Every filmmaker knows the anxiety that Destin Cretton experienced while he watched, from a dark recess of a sold-out, 400-seat theater in Austin, Texas, an audience view his movie for the first time.
"It’s really nerve-wracking," he said of the screening at this month’s South by Southwest festival. "I was scared out of my mind."
For all the collaborative effort involved with shooting a film, there is an equal amount of solitary effort — from writing to editing to wondering whether the audience will respond to the emotional cues.
Relief can come, if it does, only when the screen lights up.
That’s how it was for Cretton, a 34-year-old Maui native who screened "Short Term 12" at the Austin event.
"As a filmmaker you spend a lot of time isolated when you are writing or when you are editing your movie," Cretton said by phone from a high school classroom near San Diego, where he teaches video production.
"It is usually just you and one other person in a room for months," he said. "Then you come out of the room and show your movie and watch all the decisions you made play out to an audience. And to hear them respond is … magical."
Cretton invested years in "Short Term 12," first as a short that won the Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 2009 and now as a narrative feature.
His hard work paid off at SXSW. The film about teenagers in a facility for at-risk youth won both the Grand Jury prize and Audience Award in the Narrative Feature Competition.
There is a strong possibility of a theatrical release.
"I can’t say one way or the other right now, but the reception from everybody, including buyers and distributors, has been really positive," he said. "Basically any hope or dream I had, in the best-case scenario that I was thinking could happen, happened and went way beyond my expectations."
CRETTON has written and directed four award-winning shorts, and his first feature film, "I Am Not a Hipster," premiered to critical acclaim at Sundance.
"Short Term 12" grew out of the filmmaker’s experiences working at a California group home for troubled teens. Cretton, a Maui High graduate, was looking for work after finishing at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. He wound up at a care home where a patient threw a chair at him on his first day.
That was one of the scariest moments in Cretton’s life, but he stayed at the home for two years. Later, as a graduate student at San Diego State, he used the experiences to create the 20-minute version of "Short Term 12" that succeeded at Sundance.
Anderson Le, programming director for the Hawaii International Film Festival, watched "Short Term 12" in Austin and said it was the best film at SXSW.
"It doesn’t go through the clichés that a lot of films like this get trapped in," Le said. "It could have turned into a bad TV movie of the week, but it didn’t. He made it into something that is very real but is also uplifting and hopeful."
The audience gave Cretton an enthusiastic standing ovation. "This film will put him on the map," Le said.
Le wants to screen it here, but film distributors are in a bidding war for the rights to "Short Term 12," he said.
In a review that praised Cretton for his "unsentimental direction," The Hollywood Reporter said the film possessed "a frankness that acknowledges the dramatic extremes in these lives without needing to parade it before the audience."
The son of a firefighter and a stay-at-home mom who had six children, Cretton saw the care-home patients as a large family. And while he doesn’t want to assign a specific message to the movie, family dynamics play a big part.
"At its core it’s just a movie about family and a movie about creating family wherever you are — even if you don’t have one or you don’t have a typical family," he said. "As humans we have a wonderful ability to create that same type of love and support wherever we are."
AND that’s a wrap …
Mike Gordon is the Star-Advertiser’s film and television writer. Read his blog "Outtakes Online" at honolulupulse.com. Reach him at 529-4803 or email mgordon@staradvertiser.com.
