Todd Solondz, director
After the failure in 1989 of my debut Fear, Anxiety & Depression, an ill-conceived, ill-begotten project, I left the film business for several years and taught English to Russian immigrants. I was terrified of failing again, and irretrievably so – I don’t know that I would have survived. But I didn’t want that first movie to have the last word.
I started writing Welcome to the Dollhouse around the time of that first film. I couldn’t think of any American films that dealt in any serious way with childhood. Children in American films were either cute like a little doll or evil demons. The early drafts of Dollhouse were all darker and more depressing; it took time to find the right level of bleakness. My hope was the film would succeed well enough to let me make a living doing after-school specials [educational TV films for teenagers].
Was [lead character] Dawn Wiener a version of me? I don’t know that I was particularly awkward – no more than a typical 11-year-old. We all have our childhood and adolescent experiences, and they shape our lives as adults. I had materials to draw upon, like anyone else.
You have to break rules to get a movie made on $800,000. We sometimes worked in the middle of the night, which wasn’t really legal in the US, certainly with child actors. Heather, who I’d chosen to play Dawn, was a feisty girl who always had the energy and desire to work beyond what was required. Her mother was on set every day; there was certainly visible in Heather a kind of rebelliousness to go to places beyond what her mother felt comfortable with. On the second day of shooting, she had to kiss her tormentor, Brandon (played by Brendan Sexton). Each successive take made her mother more and more uncomfortable. That was Heather’s first kiss.
I had wanted to call the film Faggots and Retards, but I knew I had to be responsible if I wanted it to sell. The working title had been Middle Child – something that could have been a Disney film – because I didn’t want to attract any undue attention. When you’re dealing with children and sexuality, you have to be cautious. In the end, I took the title from the song in the movie. The poster was my concept: cut-out letters from different magazines and newspapers that the kidnapper in the film might have used.
Because a lot of people who had seen the rough cut were sceptical about the film’s content, I wasn’t just being paranoid when I expected it to fail. But when it sold to Sony Classics after Toronto film festival, I knew it was going places. It was a seismic shift in my life that I was capable of making a movie with such an impact. I was happy when I won the Grand Jury prize at Sundance in 1996 – who wouldn’t be? It’s nice to win prizes, it brings out the child in everyone.
Heather Matarazzo, actor
I was due to audition for one of Dawn’s friends, a role that ended up being cut. But Todd asked me to read for the lead. I was very candid about the script – I didn’t censor myself when I was young. I thought it was a PG version of what happened in junior high, and I said as much. Todd just did that nodding of the head, that slight smile – “Oh, reeeallly!” – that he has mastered so well. But he definitely tapped into a universal truth about a lot of kids being cruel.
There was only one scene I wasn’t in, and we were working 14-hour days, so there wasn’t much time to hang out with the other kids. Working with Todd was a silent, intuitive collaboration. My mother definitely had some reservations, though. In an earlier version, Brandon actually raped me. But I was very persistent and very adamant that this script was incredibly honest and spoke to me: the concept of a young woman who isn’t necessarily popular, doesn’t have any friends, and yet survives. My heroes at the time were Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind, Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz – other underdogs.
They didn’t fly me out to Toronto or Sundance, because of the expense, I think. It felt like having helped set up the party, then not being invited to it. I went into seventh grade that following year, so I was entering into the experience I had just done on film. When Dollhouse came out, there was definitely an element of kids being jealous. Acting like little assholes. I said to myself: I’m doing what I love right now. And you’ve probably peaked already.
I refused to play Dawn again when Todd brought her back in 2004’s Palindromes [Solondz resurrects Dawn again in Weiner Dog, played by Greta Gerwig]. I was 18, and I was trying to get away from that kind of “quirky” role. I had internalised Dawn quite a bit. Interviewers would say, “How does it feel to play such an ugly girl?” What I would hear was: “How does it feel to be so ugly?” Also Todd wanted the grownup Dawn to be a domestic terrorist who blows herself up in front of a Banana Republic. I didn’t want that to be her legacy. We’re both very passionate about Dawn, but I didn’t refuse his offer with the love and grace I could have. We didn’t speak again until recently. I found out about Wiener-Dog on Twitter.
• Todd Solondz’s Wiener-Dog is out now.
