Movie star Holly Hunter was too busy to rebel against the world as a teenager because she played in a brass band. She talks to Steve Pratt about playing the mother of a 13-year-old coping with growing up.

OSCAR-WINNING actress Holly Hunter admits that she was nothing like the rebellious teenagers at the heart of her gritty new movie Thirteen.

"Adolescence is a startling time for any kid and I was no different, although my more experimental years happened later," she says. "I was more paralysed by my own adolescence. My feeling liberated and dangerous happened later."

She was too involved with music to go off the rails. "I played brass instruments in a band and went to band practice. I played practically every day. I do believe this may have contributed to me not rebelling. I think I'm not inherently a rebel," she says.

Thirteen is based on the experiences of a 13-year-old trying to establish her own identity and deal with peer pressure. The script was co-written, when she was 13, by Nikki Reed, who also appears in the movie.

Neither Hunter nor first time director Catherine Hardwicke - who won a Sundance Film Festival directing award for this debut movie - are mothers so "a lot of this particular story was imaginary for both of us", says Hunter, a best actress Oscar-winner as the mute widow in The Piano.

"In a way that afforded us a certain amount of freedom in creating conflict and making the story personal for each of us to tell, and want to tell. In any role I've ever done, the only thing I've had to draw on was my own life experiences and what I've observed.

"A lot of what I harvested as an actress is borrowed, or something I've seen and want to reinvent, or some inspiration from a song or a smell or how I've felt physically. Sometimes it's borrowed, sometimes it's my own experience."

Hardwicke had a personal interest in the story - she used to date Reed's father. After the relationship ended, she kept in touch with Nikki and was taken aback by the rebellious change in her. "She was 12 and looked like a supermodel. She spent two-and-a-half hours on hair and make-up before school. I was kind of shocked because her world had shrunk to what three kids in school thought of her," she recalls.

"She was very angry with her mother, her father, herself, everyone. As a friend, I wanted to help and tried to get her interested in creative stuff instead of destructive stuff.

"She said she was interested in acting. I was worried because there are no great parts for 13-year-olds, so we had to write our own. It was going to be a teen comedy, until I saw the things that were going on in her life and her friends' lives. I started seeing these pressures, Nikki opened up to me, and we decided to write about the real stuff. It was more compelling than anything we could make up."

Hunter, an executive producer on the movie, plays a mother alarmed at the extreme changes in her daughter's attitude and appearance. Her method of acting is to think about the role before arriving on set and then letting the emotions flow naturally once "action" is called.

"What I really want to do is obey my own impulses when the camera is rolling," she explains. "It's non-judgmental, non-censored. In a way the movie doesn't stand in judgement on any of the characters. You can, more or less, see yourself in each of the situations."

Because of the subject matter, the makers hired as many women as they could to work on the film. That added up to 14 female cast members (out of 26 speaking parts), 39 women behind the camera (out of 90 crew members) and eight women artists on the soundtrack. Five of the nine producers were women.

"Naturally a lot of women were drawn to this material because we all went through something like this, or were going through it, with our own daughters", says Hardwicke. "Sometimes I remember people saying to Nikki, 'I knew someone who did that too."

Both are surprised, and a little disappointed, that the 18-rating given the film in this country prevents teenagers seeing the movie. In the US, the film has a PG-13 rating, meaning teenagers can see it accompanied by adults. "It has already been used as a teaching tool to open up lines of communication with teenagers and start them talking," adds Hardwicke.

* Thirteen (18) opens at York City Screen tomorrow.

Published: 18/12/2003