A Young Director Tells a Veteran How He Did It

Jonathan Demme, the Oscar-winning director of “The Silence of the Lambs,” was at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where he saw “Crime + Punishment in Suburbia.” He was so intrigued by the film that he thought it would be interesting to talk with Rob Schmidt, the film’s director.

Schmidt, 34, a graduate of the American Film Institute, had previously directed “Saturn,” which premiered at the 1999 Los Angeles Independent Film Festival. “Crime + Punishment in Suburbia” is Schmidt’s second feature film.

Demme, 55, who is based in New York, spoke with Schmidt in Los Angeles by phone this week. Here are some excerpts from their conversation.

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Jonathan Demme: What relationship does the film have to Dostoevsky’s novel?

Rob Schmidt: “Crime + Punishment in Suburbia” is a really loose adaptation. It doesn’t have the same characters but the theme is intact. The main character kills a terrible person, conceals the crime, is consumed by it, suffers secretly, confesses and in a spiritual way is reborn. It’s just that it takes place in a California high school instead of Siberia.

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Demme: I’m really curious about how all this started. Can you tell me anything about the life of this movie, the creative process and the casting?

Schmidt: About 10 years ago, Larry Gross wrote this script, and it sort of languished for a while. The idea was to make a B-movie high school flick but make it secretly about God and redemption, and it wasn’t until there was the run of high school movies that people began to buy the idea of it.

Then, at about that same time, Mark Waters, who directed “The House of Yes,” handed the script off to me because he had a feeling I’d like it. I loved it and I took it to Christine Vachon, one of the producers of “Boys Don’t Cry,” and she agreed to produce it. Ellen Barkin, who plays the main character’s mother, was the first actor to come on board and that paved the way for Michael Ironside, Monica Keena, who I’d seen when she was very young in a tiny indie [film] called “Ripe,” and Vincent Kartheiser, who astounded me in “Another Day in Paradise.” I was lucky enough to cast Jeffrey Wright before he got his roles in “Ride With the Devil” and “Shaft.” It was actually very easy to set up after 10 hard years for Larry.

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Demme: The original title of the movie was “Crime and Punishment in High School.” Why the change?

Schmidt: I really loved that title and the idea was that the film would be marketed as a B high school movie. But a few weeks before we started to shoot, the Columbine massacre happened, and people’s perception and sensitivity of teen violence in this country changed. Ultimately the movie was retitled because the studio wanted to take attention away from the violence, rather than explore it.

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Demme: You’ve got an incredibly excruciating murder scene worthy of Alfred Hitchcock. This violence isn’t “fun”--you reveal the true horror of it. The movie has an R rating, which of course makes it a marketing challenge. Do you feel there is also a moral challenge in the R rating?

Schmidt: I feel that one of the main themes of the film is that kids are taught that violence is a solution, but it isn’t, it devastates them. That kind of fantasizing alienates people from themselves, and I thought the movie was very responsible in the way it intrinsically portrayed violence as a bad thing. In Italy the movie was rated “14 and over.” The film board made an exception because of the purpose of the film’s violence. The point of the movie is that violence wreaks havoc in every direction.

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Demme: I’ve seen some of your earlier work, and present in that as well as this movie is a very tough, unsentimental approach to human nature, but you also display tremendous heart and great humanity through your characters. Is that what attracted you to “Crime + Punishment in Suburbia” in the first place, a chance to bring an unflinching, humanistic vision to the table?

Schmidt: I try to approach movies by loving the characters and I try to understand them as people. If they do vicious things, I want to understand why. In particular with this movie, I grew up in suburbia and I really hated it, I detested it.

I felt very alone there, particularly as a high school kid. When I read the script, I thought it was an opportunity to make a movie for disenfranchised kids, and by being hard-nosed about people in that world, I hope that kids will feel like they’re witnessing something they know, not some counterfeit model of it. So really my goal was to make something for the disenfranchised teenagers of America.

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Demme: Of all ages.

Schmidt: Including myself at 34.

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Demme: And even I, another couple decades down the line. . . . I understand that there was some pressure to remove all references to God from the movie?

Schmidt: At one point Larry Gross and I had a “Is God really necessary?” meeting at the studio, but they eventually decided it was OK. I don’t know how we could have made “Crime + Punishment in Suburbia” without the concept of God, because that’s the gift at the end, the blooming of faith and the chance of a new life. If the film has a gift, it is spirituality and hope.

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Demme: Do you believe in God?

Schmidt: I hope to believe more. I pray a tiny bit in the morning and I pray at night, to say thank you. That’s pretty much the extent of the spirituality in my life. It’s different in the movies, because you can create a world where there is no question that God exists, that’s one of my favorite things about film and fiction.

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Demme: One of the things that I loved about the picture was that I felt right from the opening sequence that here’s a filmmaker, like Hitchcock, [Sam] Fuller and Paul Thomas Anderson, who is literally experimenting with film and making it work. Do you experiment?

Schmidt: I always try to work with people who love experimenting, because it’s one of my favorite things in the movies when people take risks and do strange things. I’ve worked with two really great cinematographers, Matthew Libatique and Bobby Bukowski, and they were both ready to push and pull film, put a camera on a dolly but use it hand-held and use still photographer lenses at the risk of everything being out of focus.

This movie was the first time I got to work with sound a lot, and I discovered all these things I never realized you could do with surround sound and rumble tracks to make the audience feel the character’s emotions. For example, there is a pep rally scene in the movie and we wanted to create a very frightening place out of the familiar, create a world where harm could be done to the viewer, so we underlaid elements from the Nuremberg rally, even a track of Hitler.