Mean Creek

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Movie
German title Mean Creek
Original title Mean Creek
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 2004
length 90 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Jacob Aaron Estes
script Jacob Aaron Estes
production Susan Johnson , Rick Rosenthal and Hagai Shaham
music tomandandy
camera Sharone Meir
cut Madeleine Gavin
occupation

Mean Creek is the feature film debut by American director Jacob Aaron Estes from 2004 . The independent film is based on an original screenplay by Estes and was produced by the film studio Whitewater Films .

action

In a small town in the US state of Oregon , the young Sam is terrorized almost every day at school by the older bully George. The teachers do not take the increasing incidents seriously and when George beats Sam again one day and he comes home with a head injury, his older brother Rocky is forced to act. Rocky and Sam come up with a devious plan to get back at George once and for all: They want to invite George, who has a learning disability and who is always fiddling with his hand-held camera, to an alleged Sam's birthday party, which also includes a boat trip on the nearby located river is planned. There, George is supposed to be completely undressed and walk home naked. Rocky's friends Marty and Clyde like the idea. Marty, who likes to call himself "Martini", sees the chance to give free rein to his suppressed aggression, which he secretly keeps in check with his older brother Kile's pistol. Clyde also has a personal interest in participating in the campaign. The frail boy, ashamed of his homosexual fathers and having to endure all sorts of jokes from Marty, was beaten up with a baseball bat by George in fourth grade for no reason. Marty borrows the boat from a neighbor and steals his drug-addicted mother's car in order to carry out the plan of revenge. Sam's brother Rocky then calls the unsuspecting George and invites him to Sam's birthday party. But he makes it clear to George that he shouldn't talk to anyone about it. The boat trip is joined by young Millie, who is in love with Sam, but has no idea of ​​his plan.

A few days later they pick up George from home for Sam's birthday party. The overweight boy who takes his handheld camera with him on the trip even bought a present for Sam, a water pistol. Soon Sam and Millie noticed completely different sides of George, who is actually an introverted outsider and would like to be one of the five friends. At the river, Millie learns the reason George is taking the boat trip and asks Sam to drop the plans. Sam agrees and informs his older brother about it. The idyllic river trip on which George wants to compete with the cool Marty and from his alleged experiences with z. B. Cigarettes and drugs reported starts off peacefully. Tension only builds up during a layover when Marty learns of the changes to the plan. He doesn't think about letting Sam and Rocky spoil the fun. The needy George also reacts irritably when he is confronted by Sam, Clyde and Millie with his apparently baseless violence.

The situation relaxes again after the journey on the river, but with a lively truth-or-dare game in which Rocky has to tell about his sexual fantasies, Sam and Millie let themselves be carried away to a ten-second French kiss and Marty be the other boy Presenting the genitals, the emotions boil over. After his test of courage, George apes Marty and accidentally mentions his alcoholic father, who years ago took his own life with a firearm. Marty furiously asks George to do his duty and jump naked into the river. However, when George denies and replies that he had chosen the truth in the game , Marty reveals the real reason why they took him on the boat tour. Although Sam replies that they have gotten to know George better by now, that they think he is nice and that they have given up on the original plan, George is furious that he has been pestered by the group. He vows that Sam will go to hell for it, and denounces Millie, as well as Clyde and his fathers. As he devotes himself to Marty, he recalls the father's suicide and repeats the fact that Marty's father's brain was splashed on the walls of the room from the headshot. Marty tries to get revenge on George for this crime, but is held back by Rocky, who throws the troublemaker overboard. George, who cannot swim, goes under and loses consciousness from a bump with his head, but holds the hand-held camera until the end. Rocky, jumping into the water, finds the lifeless body near the shore, but Millie's attempts to resuscitate George fail.

As the weather darkens and it starts to rain, Sam, Rocky, Marty, Clyde and Millie are shocked by the terrible outcome of the boat trip. Rocky goes into a kind of shock, and Marty tries to appeal to him that George's death must have planned fate in advance. Clyde lies down next to the dead while Sam takes care of Millie, who fled from the boy and later vented her anger and fears on a snail that she cut in two with George's pocket knife. After heated discussions, Marty prevails, and the body is buried on the spot. He appeals to the other four to remain silent about the boy's death, and passes this on to his older brother and his friend, whom the group met with George on the drive to the river. However, Sam, Rocky, Millie and Clyde do not manage to hide the incident and confess the death of their only son to George's mother the following evening. While Marty raids a supermarket with his brother's gun and plans to flee to Mexico, the other four are interrogated by the police and the investigators lead the investigators to the buried body at dawn. George's handheld camera is also discovered. On the film material that has not been destroyed you can see the boy talking openly about capturing his life on celluloid from now on and burying the films in a time capsule in the garden to inform aliens about the thoughts in his head.

History of origin

Mean Creek is based on an original screenplay by director Jacob Aaron Estes, who made his first directorial work in 2001 with the 29-minute short Summoning ( 2001 ). The Mean Creek film script was inspired in part by personal experiences of Estes while living as a young screenwriter in San Francisco . On the local basketball court , Estes was mocked and bullied by the same drunken young man. His anger at this culminated in creative plans for revenge, which later resulted in violent fantasies, until the author asked himself who the tyrant actually was and why he let his hatred be felt in such a profound way. At the same time, the writer was working on a script about the everyday life of children, and Estes linked personal experience with the subject to create George , who evolved from a one-dimensional villain to a social outsider and a catalyst for the plot. Jacob Aaron Estes' screenplay was inspired by Francis Ford Coppola's Die Outsider (1983) as well as by the youth films Stand by Me by Rob Reiner and Das Messer am Ufer by Tim Hunter , both of which were made in 1986 . The similarity to Georg Britting's story Brudermord im Altwasser is striking .

Estes' first draft of the screenplay for Mean Creek saw him receive an invitation to the prestigious National Playwright Conference at the Eugene O'Neil Theater Center , where he revised and finalized his film script. Estes was then accepted into the Directing Program of the American Film Institute (AFI), where he met the later film producers of Mean Creek - Rick Rosenthal , chairman of the Directing Program at the Center for Advanced Film and Television Studies (CAFTS) of the AFI, and Susan Johnson and Hagai Shaham , fellow student of Estes. Rosenthal read the script and loved it, which later won the Nicholl Fellowship for Best Screenplay, a prize awarded by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to international talent in the film industry. Hollywood became aware of the young filmmaker and a director secured an option for Estes' script. The film was considered too risky after two teenagers running rampant at a high school in Colorado achieved notoriety through the Littleton school massacre in 1999 . However, the event confirmed Estes in bringing his own version of Mean Creek to the screen.

Estes and his fellow student Hagai Shaham bought back the rights to the script and the film slowly took shape with Whitewater Films, a new production company founded by Rick Rosenthal and Susan Johnson . The 13-year-old child star Rory Culkin , the younger brother of the well-known film actors Macaulay Culkin and Kieran Culkin , was won over for the lead role of the young Sam , who is being terrorized by his classmate George . The other leading roles were to be cast by an audition with five hundred young actors and actresses. Here the filmmakers became aware of Scott Mechlowicz and Josh Peck . Trevor Morgan , who had a supporting role in Mel Gibson's The Patriot (2000), and Ryan Kelley , who had starred in the television series Smallville , joined the film project. The young actress Carly Schroeder was engaged for the role of Millie . She had appeared in 2003 in the comedy Popstar in a roundabout way and was the last actress to audition for Mean Creek . Estes was so enthusiastic about Schroeder that he subsequently added scenes with her to the script. The baton was supplemented by cameraman Sharone Meir , experienced production designer Greg McMickle and costume designer Cynthia Morrill , who had previously assisted in large-scale productions such as Edward Zwick's Last Samurai (2003). Madeleine Gavin and Tom Hajdu were hired for the editing and the film music .

The filming of Mean Creek took place in the US state of Oregon in the cities of Estacada , Portland and Troutdale . The youthful cast, who, with the exception of Scott Mechlowicz, had not yet reached the age of 18, spent a week preparing for filming in the wilderness of Oregon. Jacob Aaron Estes played there with the Ensemble Theater and a version of baseball called Wiffleball to get to know the actors better. He later discussed the motivations of the movie characters with them and reenacted a few more complex scenes that were to appear in Mean Creek . This preparation made the actors feel a. free to improvise. The film crew also booked rooms in a shared apartment complex so that the actors quickly became friends with each other. The river scenes that make up half of the film were created on the Clackamas River south of Portland and the marshy Lewis River on the border with Washington State . The filming on the water was supported by locals who usually rented fishing boats on the river. A small fleet of camera boats could be rented, supplemented by platforms floating on the water. Director Estes preferred to spend much of the filming in a wetsuit in the water so as to be closer to the actors and the boat in which they went down the river. Cinematographer Sharone Meir only used natural light and a hand-held camera for the production of Mean Creek , which was supposed to act as a gateway to the inner world of the young people.

The shooting was finished after only 24 days of shooting, which was also favored by the lack of the capricious Northwest Pacific weather. Except in the final scenes, where it was important for the mood, there was no rain.

reception

Jacob Aaron Estes' feature film debut premiered on January 15, 2004 at the US Sundance Film Festival . After the film u. a. At the Cannes Film Festival (May 14), Mean Creek officially opened on August 20, 2004 in four cinemas in Los Angeles and New York . For film distribution in the US showed Focus Features responsible. By December 12, 2004, the film had gross profits of nearly $ 604,000 at an estimated $ 500,000 production cost. The drama, which was not particularly successful financially, was dubbed one of the best independent films of the 2004 cinema year and compared with Rob Reiner's Stand by Me , Tim Hunter's Das Messer am Ufer (both 1986) and Larry Clark’s Bully ( 2001 ), which were also based on authentic and dramatically portray adolescents growing up. Parallels have also been drawn with Joseph Conrad's 1902 story Heart of Darkness . In addition to Estes' staging and Sharone Meir's camera work, the focus was primarily on the performance of the young acting ensemble, in particular Rory Culkin, Carly Schroeder and Scott Mechlowicz; The latter reminded some critics of a young James Dean . Critical voices complained that Estes had just oriented too much to works like Stand by Me and thus wasted the chance to open up a new perspective on youth films with Mean Creek .

Reviews

  • “A deeply moral-human melodrama at heart, the film succeeds in showing in a shocking and at the same time touching way that what is right in life often contradicts human nature. Estes characters are consistently human, psychologically credible and personable and are played by an impressively strong young cast. " (Blickpunkt: Film)
  • "Such a simple plot barely fills the 87 minutes of the film, but screenwriter and director Jacob Aaron Estes makes up for it with his labyrinth of moral dilemmas and complex characters." (Chicago Tribune)
  • "Jacob Aaron Estes' debut film about a backfiring teen prank is like an unusual, sensitive and well-acted detention offer." (New York Times)
  • "Takes its place alongside 'Stand by Me' and 'River's Edge' as one of the very few films that carefully describes the experiences of adolescent men." (San Francisco Chronicle)
  • “Jacob Estes, in his early thirties, has created a little independent pearl with 'Mean Creek'. He needs a handful of young actors, a rowing boat and a calm river in a heat-shimmering landscape to tell the story of growing up with extraordinary intensity and in a new variation. Estes trusts his heroes to act responsibly right from the start; he lets them wrestle and doubt and argue about the value of friendship and punishment. " (Die Welt)

Remarks

  • The names that actor Scott Mechlowicz aka Marty hatefully recalls during his target practice belong to actors or people who were involved in the production of Mean Creek .
  • The film title could be translated as “poor little river” or “nasty little river”.
  • During the Truth or Dare game, Rocky shares his sexual fantasies about a girl named Susan Johnson . In fact, the name belongs to a Mean Creek film producer .
  • Actor Josh Peck shot the video diary himself in the role of George .
  • When the producers asked actress Carly Schroeder how she would feel to spend the whole summer filming with an all-male acting ensemble, the 13-year-old informed the filmmakers about her brown belt in the martial art karate .

Awards

Mean Creek was u. a. in 2005 at the US Independent Spirit Awards with the John Cassavetes Award - a prize that honors the best film production with a budget under 500,000 US dollars - as well as with the irregularly awarded Special Distinction Award , which honored the performance of the young acting company recognized. The official justification of the award committee for awarding the Special Distinction Award read: “These young actors put their performance into practice so consistently, selflessly and so difficultly in coordination with one another that it is impossible to single out a single one from their coherent extraordinary result. The work is of such high quality that it moves beyond the skill of achieving that mysterious truth and beauty that defines the finest acting. "

Director Jacob Aaron Estes was also honored at the Stockholm Film Festival ; the two young actors Rory Culkin and Carly Schroeder were nominated for the Young Artist Awards .

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