Maui born and raised, Destin Daniel Cretton, 38, started making short films as a hobby after he graduated from Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego.
His next stop was film school at San Diego State, where his senior project was a short film inspired by his experiences working at a group home for troubled teens. That film became the basis of an award-winning short, “Short Term 12,” that he later expanded into a well-received feature-length film starring Brie Larson.
Larson stars with Woody Harrelson and Naomi Watts in Cretton’s new movie, “The Glass Castle,” a beautifully filmed adaptation of Jeannette Walls’ best-selling memoir about growing up in a dangerously unstable and highly dysfunctional family. It opens nationwide Friday.
JOHN BERGER: “The Glass Castle” and “Short Term 12” are about people who don’t fit into conventional society. Are these the types of people you find interesting as a filmmaker?
DESTIN DANIEL CRETTON: The theme that I feel very attracted to with the stories I’m telling — at least right now — have to do with family. I think that in a lot of ways comes from being raised in Hawaii where every one of your friends’ parents you call “Auntie” and “Uncle,” and the idea of family extends beyond the typical nuclear family.
In “Short Term 12” it’s this unconventional family that’s created out of necessity. In this movie it’s another version of a very unconventional family. As soon as I opened the book and started seeing the relationships between Jeannette and her siblings, so much of it just felt like home to me and the experience of ohana in Hawaii.
JB: Where did you find Ella Anderson and Chandler Head, who play Jeannette at ages 10 and 6? They are amazing!
DDC: They both auditioned, and just before Ella came in I’d kind of start panicking wondering if there was any 11-year-old girl in the country who would be able to do those scenes. And the first scene we did — I’d never seen an actor tackle a scene like that, I didn’t know if it was even going to work — and 11-year-old Ella brought so many layers to it. It just blew us all away.
There were all these things that just naturally came out of her, that weren’t on the page, and I wasn’t expecting any of it.
JB: What would you do if you encountered a family like the Walls?
DDC: Hopefully I would get to know them and try to understand the context of everything that they’re going through. Everything that those kids were going through could easily have been labeled abuse and neglect, but I know for a fact that Jeannette would 100 percent say that she has no regrets and would choose a thousand times over to have stayed with her family and be raised in the way that she was.
JB: This is your second film with Brie Larson. Will she become your muse in future projects?
DDC: If I had my choice I’d keep working with her forever. I’m obviously a huge fan of her as an actor and a performer and also a director herself.
Aside from that, I’m a big fan of her as a person. If we don’t work together again, we’ll continue to be friends.
JB: What advice do you have for teenagers in Hawaii interested in filmmaking?
DDC: Do it because you love it, not because you want to make money or become famous. If you love the process of doing it, then do it. There are feature films being shot on iPhones now, so anybody can get into the craft and practice doing it.
You can start right now. Write something, get your friends together and just go shoot something and try to have fun doing it.
“On the Scene” appears on Sundays in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. Reach John Berger at jberger@staradvertiser.com.
