Movies - Teen Spirit : All you must know about this upcoming movie

By Mulder, 15 march 2019

The first draft of Max Minghella’s script from 2009 was set in Poland, with 90 percent of the dialogue in Polish. The original expectation was that an unknown would be cast as the lead, but it proved extremely challenging to find someone who could sing, dance, speak two languages and act. Eventually, the producers at Mister Smith decided to announce the movie without any actors attached and that’s how Elle Fanning first heard about the project. At the time, she was interested in acting in a film in which she could also sing and sent Minghella a video of herself performing with the French musician Woodkid at the 2016 Montreux Jazz Festival.

As Minghella remembers it, “Once I sat down with Elle, I reimagined the film as an immigrant story, which served to make the film more personal and underlined themes that were already in the screenplay. And it turned out that Elle has an extraordinary singing voice.” The actress put months of work into preparing for the role, working closely with executive music producer Marius de Vries and performing all the singing live. Following a wildly successful collaboration with producer Fred Berger on the critically-acclaimed La La Land, de Vries was interested in keep the relationship going. He was also curious about working with Minghella, “because of his parentage [his father is the late director Anthony Minghella; his mother is choreographer Carolyn Choa] and because he was from the Isle of Wight,” says de Vries. “And then I was curious about the idea of it being an unabashed adventure in pop music.”

De Vries was also thrilled to discover in Fanning “a kind of innate musical sensibility, just a really lovely natural voice.” By the end of the film, when she’s performing her climactic numbers, he sees evidence of the experience she’s accrued, a new strength and range. “She’s inhabited by something quite different and it’s great to witness that curve of the performance emerge.” Berger believes audiences will experience a sense of discovery about Fanning in this role. “She’s been in almost countless movies since she was four years old,” he says. “She’s an actor that people like and admire but, with her voice and her presence here, she’s carrying a film in a way I don’t think she ever has before.”

Fanning agrees: “I haven’t really ever shown myself in this way, but it feels very true to me, very true to who I am right now in this moment.” The character of Violet dovetails with so much of Fanning’s own experiences as an artist who is still learning and evolving. “I can relate to her hunger, I feel that in myself,” she explains. “Everybody imagines themselves being the best at whatever they do, reaching the tip-top just like Violet.”

Music is the heart of Teen Spirit. Fanning refers to Minghella as “pop music’s number one fan” and the director himself emphasizes his deep belief in “music’s ability to create a visceral cinematic effect.” Director of photography Autumn Durald-Arkapaw speaks of the “affection and genuine, pure-hearted enthusiasm” that Minghella has for the musical genre. Coupled with a highly stylized approach, the result is a film that balances the ecstatic rush of pop with a more soulful undertone.

Executive producer Jamie Bell, a close friend of Minghella, sees the director’s approach asvery original: “The way Max is using the language of music videos — images of music that blend together — to tell this story feels very new.” Berger lauds Minghella’s ability to bring out the depth of feeling in pop music. “I think people underestimate the power of pop,” he says, “But Max is a bona fide lover of the genre and has an innate understanding of what makes for a timeless, evocative pop anthem. Berger also describes himself as “addicted to making music-driven movies,” which he claims are twice as hard. “You’re making two or three films at once; juggling the film itself, the entire music apparatus, and in this case, a dance component – three distinct layers that require their own preparation and execution. It’s a bigger swing, but it’s also much more fun.”

Most of the songs in Teen Spirit were detailed in the initial drafts of the script and the sequences are shot very specifically to the film’s soundtrack, which features music by Ariana Grande, Robyn, Grimes, Katy Perry and more. There is also an original song performed by Fanning and written by Carly Rae Jepsen & Jack Antonoff.

In addition to de Vries, the team assembled by Berger includes music supervisor Steven Gizicki and music co-producer Eldad Guetta; they relied on a strong working relationship developed during their shared experience La La Land, which earned numerous awards in music categories. “In some ways I felt like I was piggybacking on the success of another collaboration,” says Minghella, “but I think this movie also presented an exciting and very different challenge for them.” To Gizicki, the film is all about music: “It’s a character unto itself.” He confesses to a fondness for “female-driven European synth pop” and finds that Minghella’s vision for bringing it to life is truly unique.

Fanning watched American Idol and YouTube clips of Katy Perry and Taylor Swift in order to capture the essence of a powerful pop performance. “In the beginning, Violet is untrained,” she says. “She is a good singer and you see she has potential, but she doesn’t have a lot of stage presence in her voice.” Fanning and de Vries worked together for months to strike that delicate balance and to invest the singing with the requisite emotion to profoundly move the audience. The feelings start to bubble up in Fanning in an early scene, when she is seen dancing alone in her bedroom to the infectious strains of No Doubt. “I really let loose and just went there and felt like Elle dancing in her bedroom.”

Minghella stresses the importance of collaboration in the making of Teen Spirit, especially with the musical elements adding another level of complexity to the process. “You’re sitting in a room and you have a dream — essentially you’re having an abstract thought — and then you have the privilege of having talented filmmakers help you realize it and transform it into something that’s tangible for other people to see,” he says. “It’s impossible not to feel very grateful each day on set to everyone making it possible.”

An early ally on the project was close friend Jamie Bell, an executive producer on the film. The two share a longtime passion for films and filmmaking and were excited to have an opportunity to make one of their own. “Pair that with the fact that you get to do it with your best friend,” says Bell, “and we’re just incredibly lucky.”

The film’s distinctive look arose out of the relationship between Durald-Arkapaw and Minghella, according to the director. The DP shot Palo Alto — known for its haunting interplay of color, light and feeling — as well as music videos for Janelle Monáe and Solange Knowles. She imbues Violet’s dreary world with drama, capturing the lyricism of a field at magic hour or extending long beams of light against the night sky.

Berger praises Durald-Arkapaw’s eye for composition and lighting with its very specific balance of naturalism and formalism. “Autumn refuses to shoot something that is not tasteful or beautiful or striking,” he says. “Her work is hyper cinematic and expressive - images that demand to be seen on the big screen.” “I think she’s just a genius,” Minghella says of the cinematographer. “That said, we think about things in a different way and the resulting friction is what leads to our most interesting work together.”

According to Durald-Arkapaw, it’s unusual that a film of this scale would have such extensive lighting. She describes it as “very sculpted, visceral and visual — not in a handheld, quickset- up way.” The camera movement, framing and lighting are all very considered. Berger echoes the notion that Minghella has an intense clarity of vision, but also commends him for his collaborative spirit. “He’s played the movie in his head countless times, so he knows every set up, every cut, every transition, the characters’ motivations in every moment,” says Berger of the director. “Yet that precision only makes him more open to ideas from his cast and team, as he has such a firm command of the material. It’s a rare and tremendously effective dynamic.” Despite how greatly he values the input of others, Minghella has taken an auteur’s approach to Teen Spirit, which he wrote, produced, directed and edited himself. “Editing is paramount to me,” he explains. “I’m very fixated on what the rhythm of a scene should be and how the audience is going to receive the images, so editing and writing feel inextricably linked to me.” Minghella has delivered a sweet, soulful and visually rich debut that he hopes will “deliver the kind of audio-visual experience that you can only get in cinema.” Berger concurs, describing Teen Spirit as a “big-screen pop-odyssey, a cinematic event that should leave you dancing out of the theater.”

Synopsis :
Violet, a shy teenager living in a small European town, dreams of pop stardom as an escape from her dismal surroundings and shattered family life. With the help of an unlikely mentor, Violet enters an international singing competition that will test her charisma, uniqueness, nerve and talent.

Teen Spirit
Written and Directed by Max Minghella
Produced by Fred Berger, Brian Kavanaugh-Jones
Starring Elle Fanning, Rebecca Hall, Zlatko Buric
Music by Marius DeVries
Cinematography : Autumn Durald
Edited by Cam McLauchlin
Production companies : Automatik Entertainment, Blank Tape, Interscope Films
Distributed by Lionsgate (United States), LD Entertainment, Bleecker Street (England), Metropolitan FilmExport (France)
Release date : September 7, 2018 (TIFF), April 5, 2019 (United States), June 26, 2019 (France)
Running time : 92 minutes

(Source : press notes)