It’s easy to dismiss how hard it was to be a child. We grow up and encounter what we consider to be real challenges. Death, divorce, taxes. If our childhoods contained some measure of stability — clothing, food, shelter — the weighty realities of adulthood seem to supersede the fears and slights of being small. I don’t think I’m alone in the fact that I’ve never been particularly charitable to my small self.
Like many children without social gifts, I disappeared into books, searching for myself in their heroines. I loved Kay Thompson’s Eloise for her independence, Madeleine L’Engle’s Camilla for her romantic streak. I crafted elaborate fantasies around Frances Hodgson Burnett’s “A Little Princess,” in which a girl who is separated from her war hero father is mistaken for an orphan and ignored by her schoolmates, forced to sweep the floors, until he reappears in a burst of satin and cinnamon buns.
When I entered Hollywood more than a decade ago, movies for teenagers were having a moment — between “Twilight” and “The Hunger Games,” the power of engaged young people was being revisited. But unlike the films that raised me from girl to woman —“Slums of Beverly Hills” and “The Man in the Moon,” to name a few — these films required an epic hook. Vampire love, battles to the death, they have their pleasures, but so does simply watching the world through the eyes of a teenager.
I started dreaming of making this film when I was 20, but we didn’t shoot until I was 34. By growing, my empathy grew too, and the characters who were once antagonists — Birdy’s lost alcoholic father, her overwhelmed mother, her grizzled suitor — filled out for me in a way that only lived experience can provide.
lenadunham She is a horrible person. Because of who parents she got to cut in line and get show almost no one watched. And some how she is still getting platformed.
lenadunham Hi barf okay bye