Chasing her dreams

The road to movie stardom is filled with potholes, and success as a pop singer doesn’t necessarily smooth the way.

Witness the trials of Beyonce, Brandy and Britney Spears, whose success hasn’t translated to the movies, or even into that many parts. At least not yet.

Then there’s Mandy Moore, who has been working slowly but steadily in movies since a small role in 2001’s “The Princess Diaries.” The most recent film to hit theaters, “Chasing Liberty,” opened to lackluster box office, but she remains undaunted.

An independently produced film, “Saved,” in which she stars with an impressive cast of twentysomethings, premiered Wednesday at the Sundance Film Festival and screens again today (three times) and Friday. It is scheduled to open April 23.

Moore, who grew up in Florida and now lives in L.A., has been in the public eye since 1999, when her first album, a giddy bit of sugar pop called “So Real,” was released. She was 15.

“Basically what happened was I did a lot of musical theater as a kid,” explains Moore, sipping green tea in a Los Feliz coffee shop, “and I got a record deal and I released some really bad music. But, obviously, doors opened and opportunities came around, so it was a great platform to start with.”

These opportunities included an audition for Gary Marshall and the part in “The Princess Diaries.” Moore’s experience on the film was enough to convince her that acting was something she wanted to pursue.

“I always knew somehow that if I got where I wanted to be, whether it was through Broadway or acting or music or film,” says Moore, “I knew that I wanted to try my hand at a little bit of everything. ‘Princess Diaries’ solidified the fact that I wanted to venture into that territory and see what happened. I was so used to being on the road at 14 and 15, alone. I was in love with the circle of friends and the sort of family you make when you are working on a film set. I love that. It’s such a team effort and you don’t have to carry everything on your own back, like you do in the music. After doing that, I felt it was just about taking the time to find the right projects.”

After her stint in Marshall’s film, Moore took that time and ultimately chose an unexpected follow-up. Instead of jumping head-first into the fluffy teen roles she seemed perfectly groomed for, she took a surprising sidestep with the 2002 drama “A Walk to Remember.”

“Sometimes, something kind of hits you with a script, where you’re like, ‘I want to be part of this!’ I had read the Nicholas Sparks book a year and a half before I heard anything about the film. Then I saw the script sitting on someone’s desk and I was like, ‘I have to be a part of that movie.’ I was willing to do whatever I had to do to be a part of it. I was really lucky. After that film came out, people responded so strongly, it was a weird kind of turning point for me to have people walk up to me in the street and say, ‘I love your film’ or ‘It made me think.’ I’d never experienced that with music.”

Moore smiles and looks out the window.

“I want to involve myself in more projects like that in terms of music and film,” she says. “I want to do something that touches people, that’s meaningful.”

Unfortunately, “meaningful” roles aren’t necessarily what the film industry offers nubile and highly marketable teen stars. But somehow, Moore has managed to avoid the coming-of-age pitfalls that have stymied other underage sensations.

“You have to make a conscious decision to be yourself,” she says, “and I’m just lucky in the sense that me being me is kind of considered to be OK. I’m also lucky in that from a very young age I made sure this wasn’t going to affect who I was. And no one was going to take that away from me. It’s a good feeling to have your own identity. I kind of feel like from Day One I’ve been allowed to be myself, which is pretty unusual. What you see is what you get. I don’t have to be a different person on camera or onstage and then another off the stage. That seems exhausting to me.”

“You don’t have much control,” she continues, “but you are able to choose your projects, so you have that control. You choose a project that doesn’t require nudity, for instance. Being a young person in the music industry, I wasn’t afforded those choices, so now, I really put my foot down. Really, it all comes from growth.”

The miracle here is that Moore seems to have grown gracefully, not an easy task in an industry that tends to treat teenagers either too much like adults or too much like children.

“I think teenagers are a lot smarter than people give them credit for,” she says. “There is this expectation that the audience needs to have everything explained. I think they look at people that age as the lowest common denominator and figure they can keep feeding them the same sort of rehashed music or film plot line over and over and over again.

“And sure, I’ve been involved with those kinds of movies and I’ve made that kind of music, but I think people that age are so much smarter than that; they’re craving a challenge.”

Moore has continuously challenged herself, balancing roles in sweet teen flicks like “How to Deal” with more daring excursions, such as her role as a snooty Baptist high school bully in the gleefully subversive comedy “Saved.”

“It was an amazing cast,” says Moore of the film, which also stars Jena Malone, Patrick Fugit and Macaulay Culkin, “and it covers a lot of dicey topics in a really inoffensive way, although it will be interesting to see what the radical Christian community will think of it.”

In “Chasing Liberty,” Moore plays the put-upon daughter of the U.S. president, a young girl forced to stumble into womanhood under the unrelenting eye of the Secret Service.

“It’s a sweet, romantic movie,” she says. “I had never really done anything like that before and I’m such a fan of those films. I go to see them with my girlfriends all the time.”

As for the parallels between her life and that of her “Chasing Liberty” character, “I chose to take this path in my life and I knew that if things went well for me all the chaos would ensue, whereas my character in the film, someone else has made that choice for them. For me, the choice was entirely mine and I have to live with whatever the repercussions are.”

For Moore, those repercussions have turned out to be worth the reward, but at 19 there is a still a whole life ahead of her.

“Lately, I think I’ve started thinking about other things I want to do,” she says quietly, taking a last sip of tea. “I want to go to college, I want to travel, I want to open a theater for young people, I want to get married and have a family. There are a million things I want to do. So, we’ll see what happens. I don’t want to get too used to it, but you also can’t take it for granted, of course.

“I’m thankful for everything I’ve been able to do and I want to accomplish a lot more, of course, but I guess I’m just realistic in that as fast as it’s come to me, it can be taken away just as quickly.”