emotional issues at the core are still the same.”
The shoot was a challenge from the start, as she had difficulty finding a school that would give her access to students.
“It wasn’t so much Indiana, but the Midwest that I was interested in. I think there is a timelessness and an innocence there,” said the Buffalo-raised New York University graduate. “I wanted it to be in a town with only one high school so you couldn’t escape from whatever social status you had or you embraced.”
Burstein, a high school student in the 1980s, found inspiration in the teen film genre from the decade.
“It wasn’t so much `The Breakfast Club’ that was conscious. Definitely I grew up on John Hughes movies, and find that there are certain archetypes that I was looking for that exist in teen films. To a certain extent he sort of set the trend and you see these four or five story lines over and over again, and they exist in real life,” she said. “Often in fiction films they tend to be very one- dimensional. What I wanted to do was to take all the stories we have seen or experienced ourselves and seen on the big screen in this cliched way, and make it much more complicated.”
– twoodman@bostonherald.com
Originally published by By TENLEY WOODMAN.
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