Long earlier than Euphoria, there was Thirteen.
Catherine Hardwicke’s R-rated slice-of-life drama about an honors pupil (Evan Rachel Wood) whose relationship along with her mom (Holly Hunter) is put to the take a look at when a brand new pal (Nikki Reed) introduces her to intercourse, medicine and petty crime surprised audiences when it debuted on the Sundance Film Festival in early 2003 and subsequently launched in theaters 20 years in the past Sunday.
“I like elevating things,” Hardwicke (Twilight, Mafia Mamma) tells us in a latest interview. “I wanted you to feel how the hormones are raging and what it feels like to be a kid when everything matters.”
Hardwicke was a prolific manufacturing designer working with the likes of Cameron Crowe, Richard Linklater and David O. Russell within the Nineties and early 2000s when she teamed with Reed — then 14, and the daughter of an ex-boyfriend — to write the script for Thirteen in solely six days. “We really tried to [show] what it felt like to be a teenager, and just going through all the crazy pressures from the outside world,” Hardwicke says.
But whereas Euphoria, the Emmy-winning sensation starring Zendaya that provides an typically heavy and jarring depiction of latest feminine teendom, was produced with the backing of the hit-making community HBO, Hollywood was much more cautious of comparable content material when Hardwicke and Reed shopped their script round city twenty years in the past.
“I mean, every studio and every financier said, ‘No, we can’t make it. How could we make a movie that’s gonna be R-rated with an unknown 13-year-old girl in the lead?’ Everybody said no,” Hardwicke says.
The movie was in the end produced with a finances of about $2 million, which Hardwicke raised by way of impartial fairness financing. It was shot in Los Angeles over 24 days.
“We made it by hook or crook, you know? And for no money. I got paid three bucks the whole time. But when we finally made it, people were like, ‘Oh, it’s powerful. It’s moving. It’s relevant in a way to what people are going through.’”
After the movie premiered to raves and a directing award for Hardwicke on the Sundance Film Festival, Fox Searchlight acquired the movie and finally set it for theatrical launch on Aug. 20, 2003. It in the end earned over $10 million, scored bravura opinions (“An emotionally wrenching, not to mention terrifying, film about the perils of being a teenager,” reads the essential consensus of Rotten Tomatoes’s 81 p.c approval ranking) and heaps of honors, together with Oscar and BAFTA nominations for Hunter, SAG nominations for Wood and Hunter and an Independent Spirit Award win for Reed.
“That’s my little baby,” Hardwicke says now of the movie. “You know, I saw what Nikki Reed was going through at 13… Holly Hunter, Evan Rachel Wood, their performances are still so strong if you watch it now because they put their hearts into it. They felt it. They lived it on the day. So I love that film.”
And it’s nonetheless resonating with teenagers right this moment, the filmmaker says.
“Even now on TikTok, there’s like 1.6 billion interactions with Thirteen. People are seeing clips and they’re writing in the comments, ‘That happened to me last week with my mom.’ So because it was quite honest and had real emotions, it’s still relevant to a lot of people.”
Hardwicke and Reed reunited 5 years in the past when the director forged the actress as vampire Rosalie Hale in The Twilight Saga. But the pair have lengthy mentioned persevering with The Thirteen Saga.
“We have talked about [it], I talk to Nikki a lot,” Hardwicke says. “We really wanna do a TV series where we see other 13-year-old girls: Thirteen Afghanistan, Thirteen Detroit. You know, let’s see how other 13-year-old girls are navigating their transition into adulthood.”
Thirteen is on the market to stream on Apple TV.
Discussion about this post