ritics and moviegoers will disagree about what was the best or worst movie at Sundance this year, but there's little doubt as to the most divisive. Marcos Siega's Pretty Persuasion, a dark satire-cum-morality play about a sex scandal at an elite Beverly Hills private school, outraged some audiences with its frank portrayal of teen sexuality, while intriguing others fed up with the usual glut of fest-friendly heartwarming family dramas.
     Pretty Persuasion stars Evan Rachel Wood as Kimberly Joyce, a coldly manipulative fifteen-year-old who, along with two friends, accuses her drama teacher (Ron Livingston) of sexual molestation. The film, written by Skander Halim, incidentally tackles bottom-feeding journalists, self-absorbed parents, the culture of celebrity, the war in Iraq, religious mores, porn, racism, and hypocrisy of all sorts. And, by the way, one of the people Kimberly seduces is played by Jane Krakowski.
     The dry, controlled wit of Pretty Persuasion, as well as its curiously restrained visual style, is a far cry from what one might expect given Siega's resume: He's a veteran music video director, and also directed the upcoming Nick Cannon action movie The Underclassman — a "completely different movie" that happens to also be set in a high school. But Pretty Persuasion has been Siega's dream project for years — he even invested his own money in the project. "I had to sacrifice in all sorts of ways for this one," he says, clearly relieved (and anxious) that its release has finally arrived. "I can't wait for audiences to experience it." — Bilge Ebiri So what's a nice guy like you doing making a scandalous movie like this?
I was always attracted to this material because of its very distinctive voice. In fact, I optioned it years ago, and all along I told the writer, Skander Halim, "Dude, I don't want to change this thing. It's so unique, it's so unforgiving." At the time, I was reading a lot of scripts, and most of them were teen movies. But this was so not a teen movie. I wanted to be true to that script. With the exception of some James Woods improvising, it's pretty much the same script it was back then. I was shocked to learn that Evan Rachel Wood, despite being so young, had been attached to the film for something like three years.
She originally signed on to play Brittany [the lead character's best friend]. I had Jena Malone playing Kimberly. One day, I was actually doing a Kelly Osbourne video, of all things. I wanted them both to come to set, in order to see them together. That day, there was a seed of doubt planted in my brain. Don't get me wrong, Jena Malone is amazing ­ I would put her in anything! But she was getting a bit too old to play a fifteen-year-old, and there was something about Evan; she has this ability to look at you in this way that's really unsettling. Very unforgiving, like you said.
I think everyone universally responds to Evan's performance. As a director, I love to hear people giving me credit for an actor's performance, but I can't take credit for how inherently smart she is. There are certain things you can't teach people. The film addresses teen sexuality. As a director, how do you approach something like that?
As a director, it's the most uncomfortable thing to deal with. I used comedy, frankly. It's a very intimate thing between an actor and a director: "You're gonna do an orgasm; let's hear it." But with Evan — she's fifteen years old, and I'm thirty-four. You're dealing with something that inherently feels wrong. So, I decided to make everyone on the crew do their version of an orgasm, and told them to take it over the top. We laughed at the assistant cameraman doing an orgasm, the makeup girl doing an orgasm . . . The idea was to make her laugh, set her at ease. We never felt like we were doing a sex scene; we were goofing around. That was my way of dealing with it, but obviously with a careful eye to the fact that we had to get something out of the scene. In that sense, the movie isn't very explicit at all. The sex is always offscreen.
I shot it all in a very clean way. The loud sex sounds came later, when I was watching the movie with my editor. He had the idea of putting in the slurping sounds, to increase the discomfort. We showed it to a few people and they squirmed. That's all I had to do. The original script never got into any explicit sex. It was all throwaway lines. But as a director, you have to tell that story, to figure out how to do it. How has teen sexual awareness changed?
Guys sort of want slutty girls, the ones who wear nothing and dance around and look really sexy. But once they get them, then they want the tame, non-sexual girls. That's probably been around forever, but today you get so many mixed signals. You read People, or In Style, or those other magazines — they're all selling midriffs, cleavage, and breast implants. But if a girl does that, she's labeled slutty. It's all really confusing. That's why I didn't want to go too far in either direction in the film. How did you settle on the style and the look of the film? You made your name in music videos, but your film doesn't have the flashy aesthetic we've come to expect from directors who work in that medium.
I shot really long takes, to heighten the discomfort of what was going on. I wanted the movie to lull you into submission in a way, to complement what Evan's character Kimberly was doing onscreen. She's always in control, and I made sure to work that into the style of the film. It would have been very easy to shoot in a very music video style. But I wanted to stay away from all the trappings of the teen genre movie — the flashy and quick cutting, etc. There's not one contemporary song in the entire film. And it's a movie set in high school! We also paid close attention to wardrobe. Skander's original script had the girls wearing plaid skirts and knee-high socks — very stripper-esque, very Lolita. I thought, let's make them more Grace Kelly, so we gave them the more conservative outfits you see in the film. All of that was about creating this sense of control. Look at what Kimberly's wearing when she seduces Jane Krakowski's character: a cardigan and a sundress. No skin whatsoever. She has a bow in her hair, and she looks thirteen and innocent. And what does she say? "I love cock too much." What are the challenges of marketing a movie like this? Its sensibility may be too adult for teens, but its subject matter might turn off some adults.
It's impossible! We're still dealing with that challenge. We had many conversations about how to sell it, and to whom we're selling it. Will a thirty-year-old audience come to a movie set in a high school, with fifteen-year-old girls? Will a sixteen-year-old audience come to a movie they shouldn't be coming to? I'm putting my faith in word of mouth. Even when people say bad things about the movie, they say it with such passion that people think, "Hm . . . I should see this." Reviewers either seem to love it or hate it.
Really bad reviews, like the ones that came out of Sundance, certainly hurt, but at the same time, I prefer them to those middle-of-the-road reviews that don't have a point of view. Hopefully, we're manipulating the viewer the way Kimberly is manipulating the people around her. Speaking of bad reviews, how tough was Sundance for you?
Well, I was blown away by the fact that we even got into Sundance, so I really just enjoyed being there. The initial hype for the film was based pretty much entirely on the synopsis in the Sundance booklet, which made it seem like a Heathers-esque cult teen movie. With the success of Mean Girls and Napoleon Dynamite, the studios were salivating at this idea of what they thought the movie was going to be. Then they got to Sundance, and were smashed by what the movie actually was. They were like, "We can't sell this!" Do you think there's a double standard in the way people respond to outrageous material in films? A film like American Pie has just as much shocking material, but because it's all in good fun, no one says anything, whereas something more serious-minded like Pretty Persuasion gets put through the wringer.
It's hard for me to pinpoint. I don't want to give away our third act, but the film definitely takes a turn for the serious. If we were more consistent with the absurdity of the second act, it would have probably been more palatable for studios. When you deal with things in a more serious way, especially after having made the audience laugh at certain things, it's unsettling.  n°