True to a Difficult Age

Most things adults know better. Except certain things, which teenagers know best. Like that first time you fall in love and walk around with a tingly, achy sensation coiled in the pit of your stomach. Or the first time you break up, and the certainty that you’ll never be able to get over it seems wired in every cell of your body.

That kind of stuff has been on Jodie Foster’s mind lately. “I’ve been thinking a lot about when I was 15, 16, feeling like I was completely alone in the world and there was nobody to understand what I was going through,” she says, at 39 very much a grown-up mom but irresistibly drawn to matters of the adolescent heart. “I don’t think I’ve ever been as dark or as sad. But to me it was also beautiful: I never felt as much. So I really wanted to make a movie that is true to those things.”

To this end, Foster rolled up her sleeves and went to work as an indie film producer; the sweet, tart fruit of her labor arrived in New York and Los Angeles theaters Friday. “The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys” is a movie about teenagers that strives to convey both their exuberance and immaculate seriousness; its eye-candy layers peel off one by one to reveal the big emotions of youth. Embodying the passage from innocence to experience are three young actors--Emile Hirsch, Kieran Culkin and Jena Malone--who were about the same age as their characters, 15, when “Altar Boys” wrapped. After the nearly two-year post-production process (the film includes animated sequences), the three are older and wiser to the ways of filmmaking.

Teen movie conventions routinely allow 15-year-old characters to be played by those in their 20s who need to shave twice a day. “Their voices are way low, so they squeak them up by tightening their jockstraps,” Hirsch jokes. “I know people in high school who look like, honestly, they’re still in sixth grade. But in the movies, how these people look is like adults!”

Teen actors are rarely asked to play parts that make use of what comes naturally to them, says “Altar Boys” director Peter Care. No amount of adult competence can convey to the same effect the clumsiness of body language, the transparency of emotion, the mixture of bravado and fragility typical of that age, Care suggests.

“When boys are getting 13, 14, 15, they don’t know what the heck is going on with their bodies, and they have that mixture of real innocence and yearning for the truth about life written all over their faces,” he says.

Foster, who knows something about growing up on screen, shared those insights with Hirsch and Malone recently when she joined them in a conversation about cinematic and real-life adolescence in the Mid-Wilshire office of the film’s publicity firm. Looks allowed Foster to be cast as a teen in “Stealing Home” at 25, when she remembers vowing to herself that it would be for the last time.

“Did you feel like you were stealing all these roles from the younger kids?” Hirsch asks. He has been acting since age 10, but the role of Francis, the protagonist among the titular altar boys and a daydreamer whose feverish imagination turns everybody around him into comic-book characters, is his meatiest part yet.

Foster fought to cast teenage leads and used her star power to secure wider audiences by giving herself a supporting part. With “Altar Boys,” her ambitions extend to repairing other omissions of the teen movie genre, especially the absence of dark themes with big appeal to the hearts and minds of teenagers but seldom reflected on the screen.

“I think adults love to believe that sadness is not a part of children’s lives,” she says. At that age, “the questions are huge and complicated, and a lot of them are incredibly sad: ‘What will I be like?’ ‘Will I be successful, or will everybody spit on me?’ ”

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It began as a 1994 J.D. Salinger-esque novel by author Chris Fuhrman, and the story has sprung to the big screen with its sensibility intact. In performances that bring to mind the gauche charm of teenage poetry scribbled in notebook margins, Hirsch and Culkin play Francis and Tim, respectively, ringleaders of a gang of teenage daredevils on the loose in an early-’70s Southern town.

They fancy themselves comic book heroes and scheme to sow fright in the souls of their Catholic high-school teachers. They seek forbidden wisdom in books and alcohol. And sometimes they stare at bedroom ceilings studded with Day-Glo stars and try hard to imagine what William Blake meant when he praised the nakedness of woman as the work of God.

Malone plays a strange girl named Margie, who is the subject of Francis’ love-struck doodlings and ultimately his guide into the bittersweet business of adulthood. Foster dons a nun’s habit and a prosthetic leg as Sister Assumpta, the uptight teacher who haunts the teenagers’ dreams as a motorcycle-riding hellcat.

The goal of “Altar Boys” was to have on screen true teens who come across not just as “the daughter, or the son, but someone with emotions, complications, problems: things that are not necessarily stereotypical of what a young person is,” says Malone, 17: “Allowing young [characters] to live and breathe and become a lot of different things that don’t seem particularly accessible. Things that are just

“Those things that people have to deal with: love and hurt and loss, all of that,” Culkin picks up the thread by phone from Manhattan. At the ripe age of 19, he is the oldest of the trio and proudly proclaims that he’s “out of school and into life.” He slipped naturally into the role of charismatic Tim, the fairest of the altar boys who is given to dionysiac histrionics and much verse quoting. “There’s a lot of movies for kids out there, but they’re really not my style,” he says simply. “The kind of movies ‘Not Another Teen Movie’ makes fun of--except that movie was funny.”

Amid a slew of pictures that target teens with glib, ironic messages, “Altar Boys” stands out for a tone that is equal parts black humor and poetry. “At that age you are into the poetry of things, but you also have a darker side, drawn to violence and video games and being naughty in school,” director Care says. In the film, the satirical angle surfaces in animated sequences that represent Francis’ comic-style drawings come to life. It is the stuff of dramatic thoughts and wild emotions that boys of his age feel but typically cannot articulate. The clear split between fantasy and reality, says the director, freed the movie to deal truthfully with the more delicate, private emotions of teens--like falling in love.

Foster is convinced that the first time this happens is unlike any other time in your life. “Adults say, ‘You know what? You’re gonna fall in love 20 times in your life. It doesn’t matter!’ ” she says, mimicking a motherly voice. “But that’s just not right, because the first time that happens it’s more painful and more horrible than any other time.”

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If adults turn a blind eye to the darkness of young age, does it comes as a surprise that teens go hunting for answers to the difficult questions of life in grown-up movies?

Malone: “I remember seeing ‘Thelma & Louise’ when I was 9 and not being able to get those women out of my head,” Foster: “The movies that really touched you when you were younger are never the movies you were supposed to see; it’s always the R-rated movies. For me, it was ‘Coming Home,’ it was ‘A Dog Day Afternoon.’ ” (“Altar Boys” is also R-rated.)

Besides the gloom and doom that makes being a teen so pleasantly dramatic, there is fun to be had--especially if you happen to be an actor. “Some things that you do ... it’s not even acting, a lot of it,” Hirsch says. “Some of the stuff I did before ‘Altar Boys,’ all these movies--they were really horrible. But you know, I got to go to Australia for three months in seventh grade to do a monster movie: It was just fun, like an adventure.”

According to Foster, collaborating with adults and having opinions valued puts teenage actors light-years ahead of their peers. “Acting is basically psychology,” she says, pointing to her head and speaking in her familiarly rapid, precise delivery as Malone and Hirsch listen intently. “For a young person to be dealing with psychology in that way, to understand about emotions and talk about how people feel, I think it’s really helpful.”On the downside, you end up spending way too much time with grown-ups, and being in their world of money and power is “kind of crazy,” Malone says.

Foster’s knowledge of the movie business since age 6 has made her protective toward young actors. “I’m like the ultra-mother on the set,” she says. “But some people aren’t.”

“Yeah, they tell you, ‘Tough it out!’ ” Hirsch says, nodding, and that’s when the war stories come spilling out: Foster’s “bad, bad frostbite that always comes back,” a souvenir from the set of “The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane,” which she did at 12. Outfitted only in thin liner socks, she soldiered on for take after take in below-freezing temperatures, until tears came and someone finally asked what was wrong. “Like they couldn’t tell I was cold!” she bristles.

Of course, there is the story of Robert De Niro taking Foster under his wing during the making of “Taxi Driver,” when he helped her concoct an Oscar-nominated performance as a precocious streetwalker. But not all adults were as generous. “I do remember actors being actively unhelpful,” Foster says. “Like trying to get me upset for a scene. Instead of saying, ‘OK, let’s talk about what this person’s feelings are,’ they’d say something like, ‘You’re no good!’ Or they would just talk at me, like, ‘Be happy! Smile!’ They just couldn’t imagine that [I had] a brain and could think for myself.”

Care says he treated his two young male leads as adults, or as if they were his teenage sons, as the occasion demanded. He admits that sometimes the boys were just boys: “One day Kieran would be totally on, he would want to change the script, and his changes were great,” Care recalls. “And then the next day it would be opposite: Emile would be on fire, reacting instead of acting--absolutely amazing. But Kieran would be totally unfocused because he stayed up too late watching wrestling the night before. And you’re going crazy!” Care says.

Not that the first-time director wants to complain too much about working with teenagers: “I heard that adult actors do it the same.”