"Between the ages of 14 and 16 I was in a very dark place and then came out of it." That's Samantha Morton, talking to Simon Hattentone about her painful childhood and early adolescence, and about the new movie--The Unloved, her directorial debut--that grew out of it. The movie is about a little girl, called Lucy, who comes from a violent home environment and has been placed in a car home. As a director, Morton wanted to capture the quality of detachment that some abused children have towards what's being done to them" "You read a lot about this in psychology, how children almost astral project. They throw themselves out of their body and it's almost bordering on the autistic spectrum. They are spectators of their reality. They are quite numb." Not that Morton had to get all this from her reading. She was made a ward of the court when she was eight years old; her father used to hit her. Although The Unloved is autobiographical in its emotions, Morton says that the life it depicts is far less awful than some of the things she experienced, because "I'm not going to make a children's film and turn it into a horror film. I wanted to make a film that someone from the age of 13 could watch and get, and it would change them."
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