Phoebe Gloeckner talks about how ‘Diary of a Teenage Girl’ became a movie.
How the provocative inner secrets of a real ’70s high school girl wound up onscreen
Phoebe Gloeckner still vividly remembers sitting in the principal’s office at San Francisco’s Urban School in 1976 as a downcast 15-year-old, choking back the urge to divulge the whopping secret behind her lackluster high school record — that she was sexually involved with a man who was more than twice her age and, worse yet, dating her mother.
“I was bursting with the desire to tell him, but I was afraid he would think I was a slut or a terrible person,” says Gloeckner, now 54, by phone from Ann Arbor, Mich., where she teaches art at the University of Michigan. “And I just couldn’t, so he said, ‘Fine, you’re expelled.’
“I kept the story inside, just burning a hole in my head for years until the book,” Gloeckner says of her unflinchingly honest 2002 graphic novel about her sexual coming of age in San Francisco, “The Diary of a Teenage Girl,” which has been adapted into a new feature film directed by East Bay native Marielle Heller.
Gloeckner’s edgy R. Crumbesque book about her semiautobiographical alter ego, Minnie Goetze, was lauded as groundbreaking in its frankness and its form — about two-thirds confessional prose, one-third ’70s underground comix-style drawings.
“Diary,” which received raves at its Sundance premiere in January, was filmed in neighborhoods across San Francisco, colorfully re-creating the city’s (and Gloeckner’s) free-loving past.
Patty Hearst’s trial plays on television in the background as Minnie (played by British newcomer Bel Powley), embarks on her sexual awakening with Monroe (Alexander Skarsgard), unbeknownst to her hard-drinking single mom (Kristen Wiig).
“It was very much a family affair,” said Heller, of coming back to the Bay Area for the 24-day shoot. She spoke by phone from Los Angeles, where she was directing an episode of the Amazon series “Transparent.” “My brother composed the music for the film, my sister-in-law was costume designer, family friends let us film in their backyard, and Berkeley Repertory Theatre let us raid their costume and prop shops. (Heller’s father-in-law is Berkeley Rep Artistic Director Tony Taccone.) We called on our whole community to help make this movie.”
Heller deftly handles Gloeckner’s provocative material by staying true — at times painfully so — to the book’s intimate exposition of a girl falling headlong into lust and longing, ravenous for new experiences.
“Diary” incorporates animation (by Icelander Sara Gunnarsdottir) “to give real insight into Minnie’s creative life and mind, almost like in a musical when a song comes out — it’s because hopefully the characters have no other way to express themselves,” says Heller. “The book is such a hybrid mix of mediums, and I wanted the film to be the same thing.”
Heller, an actor herself, first adapted and performed “Diary” as an off-Broadway stage play in 2010. She says Gloeckner’s book “just lit something up inside of me when I first read it. It felt closer to capturing what a real teenage girl feels than anything I’d ever read. And there is such a void onscreen of the voices of authentic teenage girls.”
“I get so angry seeing girls on film,” says Gloeckner, who left San Francisco in 2001 and
has two daughters, ages 24 and 16. “Teenage girls are generally the objects of boys’ or men’s desires, and such empty portrayals.”
She and Heller see the new film as a debunking corrective to “the horrible message teenage girls often get in books and movies — and life — that boys are the only ones wanting sex, and if you are a girl who wants it, you’re a freak, or something is wrong with you,” says Heller.
Gloeckner was approached by three previous directors, but was reluctant to have her intensely personal book adapted. She consented to Heller’s stage adaptation “because the idea was so difficult and outrageous. I thought, ‘Go ahead and give it a try. Knock yourself out!’ ” she says with a laugh.
“But then I went to a readthrough and cried. (Heller) created something so moving, and it was the first time I had seen the characters in three dimensions. It was like being in a hologram, seeing ghosts from my past wandering around.”
Heller says that even after the play’s successful run, she couldn’t shake Minnie and felt “there was more to explore in this character who has one foot in the adult world and one foot in the child world. I consciously put those right up next to each other in the film editing, like cutting from a scene of Minnie in her room with her flashlight in bed like a little kid, pushed right up next to a sex scene with Monroe where she’s feeling in her power and like a woman.
“A lot of the film’s humor comes from that juxtaposition between adulthood and childhood. You’re in this transition as a teen, and the nature of being in between is funny.”
“Do I look different than I did yesterday?” Minnie asks her cat after losing her virginity.
Heller developed “roughly 85 drafts” of the script, and numerous critics have already weighed in that she has succeeded in striking a just-right punchy tone in a film that, given its subject matter, could have easily veered toward the lewd or the tragic.
“I really wanted to give the audience permission to laugh,” says Heller, “because people hear what the subject is — a teenage girl and an older man — and think uhoh, it’s going to be very serious.
“We talked a lot about the time period and Charlotte (Wiig) and Monroe (Skarsgard), the so-called adults in Minnie’s life, actually being emotionally 15 years old themselves. I think San Francisco had this perpetual youth culture in the ’70s. The rules were being thrown out, and there were no grownups, no role models.
“It was not, to say the least, a typical situation or easy to make sense of,” says Gloeckner of growing up here in the ’70s. She experimented heavily with drugs and at one point lived with Polk Street’s gay runaways. “It’s hard to be living with someone who is going out with the person you love, whether it’s your mother or not — but particularly if it is.
“So I drew all the time. R. Crumb and Aline Kominsky were all I read.
“Minnie stumbles a lot along the way, but she does come a long way in realizing that there is a lot more to life than the carnal — though it is a big part of it.”