“It’s a tearjerker in the best sense of the word. I hope it will really touch people’s hearts and make them feel something”
David T Friendly |
American Pie star Chris Klein as Kelley |
But gradually, as the days get hotter and July 4 draws near, the experience of being in contact with a real family - far from the sterile luxury of his own ‘home’ - and the luminous nearness of Samantha give him a whole new perspective on life.
Although Jasper and Samantha have been going out together since childhood, the growing love between the latter and Kelley is, says director Mark Piznarski, “something which changes them all, and which gives them something they would not otherwise have had”. This, he insists, remains true despite the tragic circumstances which both darken the tone and heighten the emotion of the final minutes of the movie.
Piznarski, here making his feature debut after directing episodes of such hit TV series as NYPD Blue, Relativity and My So-Called Life, was recommended for the job by Ed Zwick, one of the creators of thirtysomething, who was initially approached but couldn’t fit Here on Earth into his schedule. “I’m kind of a protégé of his,” jokes Piznarski. “But, when I read the project, there was something in it I really responded to. I’m a father and I have a 13-year-old daughter. And whenever we go to the video store, we can never find any teenage movies that are not foul-mouthed or violent. This is something I would have wanted her to see.
“It’s not about a rich young man who falls in love,” he insists. “I think it plays on more levels than that. It’s about how three lives are affected by one another. We’re trying to portray young people and their relationships in a mature, realistic way.”
Leelee Sobieski - from TV’s Joan of Arc - as Samantha |
Here on Earth, like Love Story - and, in a very different way, Romeo + Juliet - is one of very few recent teen-oriented movies that doesn’t shy away from emotion. At the same time, Piznarski insists, it doesn’t cross the line into sentimentality. “But it’s a narrow line,” he admits. “I guess it has to do with being honest to your characters.” What is more, he says, his three principal actors - who are all slightly older than the characters they are playing - found no difficulty relating to the intensity of the emotions felt by Kelley, Samantha and Jasper. Nor did they feel the need to play them down, much less make fun of them: after all, what happens to Kelley and Samantha is somewhere we’ve all been or, if we’re still in our early teens, will soon go.Producer David T Friendly is quite happy to take on board the label ‘tearjerker’ when talking about Here on Earth. “But it’s a tearjerker in the best sense of the word,” he says. “I hope it will really touch people’s hearts and make them feel something.
“The film relates to something we’ve all experienced: when you first fall for someone and your feelings for him or her are all that exist in the world,” he adds. “Our story builds a triangle within the environment of experiencing first love, which in turn provides drama and emotion.”
Although it is set in Massachusetts - among the wooded hills of the Berkshires loved and celebrated by the poet Robert Frost, whose work is quoted several times in the film - it was actually filmed in the very un-Frost-like state of Minnesota, where an ideal location was found in an area known as the ‘Land of 10,000 Lakes’, complete with Frost’s beloved birches - that “little bit of heaven here on earth”.
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