When the Columbine school massacre happened, I was in my sophomore year of high school. I remember this vividly. It was the first time I’d heard of a mass shooting happening in a high school in my lifetime. The coverage on the media was intense, and I felt drawn to it as I was in a high school similar to that one. A few years earlier, a close friend of mine had died in a car accident. Our school came together because of our shared grief. Cliques disappeared and everyone was there to support one another. I felt that there was a similar feeling when Columbine happened. As the years went on, the school shootings became a regular part of news coverage, and it seemed like an epidemic. President Obama regularly talked about this in speeches, comforting our country along with pointing out the flaws in our system that allowed gun violence to happen.
Hannah Peterson, a rising filmmaker, felt drawn to exploring this epidemic in her feature debut, “The Graduates,” having also dealt with grief herself after her brother committed suicide. Previously, Hannah was mentored by some of the best indie filmmakers working today by working on films directed by Sean Baker (“The Florida Project,” “Anora”) and Chloé Zhao (“Nomadland,” “The Rider”). I got to speak with Hannah about the impact these filmmakers made on her, and how it was working with her actors and the non-actors that were part of her film.
The film focuses on two high school seniors a year after they’ve respectively lost a boyfriend and a best friend to a school shooting. The editing and the writing in the film is nuanced with emotional beats that will be instantly recognizable to anyone who has lost a special person in their lives and had to grapple with how to face a future without them. The film stars Mina Sundwall and Alex Hibbert (“Moonlight”) with Kelly O’Sullivan, John Cho, and Maria Dizzia in supporting roles. The film premieres in select theaters on Friday, November 1st. In Chicago, Hannah will be here for a Q&A at the Siskel Film Center on December 18th, moderated by filmmaker Jennifer Reeder (“Knives and Skin,” “Perpetrator”).
Can you talk about the inspiration for this film?
I wanted to make a contemporary story about what it’s like to come of age in the American public school system. That’s the story I had been telling in my shorts, and I also wanted to explore it in my feature film. I started speaking to high schoolers, asking them what their experience was like in school, like what are the highs, the lows, etc.? This was in 2018, when there was a constant succession of media coverage around school shootings. It just came up in every conversation I had, this idea of school safety. At that time, it seemed like there was this kind of ambient anxiety, whether students had experienced gun violence in their schools or personally. And even if not, there was an idea that this could potentially happen to us. Students showed me text message chains with their parents and what they thought were sometimes the last moments of their life during a drill. It just seemed like it’s impossible to tell a story of an American public school today without touching on the subject.
And as I started to dig more into it, I had these memories of when I was growing up. You and I are of the same generation. I remember Columbine so lucidly. I grew up in Northern Virginia outside of DC and in my junior year of high school, there were a series of shootings that were coordinated in the area. I watched people harden. They brought in school resource guards, they had metal detectors, and we did active shooter drills. I just remember that sense of security being really punctured. So that was my entry point into the film.
As I started to speak, more students had experienced gun violence in their schools. I saw that there were some schools that had lesser media coverage when the event happened. That idea of having to return back to a school that experienced a shooting a year after it happened was really compelling to me. Intellectually, I was really inspired by films that were taking up this challenge of the passage of time. How does the past really put pressure on the present, and how do we evoke histories without showing it? That made sense to me as an entry point to doing this film. And the film really comes from those conversations. That was the genesis.
The editing in this movie is so good in how it accentuates the film’s emotional tone.
Thank you for saying that. Sometimes the biggest compliment is the editing. It’s funny, I even forget that I was the editor of this movie because it all blurs together. But I learned the most about filmmaking, the story and these characters by editing. I very much was still writing in the edit. Because of my experience in editing my short films, it just made sense due to the content of the film for me to try to edit it myself. And I also came up with Chloé Zhao and Sean Baker, who both edit, write, and direct their own films. So I just felt like I’ve got to give it a shot.
Leading up to the actual making of the film, I lost my brother to gun suicide. I had already written the script for “The Graduates” prior to this experience, and undergoing that with my family and my community around me certainly influenced the making of the film. I feel like losing my brother impacted me the most in the edit. I was editing right around the one year mark of his death. And the film is set one year after the school shooting where this student had died.
During this process, I gave myself permission to lose the idea that plot needed to drive the story. At this time I was experiencing these banal and mundane moments. Everything when you lose someone is a first — the first time you go to the grocery store without that person, and the first time you get in a fight with your Mom without that person, and the first time you go back to work without this person. These really small moments are so monumental in the experience of grief. I had this experience when I was grieving that you’re outside of the flow of time. I really just wanted to accomplish that through these characters.
We had filmed all of these beautiful, introspective, really quiet moments where a character is experiencing something for the first time without their person. I really, really wanted to anchor the plot around those moments, and to build them like mountains that we were climbing up and descending down in the edit. I feel that my experience with grief in my own life gave me permission to do that, and I saw that there was power in that.
What a cast! Can you talk about working with your casting director and finding these talented actors?
It was a really cool experience because I feel like we got to cast this film untraditionally. You know, there are really seasoned actors like John Cho and Kelly O’Sullivan. But then for Mina Sundwall, this was her first feature. And for Alex Hibbert, he had done “Moonlight” and TV, but this was his first leading role in an indie film as a young man. He was seventeen or eighteen years old, close to the actual age of the character. And then, we cast locally many of the high school students. The basketball team are all real students and people who were from where we filmed. Because of that, the film has all of these different textures and layers.
I wanted to make sure that the actors could blend into this world. Someone like John Cho really accomplished that in unbelievable ways to me. And I just felt really lucky. Mina and Alex were exciting to work with so closely as the leads of the film because they were very invested in their characters. They did a lot of work ahead of time to do their own research and to develop their characters. I just felt like they were writing the film with me. My experience with them workshopping the dialogue and finding magic moments was a collaboration that I greatly appreciated. And to work with someone like John or Maria Dizia, these actors are so iconic. They really showed up. It wasn’t like they walked on set and walked off. They all were completely invested in this film, like it was their own. And I think that was what I was really looking for. Because it’s my first feature, I wanted to make sure that it felt like we were all in this together and I feel like that is what I got with this cast.
How did the mentorship you received from Sean Baker and Chloé Zhao help you in your work as a director?
I think I took everything from the pages of their books by working with them on their films. On “The Florida Project,” I was a PA, and on “Nomadland,” I was a director’s assistant. I really got to have a front seat to watch these people work. And they both are part of this family of filmmaking that I really wanted to emulate through my work. I always wanted my work to be in conversation with theirs. I was very intentional in who I was going to work with when I was coming up as a director.
They both are just incredibly generous people, and took me really seriously as a writer and director. I think they both have an incredible eye for faces and that’s something I really took away from both films. Both Chloé and Sean put me into the position of being a part of the non-actor casting, the local casting, particularly in “Nomadland.”
“Nomadland” is one of my favorite films of all time.
It was a beautiful film to make. The experience of making it left a really indelible mark on me as a human and obviously as a filmmaker. But this idea of how do you take a script and go out into the real world, find people and listen to their stories and bring those two things together — that’s something I really tried to accomplish in “The Graduates,” particularly with the basketball team and the grief center. Those are all real people that we brought into it. We worked together to try to bring that texture to the screen. I got to watch Chloé work with people in that way by creating a safe space where people feel like they have the toolkit to be able to be onscreen and tell their story. That is something I really took away from both of them. And just how you treat people. I did all of my work on the heels of working on their projects. And I hope nothing more than to be in conversation with their work because I think they are the most exciting directors working in American indie film today.
I agree! What an education. What do you hope people see in your film?
I try to really end the film on a hopeful note. To me, the hope comes from these really minor moments of connection between the characters. I want people to take that away from it. I think that being able to connect with people through conversation and have empathy for one another is the catalyst for change. I really hope that no matter where you’re coming from, you’re able to empathize with these characters. I hope they see what it’s like through this ultimate moment of connection and that they are able to forge a path forward.
