Hard Candy, David Slade’s taut, tense thriller about pedophilia, is a stunning first feature. The film’s story—about 32-year-old photographer and and a 14-year-old girl—began with Ridley Scott’s company moving Slade from London, where he’d directed commercials and music videos, to LA, where he planned to direct a film written by a friend.
“Tragically, my friend died, and the film was put on hold,” says Slade. “I sought another project—was sent action scripts. I grew up on Nicholas Roeg, Werner Herzog and other kinds of subtle cinema—and I say cinema rather than movies. I didn’t want my first feature to be helicopters and cars blowing up. Hard Candy was the first script sent to me that I couldn’t stop reading. Brian Nelson put such complex arguments into such simple words; it made me question my values and beliefs. I wanted something challenging; Hard Candy was challenging.”
MERIN: Ellen Page is awesome—but what convinced you to sign an unknown 17 year old to carry your film?
SLADE: Ellen’s incredibly articulate, smart, and she understood the character in a way other people didn’t. She didn’t overplay sexual flirtation and remembers the passion of being 14. It took time to convince the backers because she looks very young, and they were scared—there’s always a little struggle between writer and director and backers.
Did you have final cut?
No, but I’d change only one shot, and I’ll not tell you which. In the end, we made the film we wanted to make. Hard Candy’s about taking responsibility for your actions—something people in the Western world relinquish whenever possible. This film challenges people at an extreme point and tries to see how someone reaches that extreme point.
Were there impediments because of Ellen’s age or the subject matter?
There was some trepidation and nervousness from the backers. Early on, there was talk of cutting sexual flirtation lines, but I said, “For God’s sake: I was 14, you were 14—I don’t know what you think 14 year olds do, but we’re not cutting these lines. And, we’re not changing anything to sidestep an R rating. No! We’re not having her say that because then you’ll want to use it. So sue me.”
You mean you didn’t shoot some scenes as a way of controlling the editing?
That makes it sound like the producers were difficult to work with, but they were really nice. I must say that putting myself in their shoes, which I do whenever I’m in a…What’s that word? When you reach a stalemate?
Standoff?
No, a film word that’s tailored, as film words are, to be polite—an impasse.
Their worries were genuine—because they’d invested $1 million and were scared an “R” would keep people away. Brian and I felt we were on solid ground. When they saw there was nothing gratuitous in the rushes, their responses became more positive. Then, when we were the toast of Sundance in 2005 and entered a bidding war, everyone’s fears were completely allayed.
Since you avoided some choices by not shooting them, what challenged you in editing?
Cutting Brian [Nelson]’s dialog—because it’s incredibly smart. It’s not text; it’s text with subtext, with subtext, with subtext. People said the film should run 80 minutes. No! If you cut dialog, you lose what’s underneath the surface. The balance of characters was dialog. There wasn’t concern about throwing bias towards one or the other, because it was on the page. The difficulty was cutting to a length people could sit through, while keeping Brian’s script’s integrity.
What about your use of color?
Color’s an incredible emotional motivator if you feel it, not see it. In Hard Candy, I could use color to underscore emotions because performances were strong enough that audiences would focus on the characters, looking through this transparent color-mesh surrounding them.
There’s damnation in Patrick’s character—at the end things are black and white, shot in silhouette. That’s deliberate. Earlier, Ellen’s colors shift between cold and warm. It could’ve been overbearing, but her strong performance allows me to go that far. Color-density shifts are clues for the audience—there’s a section where density, sharpness and contrast change over 20 minutes—you don’t perceive it, but it’s an emotional resonance underscoring the performance.
Were the actors aware of this?
We mentioned it, but it wasn’t important to them. I’d ask them to emphasize a line, saying this or that will be happening, too. Or suggest the key to a scene is this word, because something visual would happen, too. But they just focused on acting—which was fine with me.
