Years earlier than “Euphoria,” director Catherine Hardwicke had the teenage milieu locked down together with her movie, 13.
The drama centered on honors scholar Evan Rachel Wooden, who meets a brand new buddy (Nikki Reed) who flip her on to a world of intercourse, medicine, and petty crime. That exams Wooden’s relationship together with her mom, Holly Hunter.
The movie debuted on the Sundance Movie Competition in early 2003 and celebrates its twentieth anniversary on Sunday.
“I like elevating things,” Hardwicke (Twilight, Mafia Mamma) stated in a Yahoo! Leisure 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 when she teamed with Reed — then 14, and the daughter of an ex-boyfriend — to write down the script for 13 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.
Hollywood within the early 2000s was nervous when Hardwicke and Reed shopped their script.
“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 ultimately produced with a funds of about $2 million, which Hardwicke raised via 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.’”
Fox Searchlight acquired the movie and it in the end earned greater than $10 million, thank to rave critiques. Oscar and BAFTA nominations adopted for Hunter, SAG nominations for Wooden and Hunter, and an Unbiased 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.”
Teenagers right now nonetheless relate, 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.”
