Teens open up for film

"American Teen" opens wide into suburban theaters this weekend after playing in Chicago venues for two weeks. It's a critically lauded look at the senior year of four high school students in the Indiana town of Warsaw.

This marks the third doc directed by New York-born Nanette Burstein, who "auditioned" 10 American high schools to find the best one for storytelling purposes. She steered clear of big city high schools and suburban schools, and all schools close to big cities. After extensive interviews with students in western Pennsylvania, Ohio and northern Indiana, Burstein selected Warsaw.

"It had the most students and stories I was interested in," Burstein said during a recent publicity swing through the Windy City. "It wasn't necessarily the town itself or the school itself. I was looking for subjects that would surprise me, people who seemed one way, but had attributes that were unexpected. I was also looking for students with strong story lines, people who wanted to achieve something during their senior year, despite what ever odds there were."

She wound up with excellent subjects: sports jock Colin is destined for the military, unless he nets a basketball scholarship. Popular girl Megan feels pressure to get into dad's alma mater Notre Dame, or be a failure. Jake the band nerd, an acne-victim, just wants to find love or acceptance. Hanna the rebel wants to escape the Midwest and live in California as a filmmaker.

"They all had a narrative that could play out," Burstein said.

The toughest part of making "American Teen" turned out to be getting the students to accept the cameras as part of their lives during their senior year.

"It's one thing to agree to be the subject of a movie," Burstein said. "It's still another thing to actually have your life filmed. I think the toughest part is being able to capture those raw and intimate and spontaneous moments and not miss them, and to make these teenagers comfortable on camera and let them bring you into their lives and tell you what's happening so you don't miss things."

Some critics have wondered about Burstein's journalistic integrity, especially in scenes where her cameras appear to be multiple places at once, conveniently capturing both parties during telephone sequences. The director admitted to a little bit of storytelling fudging.

"We had two phone calls in the film," she said, "and when you see students listening on one end of the conversation, you're seeing reaction shots from other phone calls. We just cut to a shot of them listening. But the audio is all real."

At least as real as it can be after the callers are informed that their chat is being recorded. Burstein said all parties were made aware of that before recording their calls.

"American Teen" breaks ranks with most documentaries by using animation to illustrate the students' dreams and fears. It's a bold device that works, and Burstein took a real risk with it.

"I felt that the inner lives of teenagers are very important," she said. "There is a lot of fantasy and wishful thinking going on at that age. Normally in documentaries, the only way to express that is through the talking head describing it. I wanted to visualize what they were feeling and thinking. Because it's a fantasy, or in some cases a nightmare, the only way to do that, I felt, was through animation."