Interview (Part 3): Destin Daniel Cretton

This week, we are reading and analyzing the script Short Term 12, so I thought it would be a good idea to reprise my October 2013 interview writer-director Destin Daniel Cretton.

One of my favorite movies of 2013 is Short Term 12, so I was understandably excited when its talented writer-director Destin Daniel Cretton agreed to an interview. Our hour-long conversation did not disappoint.

Destin’s script “Short Term 12″ won a 2010 Nicholl Screenwriting Fellowship. He used that to write the script for the 2012 movie I Am Not A Hipster which Destin also directed.

Today in Part 3, Destin discusses the unique way he handled important exposition with two key characters in Short Term 12:

Scott: One of the facility’s residents is an eighteen year-old named Marcus (Keith Stanfield), about to turn eighteen, who’s facing the prospects of having to leave the facility. And a key point in the movie he basically flips out, and Mason goes to talk to him, eventually getting Marcus to share a recent song he wrote.

First off, a song is a great way of delivering this exposition regarding this character, so my first question to you is how conscious of you were that he used music to convey back story?

Destin: Those scenes were very, very challenging for me. Exposition is always something that I’m terrified at, terrified about, because I typically spot it very easily when I watch movies, and it usually pulls me out, and especially when it’s a character who doesn’t want to talk about something, finding a ways for the them to reveal that information or make their initial confession about something that they’ve been avoiding talking about is really hard.

The inspiration came from different experience that I had with the teenagers at this facility where I thought that they were not processing any of the things they had gone through until I opened up their journal and saw the drawings that they were working on.

On one occasion one of the young men actually asked me if I wanted to hear lyrics of his, and he rapped to me, and they’re very revealing about things that he’s actually processing through about his life. And so that was the inspiration for that scene.

Scott: There’s a refrain to the song that has this line, “Look into my eyes so you know what it’s like, to live a life not knowing what a normal life’s like.” Did you write those lyrics?

Destin: Those lyrics, yes, I did write those lyrics, but the entire rap was a collaboration with Keith who is also a wonderful lyricist and writes his own raps. So I wrote the first draft of the rap, and then he took that and changed words and modernized the slang and things in the rap so it was a really fun collaboration.

Scott: There’s another instance which you use a similar device to convey exposition when Jaden shows a story she wrote to Grace about an octopus who develops a relationship with a shark. Do you remember what inspired you to write that story?

Destin: I don’t, really. It was just another one of those scenes that I struggled with for so long. I knew that this character did communicate through art. A lot of her drawings and things was one of her outlets. That story was one of those moments where it just feels like it came from somewhere else. I took a walk around the block at the coffee shop where I was writing and I was stressing out about it and trying to figure out how to get this character to talk that didn’t want to talk.

That story actually brought me to tears. I had fallen in love with that Jaden character so much.

Scott: There’s another thing you did that I found interesting. There’s that cardinal rule in film making, show it don’t say it, yet your story begins with Mason telling a story and ends with Mason telling a story. It’s almost curious what your instinct was there. Were you aware of this show it don’t say it conventional wisdom? What was your thought process on that?

Destin: I’m actually a huge believer in show don’t tell, but in this case those stories were directly inspired by interviews that I conducted with other supervisors and counselors who worked in places like this and who have worked in places like this much longer than I did. On a number of occasions, in those interviews I was just blown away by how incredible they were at telling stories. They were magicians and storytellers.

The stories that they were telling, one of them that I recorded was almost verbatim me just typing it straight into the script and that was the opening story of the movie. I did manipulate some things and added some crude jokes, of course, but for the most part it was the voice of a guy who had worked at a place like this for 16 years telling a similar story.

Anybody who works in a very intense environment uses storytelling as an outlet and a way to cope and also as a way to make sense of things. Sometimes there’s a little bit of fiction woven into it like the last story that he tells. He was implying certain things and there’s a little bit of his own hope for Marcus woven into his story.

If I had shown that story, then it becomes the reality of the director as opposed to the viewer deciding how they want to interpret what this story is coming from this character and how much of it they want to believe, how much of it they want to say that’s a Mason embellishment. That was part of the fun.

Scott: That’s interesting because when I watched the movie and heard both of those stories they work for me completely. One reason, of course, they’re entertaining. The second reason, particularly for that last story, because of the point you just made there, it actually ties back to this Marcus character. That’s an interesting result of the character, potentially.

The third thing, you just said something which is that it really is authentic to this story universe, these characters in this environment would use stories to process things and put things into perspective. Is that what I hear you saying?

Destin: Yeah. In a way, it’s what I was doing through the entire process of making this movie. This is a movie that is inspired by a lot of real events, but it’s a fictionalized story. My organization of it was, in some way, a way for me to organize those thoughts and questions that I had working there and that came up during the research process.

Here is a brief interview with Destin:

Tomorrow in Part 4, Destin relates how he approached the narrative structure of Short Term 12.

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

Part 2, here.

The official movie site is here.

Go here to rent or buy Short Term 12.

Destin is repped by WME.

You can follows Destin on Twitter: @destindaniel.