Many have flocked to Salt Lake City to get some fresh air, but unlike most who look towards the mountains for rejuvenation, Hannah Peterson saw it as a place where she could invigorate from the ground level with “The Graduates,” well aware that when taking on a subject as difficult as the aftermath of a school shooting, only real conversations were a way forward.
“When I was looking for a location, it was really important to me to find a high school that would let me cast within their student body and administration,” says Peterson, who has long been developing her own brand of a narrative and nonfiction hybrid style from her time spent on the sets of Sean Baker and Chloe Zhao. “That’s why we actually shot in Salt Lake City because we found that high school who would let us do that, and a number of the teachers in the film and students in the film are actually Salt Lake City high school students and teachers.”
It could seem a little too on the nose that post-COVID, Peterson and crew would spark life in a school that had been emptied out and a student body was only gradually getting its bearings back when she began rolling film, but the writer/editor/director clearly has a way of bringing the best out of the environments in front of her, encouraging dialogue that might be held in otherwise. After creating that atmosphere on set, she’s apt to turn every theater “The Graduates” plays in into such a forum as it shows the students and staff at Lewis High School dealing with the fallout of a tragedy, coalescing around the death of one particular student Tyler, whose girlfriend Genevieve (Mina Sundwall) is obliged to think about her future with college on the horizon, but can’t think about anything but the past, and his friend Ben (Alex Hibbert), who transferred high schools as a way of putting distance between himself and that awful day, but finds himself returning more and more to Lewis anyway.
One may pity at first the poor basketball coach (John Cho) who is part of the faculty tasked with tending to the variety of emotional reactions his kids are having in “The Graduates,” but while Peterson is there for rock bottom, notably avoiding any depiction of the violent event, she beautifully illustrates how people can create a sense of community for one another in their grief, sometimes without knowing what impact they’re making. The transcendent result comes from the filmmaker’s own development of such a network behind the scenes lending the proceedings an unmistakable air of authenticity when a cast of professionals and nonprofessional actors work from a script based on countless discussions Peterson has had with actual teenagers, an element that has made her one to watch since her shorts “East of the River” and “Champ,” employing the same methodology. But in “The Graduates,” she is able to get at greater truths than what could be possibly known already when the film so elegantly expresses how people come to terms with what happened on their own time, observing a struggle to connect when a loss can mean different things to different people but recognizing those putting in the effort to ultimately persevere.
“The Graduates” would be special under any circumstances, but even in its release, Peterson is adopting an extraordinary communal approach, putting the film in the hands of The Future of Film is Female as its first theatrical release after the organization founded by Caryn Coleman played host to the director’s shorts throughout the years at their legendary screening series at New York’s Nitehawk and MoMA. In that same spirit, screenings of “The Graduates” will be accompanied by Maryam L’ange’s short “Rāz (The Secret)” and beyond its New York run at the Metrograph this week, special one-night events have been planned in Los Angeles, Portland, Winston Salem, Chicago and Cleveland in the months ahead. Recently, Peterson reflected on the film’s slow and steady build since premiering at Tribeca last year and the meticulous process of creating such a sensitive and touching drama.
“The Graduates” seems like the culmination of work you’ve already been doing in your short films, working with teenagers and relating these stories to how they’re coming-of-age these dates. How did it become a focus for you generally?
My first short “East of the River” I made off the heels of working on the set of “The Florida Project, and I was really interested in finding a subject that I could go heavy on the research with and cast actual high school students, taking a lot of the processes that I had learned from working on “The Florida Project” into my own work. Prior to making “East of the River,” I had worked on a documentary that was with an advocacy firm that focused on school pushouts —students who are expelled or suspended — in the D.C. public school system and during that process, I interviewed a lot of high schoolers. Their stories just really stuck with me, so that seemed like a natural place to start and I just loved working with humans of that age.
As an emerging filmmaker, I was also looking for people that were really collaborative in the process. Whether you’re a non-actor or an actor, I think anyone of that age is just really hungry to be really involved in a project creatively, so that was a big reason, just process-wise, of why I wanted to focus on a younger age group for my work. Then everything since has just been an evolution of that.
It seems really savvy to often cast someone with a lot of experience like Eva Noblezada as the lead in “Champ,” but surround them with nonprofessionals to get a certain feeling. How did that approach come about?
That was something that I knew was integral to my work, and that I wanted to keep up [with “The Graduates”]. With both “Champ” and “The Graduates,” the subject matter has a lot to do with trauma and [requires] a lot of emotional maturity to the role and I felt like in my evolution as a filmmaker, it became really important to me that whoever is carrying that role has the tool set and the process to be able to navigate portraying a role like that and also be able to take off that role [when the camera stops], so for both of those leads, it was important to me to have someone who had acting experience that I knew would be able to navigate that. For “The Graduates,” I always wanted to have the texture of real high school students as a part of it. It just gives a level of credibility to coming-of-age to me.
What was the seed for “The Graduates”?
I had seen a incredible piece in the New York Times called “Inside Santa Monica High,” that were all photographs by Nico [Young], a young photographer who at the time was a senior at Santa Monica High School. I was really enraptured by these photographs because even though they’re current, they captured the kind of timelessness of high school and the doldrums of it and the experience. Visually, that was something I really wanted to accomplish and Nico’s photographs are actually in “The Graduates” — in the scene where [Genevieve, played by Mina Sundwall] is hanging up her photographs, those are his. And those first conversations I had with high schoolers started from there. When I started to meet [them for “The Graduates”], the questions I was asking were like, “What are the highs and lows of high school? What is your experience now? And from that, the conversation around anxiety of school safety emerged.
From what I understand, you keep a conversation going throughout production, constantly asking what the film is actually about with the people on set. What’s it like to keep that up on a feature like this?
Yeah, there is a script going into the film and that is what we shot, but I’m constantly writing and asking everyone to write with me whether they be an actor or a crew member. That happens from the research to the writing to the casting to the making of it through the edit and it’s important to me once we’re working with actors to be able to have this script come out in their words, so we do a lot of workshopping of the dialogue, always allowing myself to be open to them interrogating the words and the plot as well, especially when working with real people.
For instance, the basketball team [in “The Graduates”] are all actual basketball players in Salt Lake City in high school and the script was really loose on that scene. It just said, “And then we’ll go around and ask and have the actual basketball players describe their hopes and dreams for the future.” Once we cast those students, we workshopped that scene and that ended up becoming their own dialogue, so there are certain parts of the script that are important for me to keep more scripted, but then there are places in the script that I’m writing into the actual script that it’s going to allow flexibility or malleability around the words because of casting actual people. That was the case for the basketball scene and the grief scene in “The Graduates.”
I just loved what you did with it, and especially this idea that people are all operating on their own timelines and experiencing their own trauma, so you’ll have scenes with conversations where it seems like the characters aren’t necessarily aligned with each other in terms of what they’re expressing. Was that difficult to pull off?
That’s certainly was my intention because I was on my own grief journey when I was making this film, and so were my family members and the people around me, so there was that idea that we’re all experiencing the same loss, but we’re navigating it in different ways and in different times. We feel this loneliness of losing somebody, even though it’s the same person we’re all missing. And in the writing itself, the three different characters were always on a different timeline and the way that they process their grief was really different. When I cast the actors, having individual conversations of what that meant was really integral to making sure that the characters were portrayed in that way. Then editing-wise, it was really interesting because the script was actually originally written very different from the edit. The script was written in almost three chapters. It’s Genevieve, Ben, and then John, and in the edit, it just became clear that I wanted to thread all three of them from the beginning. In that way, I think there is this kind of disjointedness [because] there were things that were from the third act that were brought up to the first act, but I think it actually helped me accomplish that idea that there is this disconnection and these different timelines [of grief] throughout each of their journeys that ultimately worked in the film’s favor.
When it’s that kind of radical reconception, was there a moment it really started to click for you?
Yeah, actually constructing the intro of the film and having all three characters there, but having them in these different spaces and knowing that at some point they were going to collide, but not knowing when exactly, that was the moment. There was this chemistry in the edit that was really exhilarating to me and brought something new. In trying to constantly rewrite the script to make it try to accomplish what its intention is, that was a big part of it. Once I saw that and the chemistry between having the three stories side by side, but not necessarily connecting, that was a big opening of a box for me.
You’re working with the great Carolina Costa (“Hala,” “Wander Darkly”) as your cinematographer. What was it like to develop the right visual language for this?
In the script, it originally had a quote in the beginning from [Simone Weil’s] “Gravity and Grace,” and it was about the fragility of life. Carolina and I really grasped onto that with this film. Because so much of the film is about who’s not there, we really sought the camera out as an embodiment of whatever that was, so the idea of the fragility of life and how to translate that in visual language is something that we spoke a lot about before we began filming. With that, there are a lot of scenes where you really do feel her hand, where she’s actually operating [the camera] that’s juxtaposed [against] these more steadicam moments that have this floating, almost ghostly feeling to it. The conversation between those two pieces of cinematic grammar are really what shaped the language for us.
What’s it been like to start seeing this film out in the world with audiences?
It’s been really meaningful. I’m so glad that we ultimately premiered at Tribeca because Tribeca is a really public-facing festival, as opposed to Sundance or Telluride [where] I would have loved to premiere, but they’re very industry-facing. Tribeca happens in the summer and anyone who sees the marquee can walk in and buy a ticket. I really feel like I had a public audience and that left a real indelible mark on me because the conversations I had afterward really showed that people do connect to this film. There’s specificity to the story, of course, that the characters lose someone to gun violence, but it’s very much just a story about grief, and in a lot of ways, especially coming off the pandemic, I think everyone has a touch point into that story and the meaningful conversations I had with people afterwards who were willing to be as vulnerable as the characters on screen was really important to me. It ended up creating a real a real live grief circle in a way and a community around that and helped me move forward in ways that I didn’t anticipate.
There’s also a community in another way with the release of the film being the first from The Future of Film is Female, where I know you’ve had your shorts play at their screening series throughout the years. How did you come to entrust Caryn Coleman and her team with this? It’s really exciting.
I’m excited too. People tell you along the way, “Oh, your film will find a home, don’t worry.” And it’s hard to believe in the moment when you’re trying to find a distributor and you’re trying to find an audience for it. But I really believe in that, and this ended up being the most perfect release for this film, because Caryn has taken a really film programming forward approach to it, and a really targeted way of finding an audience that is so meaningful. I think if we had gotten taken up by say a bigger distributor, it never would have gotten the type of theatrical release that it is and the type of attention and care and bespoke quality that this distribution has, so I just so appreciate how much Caryn has put her thoughtfulness into the release of it.
Caryn has been a big supporter of my career since making shorts. She helped program “The Graduates” at MoMA during the week of Tribeca, and she just always told me, “If you want to talk about distribution of this film, let me know,” and after a year of trying to go the traditional route of being acquired, I finally called her and I was like, “Let’s chat.” She had this up her sleeve as something that she really wanted to start for The Future of Film is Female and it seemed like the perfect film to activate that. so I’m really grateful that that’s how it ultimately ended up.
“The Graduates” opens on November 1st in New York at the Metrograph and will have screenings in Los Angeles on November 11th at Vidiots with a Q & A with Peterson and Sean Baker and November 15th at the Los Feliz 3 with a Q & A with the cast and crew, Portland, OR at the Tomorrow Theater on December 1st, Winston-Salem at the a/perature cinema on December 6th, Chicago at the Gene Siskel Film Center on December 18th and 19th and the Cleveland Cinematheque on December 19th and 20th. A full list of theaters and dates is here.