Sacrifice Yes, Compromise, No

The Dangerous Life of Director Peter Care

by Jennifer M. Wood | Published February 3, 2007

The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys

David Fincher, Spike Jonze and Jonathan Glazer are just a few directors who've carried their success in the world of music videos to the big screen, with such films as Fight Club, Being John Malkovich and Sexy Beast to their credit. The latest director to follow that trend is England's Peter Care, whose The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys made a splash at Sundance earlier this year and is now playing in theaters across the country.

Adapted from the cult novel by Chris Fuhrman, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys is an uncompromising coming of age tale, focusing on the antics of two best friends, Tim (Kieran Culkin) and Francis (Emile Hirsch), who spend their days scamming up new ways to retaliate against authority, particularly their school teachers, Sister Assumpta (Jodie Foster) and Father Casey (Vincent D'Onofrio). Though mostly live action, the film contains several minutes of animation, courtesy of famed graphic novelist Todd McFarlane, which only adds to the picture's originality-particularly as it relates to films about teens. In an interview with MM, Care talks about his feature film debut, the challenges and joys of working with a young cast of talents and the unavoidable misconceptions audiences may have about the title.

Jennifer Wood (MM): How did The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys first come to you?

Peter Care (PC): It was about five and a half years ago. I had done some commercials with Jay Shapiro, who was on my production team, and he brought me the book. I fell in love with the book-and he loved the book-and we heard that Egg Pictures was looking for something that was hard-edged and sort of based on the teenage years. So we took the book over to Jodie Foster's people.

MM: Egg was the first company you approached?

PC: Yeah, we lucked out. It was sort of one-stop shopping.

MM: Was a commitment from Jodie Foster the only thing you needed to get moving?

PC: Well, it wasn't completely smooth rolling. We worked with a writer for about 18 months and the scripts were going nowhere. We ended up bringing in our second writer, Jeff Stockwell, and that's when it started to come together really well. Jeff was a really great collaborator and had a great feel for the book and adapting it. We ended up with a script after about eight or nine months with Jeff that was good enough to show Jodie herself. She came on as a producer, so that helped in terms of credibility, but it was still tricky getting the money because it's not exactly a high-concept skateboarding movie.

The people who owned the project, USA Films, actually ended up turning us down, having struggled and wondered what the hell to do and 'How do you say no to Jodie Foster?' But they found a way-and not a very nice way, actually. Luckily, Jodie was up at Sundance with her film Waking the Dead and she had a breakfast meeting with some people from Initial Entertainment who basically gave us the money right there. It was amazing: Jodie just went in and got the money; it was incredible!

MM:As a first-timer, was it intimidating to direct the likes of Foster and Vincent D'Onofrio?

PC: It was for a few minutes, yeah I'll admit that. (laughs) But I think because I had spent a fair amount of time with Jodie talking about the script, and I changed the idea for the character-Sister Assumpta was written as a kind of Roald Dahl, big beefy ugly woman and I was saying that 'I don't want this. I think we should get someone who is really kind of younger and stronger and more three-dimensional than this cartoon character.' I think that was her signal that I was really into someone like her being in the role. So the ice was broken months ahead of when we were actually shooting. The thing is we had to do so much in the first two or three days with Jodie that I didn't have time to get nervous; I just had to get my shots. (laughs)

And Vincent was a joy. We had a little time to just talk about the part. Obviously, I had a huge respect for him and it just came together kind of organically. There was no disagreement about any aspect of the two adult characters with my actors. It came together very smoothly.

MM: Yet it's the teenagers who take center stage. What was the casting process like for the film? The three leads-Emile Hirsch, Kieran Culkin and Jena Malone-all seem to fit their characters so perfectly.

PC: Strange to say it was actually in a way easy to spot these kids. We changed the role a tiny bit, but there was no one who came even close to understanding the character of Tim as much as Kieran did; he had a great feeling for it. He was the only actor who read for that part and we saw hundreds of kids on tape. He was the only one who had a feeling for the strange mixture of that character, which is maturity and world-weariness and a little nerdy at the same time. It was the same with Jena playing Margie. I was a couple of minutes late to a meeting to meet her in our little casting office and I walked in and she was sitting on the end of the sofa looking kind of lonely and forlorn and it was obvious that she was the perfect Margie.

I was worried at first about Emile. I read him five or six times for the part and I was just worried that this was his first movie role. He had been in some TV and it was a big thing to rest on his shoulders-to put this whole movie on his shoulders. I liked him but I was just really worried so I kept sort of testing him and getting him to come in and read. And then I started to improvise with him one day and he just started to cry (I did one of the big, emotional scenes in the movie) and he turned on these incredibly real tears and it actually broke my heart. What we did then-me and Jeff-while we were prepping and rehearsing was change a few things, just some of the rhythms of the speech patterns, to fit the actors. It gave them a feeling that they owned the characters and I think that's what you're seeing on the screen. They have this emotional link and an interest for the characters they were playing.

MM: Are there any real challenges working with such a young cast?

PC: Yeah, there are. They were kind of inconsistent. It was quite amazing really where one day one of them would be absolutely on fire and amazing and get everything on the first take. And then the next day they'd be kind of floundering and you'd be doing multiple takes and trying to figure out how to cover it and get around what you were missing. In some scenes they would have a perfect instinct for every word and every comma in the scene and then, in other scenes, I'd kind of really have to pull it out of them. You know, get them to really focus and go through every syllable of a sentence just to explain what I was looking for. It kind of tricks you sometimes: you get geared up for an easy day and it's difficult and then you get geared up for a difficult day-you spend all night prepping and you go in and have had one hour of sleep-and then they get it all perfectly on the first take. It's like working with three monkeys: there's always one that's climbing out of the barrel. (laughing)

MM: Coming of age films are one genre that have the ability to quickly lapse into overly sentimental territory-but your film never crosses this line. Much of the emotion that these kids feel is under the surface. Was this something you tried to keep aware of?

PC: Oh yeah, absolutely. I hate sort of false sentiment in movies; everything was meant to be understated. I also see the advantage of having the animation, which is kind of what's really inside of Francis's brain: it's the other side of a child. That allowed me then to concentrate on the more subtle side, the live action. I didn't have to have some hokey false drama put into the story because it's already there in his head in sort of a blown-up way.

MM: In addition to all the typical people a director has to collaborate with-producers, actors, writers, etc.-you had the added task of working with animators to bring your story to life. At what point did the idea to manifest the internal emotions of the characters through animation come about?

PC: We did a draft with our second writer where he kind of nailed the ability to make this rather episodic book into the script and thank god he didn't listen to me because I had some ideas, too (laughing). The first idea we worked on was actually very simple, which was that the animation would be just little interstitial moments, little psychedelic thoughts meandering. And then we kind of got dissatisfied and I can remember saying to Jeff: 'You know what's really a big deal when you're an artist-I was thinking back to when I was 14 or 15-when you try and make a story.' That's a huge development. But for kids, especially 14 or 15-year-olds doing drawings or comic strips, it's very rudimentary-it's like 'Mr. Amoeba Man Goes Shopping'-and we wanted it to be a lot stronger than that obviously. So I said he's trying to make a story now, so he's going to start ripping off things that have influenced him, like stories out of the Bible and Greek myths. And so that's where it really came together.

MM: How did the animation work? At what point was the animation being created?

PC: We had scripted before the shoot and while we were shooting they were designing the characters and a very rough storyboard for it. And when I came off the shoot, I was completely exhausted, of course, and then we started to have meetings. It was like starting all over again. It was exhausting.

MM:When a director transitions from music videos to feature films, we've become used to the MTV-influenced style of films like Sexy Beast and Fight Club. Altar Boys has a very straightforward camera style. How did you work with your DP, Lance Acord?

PC: We'd shot some commercials together, so I trusted Lance implicitly that he'd understand what I was looking for. And really it was a very simple English attitude toward cinema, which is that the camera serves the actor. You don't do anything-anything-that would distract from the performance. And the way that I worked when I was a kid and a lot of English directors work is you don't give actors marks, you don't put the microphone right in front on their face. You give them as much space-psychologically and physically-as you can in any situation. And the camera has to be in the right place, but it doesn't have to move, it doesn't have to do anything amazing. You're just serving the story and the actors and I thought that was the only way I was going to get these strong performances from the kids. I think the minute I tried to put the camera on a dolly or a train, it would have fallen apart. I think then I would have wound up with some gimmicky, music video guy's idea of a movie. So I just consciously stripped everything down. And I thought also, stylistically, it would be really interesting to have a stripped down style like that that's then intercut with something completely opposite-the animation. The two worlds have absolutely nothing in common. And I thought that would be a much more thought-provoking way to do it, rather than blend the two together.

MM:Though the film is a period piece, being set in the 1970s, it could just as easily have been taking place today-nothing about it seems outdated.

PC: Yes, it's completely universal. Everything in the movie is exactly right for 1974 in North Carolina, which is where we shot. Everything-the way that the Roman Catholic people don't have Southern accents, the cars, the wardrobe. Everything is correct but understated. I wanted kids today to relate to it as much as adults. Apart from the fact that they don't have computers and they don't say "dude," I wanted it to feel like it could almost be happening now. When we were looking for locations (and there's the inevitable budget problems about where are you going to shoot? And should we shoot in Canada and all this kind of stuff) I said, "Look, I'll shoot this movie in the Northridge Mall if I have to. We'll just make it 1999 at the Northridge Mall. It's still a good story."

MM: Do you think the story is a distinctly American one, or could it take place anywhere?

PC: I think it could take place anywhere. I'm not a Roman Catholic but I had a horrible schoolteacher when I was 10, 11 years old. I had the male version of that character who used to hit kids across the head with pieces of wood and stuff. And also I lived in a little town. The book was written for Savannah, Georgia and we scouted for that and I kept thinking man this is a lot like the little town that I lived in in England. So yeah, I think it can happen almost anywhere.

MM: The title of the film is certainly a topical one. Have you received any unwarranted criticism or scrutiny because of what the title might suggest to some, considering the current state of the Catholic church?

PC: We actually got two thumbs up from the Catholic league and I thought that was kind of funny. I think they were sweating and they realized "oh my God." I think we've heard along the grapevine, friends of friends of friends have said you know I have a friend or a roommate who wouldn't come to see the movie because it's about child molesting priests. It's sad if we've lost part of our audience and I'm really pissed about it, but we didn't want to change the title of the movie-we were really happy about the movie the way it was including the title.

MM: Where do you hope the success of this film will take you? What are you working on next?

PC: I'm looking at scripts that are more kind of Hollywood studio-type scripts. And I'm developing some things, too. The film has given me a lot of credibility right now. I'm working with Jeff, actually, the guy who wrote Altar Boys. We're looking to do something completely different from Altar Boys-something with a lot of thrills and chills in it.

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TAGS dangerous lives of altar boys directing emile hirsch jena malone kieran culkin peter care

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