Texas Monthly Talks
Catherine Hardwicke
creamy says: Sorry Catherine, I suppose if you had gone with the insane script from Paramount the movie would have been worse, but I have to be frank, you butchered it. I believe you worked hard, but your vision was way, way off. The tree top think was just one of many "crazy ideas" that were so very wrong. This is a love story. How do you make a love story and the two main characters never once say ’I love you’? The meadow scene, they don’t even touch! Why? I could list several dozen mistakes that when pulled together, all but sunk this film. You just have to listen to your commentary on the DVD to know your focus was off. Way off. Stephenie’s wonderful story and characters are what brought the people in. Good luck to you. (May 4th, 2009 at 5:04pm)
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Very full-service.
Did you hear that Little, Brown hired me to do a book about the making of Twilight? I had wanted to put a director’s journal together, because I had all the storyboard art and my sketches. You’ll see how we broke it down: shot lists, camera angles, all of it. It’s kind of cool if you want to make a film. There are so many girls who are so excited when they see that a woman directed this movie, and they come up to me and say, “I want to be a director!” They’re all revved up.
You’ve now directed a total of four films, but before that you had a long career in the film business as a production designer. How did you make the transition?
I used to be an architect. I went to architecture school [at the University of Texas at Austin], but after I graduated, my professors told me, “Hey, you’re way too creative for architecture—they’re going to try to keep you down.” I had already taken a job as an architect in McAllen, but I applied to UCLA film school. What I didn’t know is that when you go to UCLA film school, you’re the director, the producer, and the financier of your films. You write your own scripts, and you make the sandwiches. So I said, “If that’s what I’m supposed to do, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll start making films.” And when you get a taste, you go, “Oh, I love doing this.”
Why production design?
I had no money. People said, “Hey, you’re an architect. Why don’t you production-design my movie?” I realized I could make a living doing that. And it was a lot of fun.
You seem to have worked on every conceivable kind of film.
I started on a Roger Corman movie. It probably doesn’t even appear on any radar. It might have played in drive-ins in Cambodia.
So you went from Roger Corman to Cameron Crowe. Vanilla Sky was one of your last films as a production designer.
I literally started from the bottom, which is a respectable place. Roger Corman gave a lot of great filmmakers their start, because he was willing to give anyone a chance. I got to build all these crazy things and do all this stuff and learn everything: stunts and second-unit [camera work] and props and guns. You try to get the next job to be a little better, a little more legit, and when you come with absolutely zero connections, you have to claw your way up, which I did.
And the next thing you know . . .
I loved getting to work with Cameron and Costa-Gavras and Richard Linklater. When I worked with Rick—I did two movies with him [The Newton Boys and Suburbia]—he and I got to be really good friends. I thought he would help me. I said, “Rick, I’ve written this script, and I was hoping you would
executive-produce it.” And, you know, he gets that nine million times a week, so he flat out said to me, “Hey, man, if you want to direct, you just have to direct.” And I was like, “Wow, that’s pretty harsh!”
What did he mean by that?
Don’t talk about it, you know? Do it. If you get to direct a movie, you’re going to work your ass off—blood, sweat, and tears. If you’re not willing to do that, you don’t deserve it.
It’s easy for someone who has directed a bunch of films to say, “If you want to direct, direct.” The reality is, you may have been a successful production designer, but you still had to get someone to entrust you with a film as a director.
What he said to me was right, because I had to get off my butt and figure out how to do what he did. His first movie [Slacker] was made for $23,000. Another one of my close friends, David O. Russell, made his first movie [Spanking the Monkey] for very little as well. What Rick was saying was, If you want to do it, figure out a low-budget idea and make the damn thing happen yourself. And that’s the best thing I could have heard, because the two movies I’d been trying to make were going to cost $9 million and $5 million. I kept writing for a lower and lower budget, and then I was like, “No, I need to write something that’s going to cost nothing—something I can shoot in my house, in my car, in my clothes, with my own camera.” That’s basically what Thirteen was.
How much did Thirteen cost you to make?
I had planned to do it with my own money if I couldn’t find any other way, but I finally scrounged up just under $2 million.
It’s a great movie for $2 million.
I had to die for that movie to be made. I had to struggle to get that money, and even to make it happen for that money was hard-core. I think it shows.
Tell me about growing up in McAllen.
My dad was a classical pianist and trained as a chemical engineer, but his dad was a farmer. His dad told him he was going into the family business, and he did, with his brother and his father. The land was very cheap in McAllen, all around the Rio Grande in the irrigation plain, so that’s where the family moved. That’s how we got there.
Farming is a tough life.
If you’re a farmer, even if you do everything right, the insects could be bad or there could be onions all over the world keeping the price of onions low or the weather could be bad. So my mom got a teaching degree. There were three kids: me, my brother, and my sister. McAllen was pretty rough in some ways but also kind of fun. We had rope swings and tree houses. We would get inner tubes from tractor tires and blow them up and float down the river, get in crazy mud fights, and [mess with] snakes. I swam across the river two hundred times. It was a Huck Finn childhood.
McAllen back then would have been very different from what it is today—very open and free as a border town, with less tension.
No, it was tense. There were definitely racial tensions. Everybody was friends, but there would still be fights at our school. Our principal was stabbed three times my senior year on school grounds. I had three friends who were stabbed. I knew people who were shot in the back. There was drug smuggling, police brutality. Electronics smuggling was very popular in McAllen. They would fly planes, DC-3’s, loaded with electronics goods. They would land on unlit dirt airstrips with a guy with a flashlight guiding them. It was pretty wild.
A different world.
You could grow up in it and miss all that and just go to church and Girl Scouts. But, of course, I tried to catch on to every crazy thing that was going on.
Did you go to the movies much as a kid?
No. We only went to one theater, and they were showing mostly Clint Eastwood or films in Spanish. I didn’t go to many movies. Let’s be honest: It was a cultural wasteland. At the time, you could not go to a significant museum unless you drove three hours to Corpus Christi or four to San Antonio.
Do you miss it?
Yeah. I’ve gone back there a couple of times. I’ve been thinking about how we would go over to Mexico and get in all kinds of trouble, because if you were twelve or thirteen, you could go to the bars. You’d go to your prom and then run over there. Every now and then they would try to crack down and force you to have an ID to get into a club. All I had was my Girl Scout ID from, like, seventh grade. And I’d say to the guy at the door, “You have to be eighteen to have this.” And he’d say, “Come on in!” It was a wonderful childhood. I’m dying to make a movie about it.
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