One knows a film works when it has stuck with you long after you leave the theater, and right after watching Short Term 12 at SXSW this year I knew it would be in that category, which is why I wrote my glowing review. I’ve longed to talk to both the director and star of the film since March, and I recently got my opportunity with the film currently in theaters and expanding over the next few months. While most of our conversation was fairly brief, we got in-depth on two key moments in the film that, despite a lot of context here, can definitely be considered a spoiler. As always, I’ve noted those moments so you can go into this film relatively fresh. Read on to enjoy the conversation.
The Film Stage: You’ve mentioned you’ve worked in a short term care facility, similar to the place in the film it self. It’s been a decade or so?
Destin Cretton: Yeah, I worked there between 2002 and 2004.
I’m curious if you took some of the conflicts you saw during your time or did you update some of them?
A lot of my own experiences are implanted directly into the film, for sure. I connect personally and I have specific experiences that connect personally with most of the characters in the movie. But it’s also a mixture of other interviews I did with other staff members and other stories that I’ve been collecting. So, yeah we definitely tried to update it to a certain extent. To be honest, a lot of the stories that I experienced while I was there and while I was talking to other staff, the stories are very similar.
Larson has said she didn’t really have a traditional audition. She mainly just talked to you and convinced you she was the woman for this role. Are you eager to have an experience in casting like this?
It really depends on the actor. I was convinced with Brie by looking at her reel, same with John Gallagher Jr. As a director I totally understand that you need the traditional casting, but it can be really misleading. You could easily miss somebody who just isn’t very good at an audition, but once you get them on set…
Can you talk about your working relationships with your films and if you foresee any future collaborations?
There really is not an actor that I’ve worked with that I wouldn’t work with again. All the actors in I’m Not a Hipster are incredible and all the actors in Short Term 12 are incredible and I’d love to work with Brie again and I’d love to work with John again. Can I tell you how inspiring it is to see the words you have written come out of their mouth and be so convincing? It’s just such an inspiring thing. At the same time, I’m not very good at forcing and if a character aligns with one of them, I’d jump at the opportunity. I don’t think I’m very good at working out a story because I want to work with an actor.
I’ve read that you teach, part-time, a high school film class. I’m curious if you’ve pulled any of the more promising kids on to your own production, or even felt that inclination?
I had some of my kids working on my previous feature, but our schedules just didn’t align because we were shooting during the school year for this one. So they weren’t able to come on set, but they were definitely involved. We did a behind-the-scenes video to take back to them. I had everyone talk about their job and had the DP explain what he was doing, just so they could learn the process. I still teach ever other week at a high school in San Diego, which is my favorite thing that I do. It reminds me of why I love making movies.
Potential spoilers:
Two of the key moments in the film is the rap, which one of the foster care kids does and then there’s also the octopus story and I’m curious how much of that came from you. Did you write the rap? How much of the drawings and the story was you?
Those are very key moments in the film and they are probably the moments in the writing process I was most afraid of and I procrastinated around them a lot, because they are very key moments in the movie where a character has to reveal something about themselves. But all the characters in the movie are intrinsically non-communicative and the last thing that they want to do is spill their guts about the things that happened to them. It was really a challenge to have them express the hard things that happened to them in the past, but basically the rap was inspired by an experience that I had when I was working at a place and it was very similar to the scene in the movie, where I sat down next to him and he just wanted to share some of his lyrics he’d been working on. I got the feeling that he was processing all of these things through these lyrics and it was very moving for me, so that’s where that came from. There’s always a little debate between who wrote the rap, between Keith [Stanfield], the actor, and I. Because I wrote the first version of the rap, basically setting the template and I told the story that I wanted to tell through that moment. Then Keith took that and made it cool, made it real and a lot more raw. [laughs]
The octopus story was just another one of those moments where the Jayden character would never come right out and say it. That story was just something that came out of the writing process and the art that was made for the story was something I worked with an artist in San Francisco, David Fernandez. It was inspired by a lot internal things we were looking at and art that was used by people to express difficult times in their lives. A lot of the back and forth between David and I was making the art more expressive and dirty and imperfect and that’s what we ended up with it. It’s also a story and the art is supposed to be from a 16-year-old brain. That’s where it all came from.
I think you definitely got that across, both of those sequences are beautiful. So, you definitely hit it out of the park.
I will say, just briefly, that the reason that those scenes were hit out of the park is clearly because of those performances and those actors. If you did pick a different person for either of those scenes at all… I’m just really thankful to those performers.
Short Term 12 is now in limited release and expanding. Check out a 40-minute interview with Cretton, Gallagher Jr. and Larson below recently held at Film Society at Lincoln Center.