I’ve been talking about Short Term 12 since it played the film festival circuit, came out theatrically and in my year-end 2013 lists. It was in my top 5 of my top 12 of 2013, and Brie Larson was my number one performance of the year. She plays Grace, a foster care supervisor dealing with the conflicts that arise on the floor of the foster center, while avoiding her own.
I spoke to Larson for the theatrical release, and now that Short Term 12 is out on Blu-ray and DVD as of January 14, I got to speak with director Destin Daniel Cretton by phone about the film that moved me so much.
CraveOnline: You definitely did not make one of those “important issue” movies. Do you share my distaste for those “important issue” movies?
Destin Daniel Cretton: [Laughs] We were very careful to not turn this into an issue movie. From the very beginning, from the time I was talking about it, talking to the actors about it, all of our focus was on the characters and the things that they are going through as opposed to the specific issues that were affecting them. In the same breath, my hope is, it has been happening with this movie, that the movie would be a starting point for a conversation for anybody who wants to talk about any of the issues that are a part of the story.
Was humor an important way of dealing with that balance also?
A lot of that came from my own experience working at a place like this and also from the interviews that I conducted with other people who have worked in places like this for much longer than me. Humor was a huge part of just survival and for certain supervisors who were really good at their job. They were able to use humor as a tool, a very specific tool. Whether it was self-deprecating humor in order to lighten the mood of somebody else, or any time there’s rising tensions, a perfectly placed joke could dissipate that tension. That was something that I was constantly finding in all of the stories that I was hearing from different people. That’s where the tone of the movie came from.
The other side of that is we really want movies to make us feel. Do you take that responsibility seriously?
Yeah, that balance is something that I’m really interested in because on the one hand, I don’t want cheap emotions in anything that I do. When I respond most to a story in a movie, it’s because I feel like the emotions are complicated and relatable and I feel like I’ve experienced some version of that in my life before. So on the one hand, I don’t want to dip into sentimentality. I try not to dip too deeply into inauthentic sentimentality but I also don’t want to create films that are afraid of exploring emotions because that’s also why I love watching movies. Finding the balance between fearlessly tackling emotional scenes but trying to tackle them in an honest, authentic, non manipulative way I think will be the goal of my life.
And when you succeed in making us feel, then you have to take good care of us.
And myself as well.
It’s fascinating they have these protocols for dealing with episodes the kids may have, but there’s really no right way to handle those. Does that make good drama?
I suppose. To me, the interesting thing about the whole situation is the fact that in a lot of ways it’s impossible to prepare somebody to really know exactly what to do in a situation with youth who are going through extreme things like this. Everybody is a human being. They’re not the same every time. When I was there, I trained for about a week or so before getting in there and I learned a lot and thought I knew it all. It was only a week so I don’t know why I thought that, but nothing could have prepared me for that first time a kid threw a chair across the room and hit the plexiglass window a few feet from my head. My heart started racing and I just forgot everything that I had learned. I suppose interesting stories blossom out of those kinds of situations.
Yes, if an abused child is upset, there’s no manual for “This is how you make him or her feel better.”
Yeah, there’s definitely a list of things you should not do, which the main character in our movie is quickly figuring out, which is really close to my own experience. But all the things that you are supposed to do sometimes work and sometimes don’t. I think the best supervisors understand that and they treat every situation as its own different specific situation.
