CraveOnline: How much of the feature film is the original short that you made first, and how did you expand it?
Destin Daniel Cretton: Thematically there’s a lot of similarities. The themes of messed up people trying to take care of messed up people, themes of just the idea of parenting and having influence over another human being’s life. The wonderful and grave consequences of that responsibility. So those themes are woven throughout the short and feature. The main difference is that the short is a male supervisor protagonist and the feature is obviously a female. Some of the young characters are similar. Keith Stanfield who plays Marcus is the one actor who came back for his same role. Other than that, everybody is quite different.
Why did you decide to make the change to a female protagonist?
It honestly was out of boredom or fear of redundancy just for my own personal sake. Initially I was trying to just expand the short but it just wasn’t working. It didn’t feel inspired. My two bosses when I was working at a place like this, I had two young female supervisors and they were both extremely good at what they did. When I started trying to see the story through a different pair of eyes, it became exciting and challenging for me again.
Is the short on the DVD and Blu-ray?
It is, yeah. We’ve got a lot of stuff on the DVD and Blu-ray. The short’s on there. We’ve got a ton of, I think they’re really good, deleted scenes that didn’t fit into the pacing of the final cut but will reveal even more layers of some of the different characters in the movie and I think they’re quite interesting.
Are there more deleted scenes with the kids and with the supervisors?
Yeah, you get little tastes of everybody. You learn a little bit more about Grace, you learn a little bit more about some of the kids, a little bit more about some of the staff. Just little pieces of people that were cut out of the movie.
What did you learn from doing your previous film, I Am Not a Hipster that helped you make Short Term 12?
Ah, I learned a lot. There are a lot of similarities between the two movies. Hipster is about a young man who’s also similar to Grace, learning to deal with something that he has not wanted to deal with for a while. It’s the death of his mom, a tragic thing that he just hasn’t been able to process, watching him go through a similar journey of getting to a place where he can start the process. On that level I was able to experiment with a lot of things that carried over thematically to Short Term.
I think more importantly, Hipster for me and for Brett [Pawlak] my DP and Joel [P. West] my composer, it was a movie where we were all extremely free to experiment because the budget was so low. Our motto for making a movie was to just try it and not worry about whether or not it worked or not. We got to get a lot of little things out of our system and see what works and what doesn’t, how far we can push things. It was a really fun process.
Both films have a documentary style approach to handheld cinematography. Do you need that kind of freedom to capture the kind of emotions you’re working with?
For me, on the budget that we’re working with, we did need that freedom. When you’re in smaller independent moviemaking and budgets, for me the main thing I’m wrestling against is time. With the amount of time that I have, my main concern is to have as much time with the actors actually rolling with the camera on the actors as possible. That’s where the initial aesthetic choices come from. Shooting handheld for our team allows us to go much faster than either putting it on sticks or working with a steadicam. We’re able to just move really quickly which allows us to put more focus on the acting. I don’t think I’ll always do handheld. We’ll see what happens next.
