Playing a part, you get to know the inner drive of a character from inside out. ![]() Since you performed this every night on stage, did that give you some special insight in how to ultimately bring this to the screen?ĭefinitely. If anything, I just had to become clearer and clearer about the story I wanted to tell. The things that resonated with me eight years ago still resonate with me today. I’ve had to grow and learn a lot about how to actually make a movie through this process, but my love of Minnie has never wavered and my feelings about these characters and why this story is important has always been there. I don’t know that it’s shifted or changed all that much. If this has been eight years out of your life, what’s it been like to grow up with this project? Has your perspective on the story changed as you’ve gotten older? Shortly before the film hits theaters, Heller spoke about its eight-year journey to the screen, having the confidence to become a writer/director without any notable prior experience and potentially giving audiences the same inspiration that Gloeckner’s novel gave her. There’s no doubt that Heller, who shares a background with Minnie as a self-described “child of hippies” from the Bay Area, brings a historical authenticity to the film, but it’s the emotional authenticity and compassion that extends to all of the characters in “Diary of a Teenage Girl” that makes it so impressive and trenchant. Instead, she turns to a tape recorder to keep track of her thoughts, a sketchpad to express herself and her favorite underground comics characters to talk to. Further confused by an era just between the free lovin’ ’60s and the cultural conservatism of the 1980s with the echoes of the Patty Hearst kidnapping saga never far away in her hometown of San Francisco, Minnie (played by an iridescent Bel Powley) is left to her own devices to figure out who she is with no easily identifiable role model, given her mother (Kristen Wiig) is preoccupied with her own complicated relationships with men and her lover (Alexander Skarsgard) should know better, but doesn’t. Aesthetically a mix of earthy animation and beautifully burnished live-action and tonally exuberant and contemplative, it’s perfectly suited to convey the mix of occasionally incongruous impulses and actions of its high school heroine, thrust into adulthood by an affair she has with her mother’s boyfriend. It was, since it’s hard to imagine anyone else give as much care and attention to make the film adaptation of “Diary of a Teenage Girl” to work as well as it does. “I would’ve expected at some point I would’ve been bored with it, but that part’s never happened, so that always felt like a good sign,” Heller says now, with a slight laugh. ![]() Still in her twenties when the play hit the boards at the 3LD Art & Technology Center in lower Manhattan in 2010, Heller wasn’t too old to play its lead Minnie, burrowing even deeper into the world Gloeckner created. An actress when her younger sister gifted her a copy of Phoebe Gloeckner’s graphic novel, she became a playwright when she became so enamored of Gloeckner’s account of a 15-year-old’s blossoming as an artist and a sexual being that every square inch of her place was covered by a photocopied page from the book, annotated and reshuffled so it could be staged off-Broadway while preserving the hazy, reminiscent quality that made her love it so much in the first place. Though Marielle Heller had passed the formative years that she recounts so tenderly in her feature debut “The Diary of a Teenage Girl,” making a film meant an entirely different coming of age.
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