Popular Mechanics

Catherine Hardwicke on the “alluring, but toxic” cool kids in Thirteen.

by Cindy Fuchs

"I wanted to be an observer and documenter, and let things get stirred up and get people to talk about it." Words tend to tumble when Catherine Hardwicke starts talking. In her sundress and long blond braids (that look comfortable rather than flawless, like her girlfriend did them), she looks bright and breathless, not unlike the subjects of her first feature, Thirteen.

Focused on the frankly gnarly experiences of a couple of seventh-grade girls in L.A., Tracy (Evan Rachel Wood) and Evie (Nikki Reed), the film is both raw and melodramatic. Co-written by Hardwicke and the then 13-year-old Reed, the script is, in the director's words, "tight, not because of the now famous six-day writing spree, but because it started out 15 pages longer."

On learning she would have a budget of $1.5 million or less, Hardwicke started cutting, which she calls "my favorite thing: if there's anything that could be on the chopping block, then it should be." And when she decided to send the script to Holly Hunter, Hardwicke thought, "I'd better do a little work on the mom," as the first version had adults looking like "two-dimensional villains," from a 13-year-old's perspective.

Hardwicke sees her tale as cautionary, not accusatory. "I don't think that Britney's bad, she's doing what she wants to do," she says. Still, Hardwicke says, "a 12-year-old girl will wear a pink rhinestone T-shirt that says å69' or åporn star' on it. We embrace super-bad, slutty-looking girls." The problem is not "bad kids," but a culture that "gives a confusing message: You should not be thinking about sex, but there's a huge Calvin Klein billboard with a stuffed package. How do you navigate? Even if you don't want to care about your ass or your boobs, you have to, all of a sudden."

To make a movie that explored how "girls feel their power," Hardwicke turned away from her own "Welcome to the Dollhouse outcast story," to look instead at "the popular kids, the gorgeous kids." Their story, she insists, "is much more complex than you see in Clueless. I see Evie as a survivor, one of those kids who's so alluring, but toxic. If you're going to be around that kind of friend, it's going to be fun, but you don't know where you're going to end up."

This friendship leads to experiments with sex, drugs, drinking and multiple piercings. After they practice kissing each other, the girls pursue sex with black and Hispanic boys. Hardwicke explains, "Rappers and black guys are the coolest guys for Nikki. I didn't want to demonize any boys. The girls instigate; they're more aggressive. We've seen 100 movies where the guys attack someone, but this is what Nikki and her friends are involved in."

That the film includes such explicit material means, as Hardwicke puts it, that kids "can live it but they can't see it. If you say the F-word more than twice in a movie, in a nonsexual way, or a kid drinks beer, it's rated R. We couldn't make a movie about this subject without those things, so we went for it." Encouraging young people to see the film with older siblings and friends, or parents, she calls Thirteen "cinematherapy, a neutral ground for talking points."

-- Respond to this article in our Forums -- click to jump there