CHEMISTRY LESSONS
CHEMICAL HEARTS I Director Richard Tanne brings us a new take on the high-school movie.
Four years ago, writer/director Richard Tanne made a huge impression with his debut feature, Southside With You, a film imagining the walking-and-talking first date of Barack and Michelle Obama. “It wasn’t necessarily hard to get the second movie made,” Tanne tells Teasers of the next step in his career. “I had a little bit of a hard time figuring out what was the right story to tell.”
What ended up piquing his interest was when Lili Reinhart (Riverdale’s Betty Cooper) brought Krystal Sutherland’s novel Our Chemical Hearts to his attention. “She wanted to play the role of Grace, and thought I might respond to the material,” explains Tanne. “And I did. The book felt like an opportunity to do a teen romance that wasn’t a story of your first great love, but was actually your first great heartbreak.”
The film follows Henry (Austin Abrams) who’s starting his senior year of high school. A sensitive kid who’s more likely to be restoring antique vases than partying, he falls for transfer student Grace when they’re tasked with co-editing the school paper.
There’s also a diverse supporting cast and a romantic subplot that acts as a “counter-story” to Henry and Grace’s.
When Tanne met Reinhart (who also makes her producing debut here) to talk about the project, he didn’t have the standard teen-movie touchpoints. “I’m throwing out references like Vertigo and In The Mood For Love and Tarkovsky’s Stalker,” he laughs. “I had no idea how the star of a CW teen drama is going to respond. But we were on the same page. From that point forward, we were in lockstep.”
Tanne powered through the script before they had even optioned the rights, and only realised afterwards how similar his own high-school experiences had been. “I was the editor-in-chief of my school paper, and there was a girl that I fell for really hard. In retrospect, it was probably my first emotional experience as an adult.”
Chemical Hearts gives a new perspective on that emotionally overwhelming time of life. The title refers to the scientific research into why teenagers feel everything so much more intensely, which is woven into the film. “I found it very interesting that a lot of recent studies put to bed the notion that the foolish decisions we make as teenagers have to do with raging hormones, and it’s actually to do with the chemicals in the brain, and the cells in the brain essentially coming of age.”
So as well as taking you back to school emotionally, this film might also teach you something. “Everything sort of tied in thematically with the chemistry of falling in love, and being young, and feeling this wild spectrum of emotions… I always wanted to tell a story that expressed my feelings about high school.” MM
ETA | 21 AUGUST / CHEMICAL HEARTS STREAMS ON AMAZON PRIME VIDEO NEXT MONTH.