Catching Up With... Nanette Burstein

American Teen, Nanette Burstein’s surprise Sundance hit, recently made its way into theaters across the country. The documentary looks at life through the eyes of four high school seniors in the Midwest, making adult audiences rejoice that those days are behind them. Burstein recently talked with Paste about the challenges of casting and filming the documentary, and the ways in shifting cultural and technological trends have—and haven’t—led to sea changes in the American high school experience.

Paste: In American Teen, you capture some really intimate and revealing moments in these kids’ lives. How were you able to be there at so many dramatic events?
Burstein: Well, I was there for an entire school year, and I basically moved to the town and brought a crew that moved to the town—which ended up becoming two crews. So, when you can film that often, you’re able to capture a lot of intimate moments. There were definitely things that I missed along the way and would not be able to include in the story, so it seems like I was there for every moment because those are the moments I was able to cover very, very well. And also, they were the more important moments of their stories. But a lot of it was through daily communication. I’d show up every day at lunch with my field producer, Greg or Shelly, and we’d each talk to all of the main students that we were filming and just find out was going on. And if they were going to sit home and watch TV that night, then we weren’t going to film them, but if something else even remotely, slightly, potentially interesting was happening, then we would film them. Or if they were embroiled in the middle of a relationship, we would be filming them all of the time, or in the middle of a fight, or any significant moment.

Paste: Kids now are so familiar with reality TV. How did they react to having a camera on them?
Burstein: Each of them that decided to do it did it for their own reasons and beyond this 15 minutes of fame, which I think is important. For Hannah, it was because she wants to be a filmmaker herself, and she’s obviously very interested in the whole process. And for Colin, he was a basketball player, so he thought the attention could help him in his sports career. And Jake is this kind of geeky kid who is completely ignored most of the time by his peers, and suddenly he had these outsiders interested in him, so that made him feel good.

Paste: What about Megan?
Burstein: Megan actually didn’t have strong personal reasons, and she was the most difficult, actually, to capture. Not only that, but the fact that she’s very popular also made her more concerned about being on camera and how she would be seen. So it took a little longer with Megan. At one point I actually thought, “Oh, this isn’t going to work at all,” in the beginning. She was blowing me off a lot, and I basically said to her, “You’re either going to do this or you’re not, and I need to be filming you in these important moments, and otherwise we should just forget it if it’s not going to work.” And she kind of stepped up.

Paste: She was maybe the least sympathetic of the four.
Burstein: Yes, but the most complicated in my opinion, because she has that family tragedy and enormous pressure about college. But right, she had more to be concerned about, about being filmed. Also, the more popular kids, they feel life is a stage, and they’re more worried about their image, so being filmed is perhaps not the [right] image—you know, they don’t have control over it. But, you know, it’s interesting because some people think, “Oh, this is the reality TV generation, so on one hand it would be easier to film people because everyone thinks, ‘Oh my life is meant to be a TV program.’” But, in fact, it was quite the opposite. I think it made it more difficult in the beginning because reality television tends to be mean-spirited and exploitative. Not always, but often. And it just makes teenagers more suspicious, like “What are you going to do?” “How are you going to present me?” “Am I going to look like what’s-her-name from The Apprentice?” “How am I going to look on camera?” So you have to overcome that and ultimately gain their trust.

Paste: One of the most interesting things to me was almost a little meta-narrative. You have these kids who might be blogging or whatever. There’s this whole new media that they are part of. And you have this one girl who decides to send an image of herself topless to a guy and then it gets all around school. You have this private life being made public within a film about these things. Was that something that you saw—the way these kids are sort of publicly projecting themselves?
Burstein: Yeah, and it’s increasingly becoming that way, even since I made the film. I knew, before I made this film, that technology would obviously play a huge role because teenagers are the first to use it and the most to exploit any new technology, especially when it comes to communication. How it would play out, I wasn’t sure, but it’s interesting: It plays out exactly like it would have 30 years ago, but now there’s technology. So if I had given someone a note in high school, or a picture—literally handed someone a picture of myself—it would have gotten around. But not nearly to the extent that it can now because of technology. So they’re taking the same kind of techniques that they have always used against each other, as far as bullying or cruelty or flirting or whatever, and they’re using these different platforms of technology. But what they’re not realizing are the consequences of it, and how much crueler it can be.

Paste: Yeah, and like you say, some of those things haven’t changed. Maybe technology has changed the extent of it, but that’s one thing about the documentary—we think about these 21st century problems of bulimia or school shootings or drugs, but you really don’t go there in this film. Was that a conscious choice or was that just what you encountered?
Burstein: Well, you know, the school shootings—I guess I felt like any of those more hardcore subjects should be films of their own solely tackling that issue, and they’re not the norm for high school. I think our media tends to focus on the most extreme issues. Obviously school shooting is horrible, and there’s a lot to be learned from it—access to guns and the anger that certain students feel. But it’s so over-saturated that it feels like this is happening in every high school, which is not the case. And same with cutting or eating disorders—these are more unusual situations. I think any of those subjects are so important that they should be their own movie, and I was trying to just really focus on the theme of being a teenager and trying to find an identity with all of the peer and parental pressure, and not get into these more extreme, dark storylines. I don’t know if there were any kids that I encountered that would have been capable of school shooting. I’m sure there were probably a couple of bulimic girls. There are in every high school.

Paste: How did you go about choosing these kids?
Burstein: Well, you know, I started with Middle America for a campus because there is a timelessness to that part of the country. And I wanted it to be a town that only had one high school because I thought there would be more social pressure that way. And I wanted it to be economically mixed. I was hoping for it to be racially mixed, which I then discovered was hard to find in small towns in the Midwest. It needed to be a school that would really cooperate, so I called hundreds—if not thousands—of schools in four states in Middle America that fit that demographic, and I had ten that were excited about making a film there. And I went to each of these 10 high schools and interviewed all the incoming seniors that were interested, which was probably about 200 kids per school. And this school had the most compelling stories and subjects. I wanted kids from all different social groups and different economic backgrounds. And I wanted kids that surprised me. You know, Megan seems like the classic, mean girl, queen-bee type, but in fact, she has a lot of more complicated things going on. She’s got a horrible family tragedy that happened very, very recently that she’s overcoming and enormous college pressure. And there’s a reason for her rage, and it’s not often explored in the movies that depict that kind of iconic character.

Or similarly with Jake: A lot of schools that I went to had that kind of underdog type of kid. They would either be incredibly shy and not even show up to be interviewed by me because they would assume I was not interested in them. Or if they did show up, they would barely speak or they would be angry. You know, more of this school-shooting type of kid. Despite his shyness and his at-times self-loathing, he had this incredible optimism and humor and tenacity. He would just ask out tons of girls despite multiple rejections. I don’t know. I just found these oxymorons in all of these different kids. And they also all had really strong stories. They all wanted to accomplish something that year.

Paste: And what inspired the animated segments that played throughout the movie?
Burstein: I think that so much of your teenage life is about wishful thinking versus the reality of what’s happening. And there’s just a rich inner life and fantasy life at that age. And so before I made that film I thought, “Well, how do I illustrate that in the movie?” And so I thought animation would be a great way, perhaps, because, normally in a documentary, all you can do is show a talking head, and it’s not a very visceral experience. But your fantasy life is surreal and larger than life, and animation seems like the ideal way to illustrate that. So when I was shooting the film and I was interviewing them each once a month to reflect on all their experiences, I explained that I wanted to try this element of animating their fantasy lives and they thought that was a very cool idea, so they were very honest with me and at each moment would tell me kind of their wishful thinking. And then when I got to the edit room, I picked the most important ones for the story and worked with a really incredible animation company called Blacklist to bring their fantasy lives to life. And each one is a different style that keeps their personality and how they basically saw their fantasies unfolding visually.

Paste: How did they react to the fantasy portions?
Burstein: They really liked them. A lot of it was how they described it, so they were all really happy with the animations, and how they depicted their fantasy lives.

Paste: Have you kept in touch with any of the kids?
Burstein: Yeah, all of them. They all came out to Sundance with me for the premier of the movie, and have been involved in the promotion and publicity of the film and are really supportive of it. A month ago I went back to the town while they were all out of college for the summer. And they were home, and we showed the film to their parents to make sure that they had seen it before the public had seen it and also had a warm response to that from them. They are actually going to be out in Los Angeles this summer working for Paramount on promoting the movie. They’re having a good time, and it’s been a fun ride for them so far. And so far, at least, well worth doing.

Paste: That’s fantastic. Do you have a next project in mind?
Burstein: Actually, I’m going to try to do a fiction film next. You know, I spend a lot of time taking real life and molding it into a narrative with these different documentaries I’ve done. So now I’m going to try to take a narrative and make it feel like real life. Basically try to accomplish the same thing but in a different form. But what movie it’s going to be, I’m not sure. I’m developing different ideas now.