Sundance vs. Slamdance, page 2
Your career took off at an amazing pace after film school. Then what happened? How did you get so profoundly disillusioned with the studios?
Ultimately, you lose your creative autonomy. You don't own your script, you're essentially a director for hire, which is the way things work at the studios. It was demoralizing and I left the business for several years because I had been so unhappy. But you put that behind you as best you can, and try to move on. And lo and behold, I did move on, I did return to this film business which I thought I would never return to. And in the case of "Welcome to the Dollhouse," I still was able to own my material, and so was able to retain creative autonomy. This is also a much smaller-scale film, with private investors involved instead of film industry people, so there was less...call it "back-seat driving."
The suburban adolescent's world view is so well-remembered in this film. Does seventh grade loom particularly large in your memories?
I think that time of life lives large somewhere in the minds of everyone. The source of the film really is the experience, observations and memories that I have, or things that friends of mine may have told me about their childhood, some sort of amalgamation of it all. Very often in films we see, this period of life is not treated with much reality -- we tend as adults to sentimentalize and sugarcoat this time of life. And I think it is a very critical passage we all had to go through, so we should look at it for what it is, and not as what we like to comfort ourselves with.
In your view, it seems, junior high is sort of a Darwinian jungle, where sheer survival is the only thing that matters. I love how the Weiner siblings never stick up for each other, but instead take advantage of each others' weak moments. That's how it was in my house.
It is a tough world and kids don't quite have the mechanisms in place that adults have for playing this game of survival. I think, in other words, they're much more boldfaced and much more direct. If they don't like something, they just say it, and there's some cruelty there. What interests me, however, is the way these kids struggle amid this cruel, difficult, horrible world, but still salvage moments of beauty, of grace, whatever you want to call it -- tenderness. It's that struggle that compels me as filmmaker. Just to say that it's a cruel world is not very interesting, and just to say that someone is a victim of this world is not very interesting. The persecutor and the persecuted live within each of us, I think, and it's that dynamic, that struggle that I like to investigate.
Heather Matarazzo, who plays Dawn, is a natural, a perfect fit for the role. Did you find her out in the wilds of Jersey?
No, I wish I had -- only because it's a better story if I could say that I found at her at Baskin Robbins at a mall in New Jersey. I did spend many weekends with my casting director looking for kids in malls, but ultimately she was submitted by her manager. This is her first feature film, so I can't say she had much in the way of experience, but as you see she made my job so much easier. If you have the right actor in the right role, it becomes very easy to direct.
When you have Branden, the school bully, threatening to rape Dawn, it's fairly harrowing. Or an 11-year-old talking about finger-fucking...
When we were casting, there were many kids who were eliminated once their parents read the script. Even though there's no sex, no nudity, no violence in this movie, it is rated R. And the movie is very unsettling in ways -- it's as if all that sex and violence is there, but not on any literal level. And I think adults and parents recognize this and so it's not a comforting film. But I hope that it's an engaging one for people, that people find it funny and even poignant.
I did -- I even thought that Dawn's sweet little kiss with Branden was kind of erotic.
That's out of your mouth, I'm not gonna say that, but I will say it's very tender -- and moving for me, because in fact it was Heather's very first one in real life as well. It really is a very special sort of coming together of these two characters, the two extremes of the class, one the bully and the other the persecuted and picked-on. And together they find a certain kind of bond with each other that I think is very unexpected -- and yet when it happens it seems very natural and very real.
