Short Term 12 won the Narrative Feature and Audience Award at SXSW, then went on to break hearts at the Maui Film Festival and Los Angeles Film Festival. Brie Larson stars as Grace, a foster care worker who leads the staff in dealing with emotional foster kids, and we come to learn she and her boyfriend come from the system as well. We got to speak with Larson by phone when she was in New York promoting the film. The call went on for 26 minutes and they might have let us keep going. We certainly had plenty to discuss about Short Term 12. It opens in theaters this weekend, and you can currently see Larson in The Spectacular Now and coming up again in Don Jon this fall.
CraveOnline: I don’t mean to diminish any of your other roles, but is this the role you’ve been waiting for?
Brie Larson: Yes, in a lot of ways, yes. I’m extremely particular about the things that I sign on to do and the things that I believe in. I think it’s really rare and an extreme honor to be entrusted with this story and with Grace. It’s really powerful and it’s awesome to have the opportunity to play a character that through the entire film is a hard working, strong woman.
When you read it, did you know you could go to all the places it would require?
No, it was a whole process of trust over and over again every day with every scene, but my philosophy going into it was that I had to put all of my trust into [director] Destin [Cretton], and into Brett [Pawlak] our DP, that what was happening, what was being actually captured within the screen looked the way that it needed to look. My job was just to be completely honest, like brutally honest with myself. You understand the characters. I spent a lot of time developing her, shadowing in a foster care facility, spending time talking with the kids, doing improvs with them, understanding the kids’ boundaries. Then you take all of that structure and you use it and let go of it completely and understand that how I felt was honest for me at that two o’clock on a Tuesday might be completely different than how I felt on a Thursday at six o’clock, but they’re all coming from the same place and they’re all honest and they’re all within the multi-faceted nature of a human being.
Speaking of the multi-faceted nature, how can Grace be so warm towards other people and especially the kids, when she’s hurting so much inside?
There’s a few things that I feel about that. I think that every human, I’m sure you can relate as well to it being much easier to parent and mother and put love towards other people and see the good in other people. We don’t recognize or see it in ourselves. We might understand the concepts but it’s really hard for us to fully embrace it and say to ourselves, for whatever reason, “I’m worthy of being loved. I’m a good person.” How do you quantify that? How do you prove that to yourself? I think that’s a really hard thing to do and something that I started to learn through the process of the film, of just letting go and believing that I was even worthy of being the lead in a film was another form of learning that I can let good things in.
Then the other side of it is when you want to just not really be a human, you think that the pain is too painful and it’s easier to just try and work through it. She keeps thrusting herself back into the work, and in my own way I believe that she’s kind of passed herself off. She’s like oh, I’m broken, I’m screwed up but these kids won’t be and I’ll fix them. So every time something comes up for her that should be a call to action for herself, she just puts it back into the kids and that every time she puts it into the kids, it just becomes this glaring mirror that these kids are her and they are the same and there’s things to learn from them and that their pain is her pain and you as the audience are to realize that too, as in that her stories are the same as theirs and that they feel the same thing. That becomes an exterior way for her to be able to look at herself and take accountability for her pain.
Is that where her ferocity for the kids comes out, when she really fights for them?
Yeah, I always felt like as I was doing it, that she was really fighting for these kids but she’s also fighting for herself. It’s her way of trying to save the world, in a world that’s really impossible for one person to save. I don’t think that she realizes it at the time but it’s through time that that fight becomes for herself and I think she realizes that you have to help yourself in order to be a strong figure for the kids.
It fascinated me the protocols they developed for dealing with the kids when they got emotional. Are those protocols sort of futile because nothing is going to heal those wounds?
Well, it depends. These are things that I think line staff that are on the floor with these kids ask themselves all the time. Actually, there’s a woman who came to the screening last night who was really upset about the film. It really moved her because she said, “The movie just brings up for me what I’m doing every day, which is why am I doing this? It’s so hard and there’s so few lights at the end of the tunnel, why do I do it?” But I think that all of them and hopefully the film will get more eyes on this issue, that we can kind of start to look at it and realize that the issue is a love issue. I think that it can happen if we’re all more open to it, more understanding of it.
There are cases where they come out at the end of it. They come out find and those are the people that end up working in the foster care facility again. It’s a very common thing, just like Grace and Mason who were in the system themselves, to then want to provide for that system and can relate to those kids in another way.
I think that’s what makes it such great drama. Maybe in some cases the kids need to go through those dark moments to get to another side. Grace’s job is to let it happen in some cases.
Yeah, yeah. It is about dealing with it. It’s about not suppressing it but letting it out and then being able to look at it and say, “Okay, where is this coming from? How do I deal with it?” And you can’t just write off anybody just because of a past experience that they have. Scientifically we can change our genetic code so why can’t that happen with these kids.
