It’s her first acting job and she does a great job. The whole thing came because I was just trying to help her get through this stuff. She said she wanted to act, so we tried to work on acting. I said, “Let’s write something for you so you’ll have a good role.” That’s how the whole thing started, to give her a chance to act.
How did you as the director help capture the realistic relationship between Tracy and her mother, Mel (played by Holly Hunter)?
Holly and Evan both get mountains of credit because they’re both so wonderful and so great and so connected to the material, and so dedicated and professional. They already just brought everything to the party. When they met, that first night that we really started working together, we did a rehearsal on the set. That night Holly suggested that she, Nikki, and Evan spend the night in the house, and so they did. They did each other’s hair and makeup and went driving around getting pizza. They had this great bonding thing. Holly slept in her character’s bed; they slept in their characters’ bed. They made their breakfast, you know, the whole deal.
Getting Holly Hunter must have felt like the casting coup of the year for you.
First of all, the real thing was that I wanted to find somebody who would actually be great in that role. [Someone] who would just embrace that role 100% and just live it and breath it, and not be scared of the tragic flaws and wonderful things about that character. [Someone] who would just go there for the final scene. Holly, to me, was perfect. There’s no question that she’s going to take this as far as it can go and really be this person. That meant that it was going to be a good film. And then that also encouraged Evan Rachel Wood’s agent to let her come in and read for it. Before that they weren’t very interested. Before that, nobody was very interested in the movie because I’m a first-time director, there’s no money, and there’s no distributor – there’s nothing going for it on paper. When Holly signed on people took it much more seriously. Not that money flooded in, but serious actors cared about it, like Jeremy Sisto and Deborah Unger and Evan. That was great.
Which character changed the most from the way you conceived it in the first draft to the finished film?
All of the adult characters because when Nikki and I did the first draft, which we did in the now-famous, documented 6 days that we wrote it – January 3rd to January 9th, 2002 – it was mostly written from the teenager’s point of view. The parents were all two-dimensional villains. Then when she went back to middle school and I started trying to figure out how to get the movie made, I also started dimensionalizing the parents and the adults more. Then when Holly came on, again I tried to shade and nuance the mother even more.
Catherine Hardwicke on Getting an R Rating and Sparking Dialogue
