Director Catherine Hardwicke could have been an architect
The director of Twilight and Thirteen got into film after being told she was ‘too wacky’ for architecture
There's an alternate universe in which Catherine Hardwicke — the director of the critically acclaimed indie flick Thirteen and the massive blockbuster Twilight series — isn't a film director at all, and is instead the world's weirdest architect.
Growing up in McAllen, Texas — a small city on the U.S.-Mexico border — a career in film wasn't really on Hardwicke's radar.
"You didn't even know what cinema was," she said in a recent interview with Tom Power on Q. "They did have a theatre. A lot of the movies were in Spanish because of the Mexican border. I did see some Clint Eastwood movies."
Instead, she channelled her creative impulses into architecture, majoring in the subject at the University of Texas at Austin. Unfortunately, she quickly discovered that architecture isn't actually a very creative industry most of the time.
"I built a ton of buildings before I was 22, and then suddenly my architecture teacher said, 'Hey, we think you're a little too wacky or creative for architecture,'" she said. "I would dress up my buildings for my thesis project. The building would transform [from] brown at the bottom [to] all different colours, and by the top it was blue, like the sky."
She went back to school, this time for animation at the UCLA, thinking that a career in film would allow her to express herself in a way architecture wouldn't.
"I did not know about sequels," she said. "I did not know about IP. I didn't know about all the [ticking] boxes and the algorithms."
WATCH | Catherine Hardwicke's interview with Tom Power:
One of her first gigs in film was as a production designer for the 1995 cult classic Tank Girl, an adaptation of a successful indie comic. It was a job that, somewhat ironically, called on her architecture background.
"That was a very creative job — really fun things," she said. "I got to build the tank with a barbecue pit on it and umbrellas … and all kinds of a crazy world. That's architecture. All of my production design jobs were architecture."
Hardwicke's directorial debut was 2003's Thirteen, the story of 13-year-old Tracy (Evan Rachel Wood) who, faced with the standard pressures of growing up, as well as a particularly stressful homelife, starts running with a fast crowd led by her classmate Evie (Nikki Reed). At the time, parents groups and some film critics accused the movie of being sensationalistic, something that still confuses Hardwicke, as it was inspired by Reed's own life. Hardwicke was a long time friend of Reed's family — her and Reed's father used to date — and the pair wrote the script together, in part so Hardwicke could help her process her feelings.
"I'd known her since she was five-years-old," said Hardwicke. "She was in her cute little overalls and climbing trees, and then six months later, I came back from a job in Vancouver and she's like a baby J-Lo, hair perfect and everything. But she had a dark cloud over her. She really hated her mom now. She hated her dad. She hated her brother. She hated life."
She added that, in the years since, she's had the opportunity to speak to juvenile court judges and other people who work with at-risk youth about the film, and she's realized that Tracy and and Evie could have had it a lot worse.
"All these judges and people that really worked with real [kids], they said it's not exaggerated," she said. "We didn't have any suicides. We didn't have any pregnancies. We didn't have any car crashes. We had a mild version, is what the real people working with these kids said."
Over the last 20 years, a lot of people have told her that Thirteen was, in one way or another, also their story.
"I had Skrillex come up to me one time and say, 'I saw your movie multiple times. That was my life story,'" she said. "Margot Robbie told me, in Australia, that was her life story. I had an 80-year-old woman tell me that was her life story, but when she grew up, it was wearing fishnet tights and smoking cigarettes."
One common theme that runs through much of Hardwicke's work — from Tank Girl through Thirteen and all the way up to her newest film, Mafia Mamma — is female friendship. Mafia Mamma stars Toni Collette as Kristin, a frustrated, middle aged American writer who visits Italy in an attempt to get her groove back, only to discover that it was her Italian grandfather's dying wish that she take over as boss of his crime family.
"You see the support," she said. "Toni's encouraged by her friend to take the trip and go to Italy. Even when she accidently murders somebody, her friends say, 'Oh, that's cool, I got your back.' Then you see Monica Bellucci transforming her and supporting her to learn how to be like a mafia boss.… Because it's important in real life, you know, to have that support."
Kristin, it turns out, has a knack for being a mob boss, and winds up finding herself via the world of organized crime.
Hardwicke said that movies like this are getting harder to make.
"This film was quite rare," she said. "This is like an indie film that we made in Italy. The studios probably wouldn't do a movie like this because it's not based on a bestseller or a comic book series."
Still, she hopes that it's something that will be a big hit with its target audience, and hopefully will get people going to the theatre ― a habit they fell out of during the pandemic.
"We're hoping with Mafia Mamma, you'll go with your friends," she said. "I just got a picture of 13 women in Dallas that are going, all dressed up Mafia Mamma style."
The full interview with Catherine Hardwicke is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Interview with Catherine Hardwicke produced by Jennifer Warren.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
