THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT

DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKER NANETTE BURSTEIN ON AMERICAN TEEN

After profiling three boxing hopefuls from Brooklyn in On the Ropes and legendary film producer Robert Evans in The Kid Stays in the Picture, documentary filmmaker Nanette Burstein went back to school for her latest project. Filming daily for 10 months in the small, conservative town of Warsaw, Indiana, the result of her efforts is American Teen, which focuses on five students from different social groups trying to navigate their way through the pressures and expectations of an eventful senior year.

The numerous fantasies and memories the students express along the way are commonly represented through the use of animation. American Teen was a big hit at the Sundance Film Festival, winning the documentary competition’s directing award, and has been picked up by Paramount Vantage for national release. We recently talked to Burstein to get her insights on the making of the film and the reception it’s received.

Your three documentaries cover very different subjects. What about a subject makes you think, “I want to make a movie about this?”

The theme emerging from the subject matter has to be very personal to me. That’s what intrigues me in each documentary I’ve made. With On the Ropes and The Kid Stays in the Picture, the theme was pursuing a passionate goal in life against all odds. This film was very much about my own high school experience and the quest to figure out your identity at that age despite peer pressure, parental pressure and the mounting insecurity that you face.

When did you see the 1983 documentary Seventeen, and what about it gave you the inspiration for American Teen?

I saw it when I was in college at film school at NYU, and what inspired me was the intimacy the documentary was able to capture, how composed the 17-year-olds seemed on camera, which I think is very unusual for that age group. I think teenagers are preternaturally very suspicious and do not like to open up on camera, and the documentary was able to overcome that.

Were you surprised by the reaction your movie received at the Sundance Film Festival?

I was surprised. At that point I had never shown the film publicly in finished form. I had no idea what to expect, whether the response would be positive or negative, and there was such an overwhelmingly positive response to the film it was very gratifying.

You said in an interview in January that you’re always nervous about showing your work for the first time at Sundance. Now that you’ve won the directing award at Sundance’s documentary competition, do you see that changing?

No. I’ve had two successful films before, and it doesn’t make it any easier. Each film is a new challenge, and I’m deeply insecure about each project as it goes along, and maybe that’s a good thing because it makes me work harder. I never take success for granted.

You’ve said that in teen fiction films there are basically four or five archetypes. When you were choosing your subjects were you consciously looking for people who represented these archetypes?

Not necessarily. I was looking for students from different social cliques, different social classes, but more than anything I looked for students who surprised me, who had contradictions about their personalities, who on the surface seemed one way but are really very different. You had a kid like Jake (Tusing, an unpopular band member), who’s been absolutely tortured by his peers and always been turned down for dates, but rather than being an angry, bitter boy who stays in his room, he has incredible tenacity and continuously takes chances and asks girls on dates and seeks acceptance by his peers.

How do you think the use of animation to show the teenagers’ fantasies enhanced the film?

I think a lot of high school kids have a very rich and vivid inner life and a lot of time is spent with wishful thinking, so I really wanted to visualize that and incorporate it into the movie. Normally in a documentary you can’t do that except in a talking head interview, which isn’t very visceral. Animation seemed like the perfect vehicle because like your imagination it can be larger than life and very surreal.

What do you think of your movie being compared to The Breakfast Club?

I certainly understand the comparison. The Breakfast Club is one of the classic John Hughes movies that looked at different stereotypes and broke them down and showed the kids to be a lot more complex than their labels made them out to be, and certainly my film, even though it’s with real kids, it also breaks down these stereotypes and shows there’s a lot more to these kids than their labels suggest.

You’ve won six awards for your three documentaries. What would you say is the secret to your success?

Being able to tell a really strong narrative with strong character development and poignant themes. People often expect documentaries to be boring or to be merely educated by them, but real life is often richer than what you can invent in fiction. I tend to use a three-act narrative structure from fiction and apply that to real life in order to tell a compelling story.