High school trials
How Jersey’s Quinn Shephard turned adolescent woes into the feature film “Blame”
IT’S a challenge for anyone writing a high-school movie: How do you make teen characters believable? Here’s one way: Be a 15-year-old girl. “I got made fun of for being weird and artsy,” says Quinn Shephard, who wrote, directed and stars in the drama “Blame,” out in theaters Friday. She started writing the screenplay in high school, and its plot — centered around two very different girls, and scenes from the Salem witch trial play “The Crucible” — drew on what she knew. “I did do a production of ‘The Crucible,’ and I did get superobsessed with it,” says the now 22-year-old Shephard, who was a child actor in Paul Feig’s 2006 comedy “Unaccompanied Minors.” The Metuchen, NJ, native graduated from public high school early and went on to a role in the CBS drama “Hostages.”
In school, she says, she didn’t exactly fit in. “I definitely dressed up like [‘Crucible’ character] Abigail Williams. I didn’t have anyone who would get together with me and go play witches,” she says.
Instead, the young cinephile — who loved dark films such as “The Virgin Suicides” and “Heathers” — decided she’d make her own film drama. She cast herself as lonely high-schooler Abigail, who’s an easy target for manipulative cheerleader Melissa (Nadia Alexander). But Shephard wouldn’t reduce her mean girl to cliché. “I don’t want you to think we’re doing Regina George,” she told Alexander, referencing the 2004 comedy “Mean Girls.”
For the film’s edgiest role, the English teacher whose relationship with Abigail gets too close, Shephard found an ace in actor Chris Messina (“The Mindy Project”). “He got a random letter from a 20-year-old saying, ‘Come do this ultralow-budget movie in New Jersey,’ and he was like, ‘OK, yeah, I’ll do it,’ ” she says.
Shephard’s film asks questions about abuse of power, consent and rape culture — and arrives in an era when Hollywood is, too.
“Someone asked me if I made this movie because of everything happening right now,” says Shephard, who now lives in Brooklyn. “Do they know how long movies take to make? It’s not like I got in my time machine and decided to do that!”