CraveOnline: Would doing more complicated setups have gotten in the way of some of the acting?
Destin Daniel Cretton: It would have given us less time for sure. Some of the scenes don’t work for the first couple takes and then we have to stop and talk about it with the actors and figure something else out. Having the ability to just change things up, working with certain actors like Brie is very instinctual. Sometimes I like to encourage those instincts to play. Sometimes she’ll have an instinct to walk somewhere else that we weren’t planning on shooting and hopefully the lighting is okay, but Brett’s able to follow her.
The other thing I love about it, especially for this movie, is when you watch it you’re not only watching the instincts of the actors, you’re also watching the instincts of Brett in certain moments. You see his instincts play out in terms of viewing what the actors are doing and responding with the camera in a certain way. I think the best example in Short Term is the push in that he did during the rap that the Marcus character does that kind of ends right on his eye. That was something instinctual that Brett was feeling in that moment that turns it into a very beautiful moment.
What is an example of a scene that maybe didn’t work the first time, and by working through it you got to where it is in the movie?
One scene was between Grace and Mason. For whatever reason, the way that I’d written it at the time we were shooting just wasn’t working. We tried it a few times and then threw the script out the window, tried to improvise through it and then came back to the script. That was one of the few scenes that we rescheduled and shot again, like a day or two later. I sat down with Brie and John and we just worked through it together. They had been in their characters for quite a while. It was a little later in the shoot so we were just able to talk through how they feel like those characters would express the things that needed to be expressed. Then I rewrote it and then we came back to it and it felt a lot better the next time.
How competitive were the auditions for Grace?
Not very. We just offered it to Brie and she said yes. We didn’t audition Brie. We offered it to her based on watching her reel and then having one Skype conversation between the two of us. By the end of that Skype conversation, I couldn’t have been more excited to have her play Grace.
How about Kaitlyn Dever for Jayden?
Kaitlyn did audition. We saw quite a few people for that role but she came in. She has an incredible ability with subtlety that’s hard to find, especially young actors in L.A. When she came in and auditioned, she was the first one to completely, I’d been hearing the words over and over with so many people, when she auditioned I forgot that I had written those words. I was just there with her. I was in tears by the end of her audition so that’s a pretty easy choice to make.
What are you doing next?
Right now I’m adapting a novel called The Glass Castle that’s really, really fun, very meaningful, personal project for me. Even though it’s a memoir by a wonderful writer named Jeanette Walls, her story when I read it, it was so personal and close to me that it feels just as personal as anything I’ve made so I feel very lucky to be a part of it.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever and The Shelf Space Awards. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
