High school is a crazy, emotionally volatile time in a young person's life. Filmmaker Nanette Burstein (The Kid Stays in the Picture) was determined to capture this pivotal moment in her new documentary, American Teen, which generated a fair amount of buzz at this year's Sundance Film Festival.
Slick to the point of being borderline fluff, Burstein's look at five high school seniors in the small town of Warsaw, Ind., comes off like an extended, slightly more incisive episode of MTV's Real World. American Teen is perfectly "cast": There's Megan, the snotty, smart, attractive popular girl whose whole world is riding on getting into Notre Dame; there's Jake, the geeky outcast who spends all his time playing video games and dreaming of having a girlfriend; there's Hannah, the sharp, beautiful but emotionally troubled arty girl who yearns to transcend her fractured family's issues and attend film school on the West Coast; there's Mitch, the handsome, all-American guy who tests the bounds of his high school's rigid social structure; and there's Colin, the jock who's battling to win a college basketball scholarship at the detriment of his team's performance, a sin if there ever was one in the basketball-mad state of Indiana.
American Teen is the kind of documentary filmmaking that seems to willfully blur the line between reality and fiction. Animated sequences expand upon various characters' hopes and fears, and large portions of the deftly edited "live-action" footage feel staged.
But does that make it any less truthful? The philosophical/ethical debate about this type of approach — how much the filmmaker's/camera's presence influences the subjects' behavior and vice versa — will no doubt rage on. Meanwhile, the well-crafted, supremely entertaining American Teen will pass as genuine insight in a world where context is rapidly receding from view.
CityBeat recently spoke to Burstein about her process and the challenges of making a documentary on 21st-century teenagers.
CityBeat: Why Warsaw, Ind.?
Nanette Burstein: Honestly, I never even heard of Warsaw, Ind., before starting the process. Basically, I picked the Midwest because it's a huge part of the country, and there is a timelessness about that part of the country. Often in reality TV you see the West Coast or the East Coast depicted but not the Midwest. I wanted it to be a town that only had one high school because I thought it would be more of a social pressure-cooker.
CB: Were you looking for the well-known stereotypes: the geek, the jock, the popular girl?
NB: The stereotypes exist because they're real, and that is what you often find. I was looking for kids that had something to accomplish that year so there would be some kind of story that I could follow. I wanted kids that could surprise me — that would seem a certain way on the surface to their peers but who were a lot more complicated than that.
CB: We're in an age of transparency. With the advent of YouTube and Facebook and MySpace and reality TV, do you think it was easier for you to gain access to the kids' lives than it might have been even five years ago?
NB: I think so. There is a level of kids being comfortable with what we perceived as private before. But it's still a challenge: They're not used to sharing their life with the adult world because there's the assumption that Facebook and MySpace are just being checked out by their peers, which is not the case. But they are used to being more intimate and open now publicly. It's a different generation that way.
CB: How much do you think the cameras affected the kids' behavior?
NB: The struggle I had in the beginning was them filtering themselves on camera — never over-dramatizing their lives for the sake of the camera. Teenagers live a very dramatic existence. Everything is larger than life. They're bored, so they're causing a lot of drama. And they're very vulnerable and all those issues play out in the movie. If there was ever an inauthentic moment I would never include it in the movie. If anything, I had the opposite problem in the beginning of them filtering themselves and being stiff on camera and not really being who they really were. Eventually they got over it when they became much more comfortable with the process and me.
CB: In A.O. Scott's review of the film in The New York Times, he essentially says it's impossible to do a documentary like this without exploiting your subjects. What would you say to that?
NB: I don't think it's exploitative of them. I don't delve into their sexual lives. There are certain lines that you just don't cross. To say that you can't film anyone under 18 is a little odd to me, but I think there is a level of responsibility, absolutely.
CB: How did the kids react when they finally saw the film?
NB: They were all really happy with it. They all had some embarrassing moments or things they regretted, but they felt it was very honest about how they were and ultimately it depicted them in a positive way.
