Have you ever spent a lazy Saturday afternoon watching endless reruns of True Life or Made on MTV? Ever felt that they never really “got” the high school experience? MTV misses the most authentic, the most embarrassing and, most importantly, the funniest aspects of the real high school experience. Right? This summer, a documentary that really “gets” high school is heading to theaters.
American Teen follows four very different high school seniors through their final year at Warsaw Community High School in Warsaw, Indiana. (Think of a better, artsier version of True Life: I’m a High School Senior.) The film was a huge success at this year’s Sundance Film festival, and it hits theaters July 25. I sat down with the Academy Award-nominated director, Nanette Burstein (On the Ropes), for a few questions about her film.
NBN: In regards to American Teen, how did the project come along to you? Was it an idea you came up with?
Burstein: It was an idea I came up with. I actually had wanted to do a high school film for a long time. You know, high school for me was a significant time in my life, like it is for many people. You’ll find that you’ll refer to it often in your head as years go by. So, for personal reasons, I really wanted to make a film about that part of life. I feel like a lot of fictional films have been really one-dimensional, which is not only making a film about clichés, but making the clichés more cliché. I felt that there could be this strong documentary about what teenagers go through which could be both entertaining and poignant.
You touched on it briefly just there, but nowadays you’ll see something along the same lines as American Teen on MTV almost every day. How do you feel this is different from a show like True Life or Made?
Well with True Life, there are cards every other second because they can’t shoot for very long. They film for two weeks, and they can pull a show out of it. This is something where you can film for an entire year and just have such a raw, intimate story about teenagers’ lives, and it can be funny and willed with a lot of humor, which you don’t usually see on TV. True Life is a good TV show, but that’s what it is.
Why Warsaw, Indiana? Was there a specific reason for you?
Not that particular town. I wanted to do it about somewhere in the Midwest because I feel there is a timelessness about that part of the country. I wanted to be in a town with only one high school because I wanted that social pressure, I wanted it to be economically mixed and I wanted it to be racially mixed, but I really couldn’t find that in a lot of small towns in the Midwest, and the school needed to cooperate. I found ten schools which fit the bill. I interviewed all the incoming seniors who were interested and Warsaw had the best stories.
Would you mind talking about casting a little bit? I saw some of the casting videos on the Facebook group for the film.
So I went to each of these schools, I had all the students who were interested — which was about 35 percent of the class — show up, which was not a small amount because they are pretty big school[s], so I had 100 or 200 kids. They fill out a ten-page questionnaire, and then I would ask them questions about themselves based on what I read in the questionnaire. I was really looking for teenagers from different social cliques and different social classes, but that surprised me. You can have this queen bee, so to speak, who in TV and fiction films is one way, and have her have this family pressure and her own pressure. Despite how it may look for her friends, she’s got her own demons. [I looked for] those characteristics and other people who really just had a strong story to follow.
Was it hard to get these real high school seniors to be natural on camera for you?
Yeah, it definitely takes some time. That’s the advantage of being there for an entire school year. For the first couple months it’s weird, but after a few months they started acting completely natural and trusting me, and that helped a lot.
This is really a question out of my own curiosity, but you caught a crime on camera. Did the school come to you?
No, they didn’t. They didn’t come to me. Thank God. She got caught pretty quick, and admitted to it. She didn’t try to deny it. Vandalizing did happen all the time in the town, so it wasn’t unusual. It didn’t feel unusual. The word she put on the house was a pretty heavy word to use, definitely loaded, but the toilet papering was a common occurrence. So it didn’t start as feeling like a big deal and just spiraled into one.
There were several animation sequences in the film. What led to your decision to feature those?
I think out of anyone in high schools’ lives there is a lot of wishful thinking. I wish I could get that guy or get into that school or make that team. A lot of it always doesn’t come true, but it’s a lot of your interlife. The only way to usually learn about that in a documentary is to watch someone talk about it which doesn’t really animate what they are thinking. It’s their dream, their fantasy, their nightmare. You can really vividly show what is happening to them.
What would you hope for teens to take away from this film?
I hope they find it funny. That they laugh and cry. That maybe they can see themselves in a movie the way they haven’t seen themselves in a TV show or movie. That they say, “Wow. This really speaks to what I went through or what I’m going through now.”
And for parents?
I think it can mean a lot to parents too. You know since you’re a teenager that you kind of cut your parents off and don’t always show them what’s going on. There is sort of a Lord of the Flies existence that happens in high school. I think that parents are infinitely curious as to what is actually going on with their teenagers and they fear the worst. They think it’s worse than it actually is. I think this is a very enlightening view of teenagers for parents that are dying to know what is happening.