Three’s Company

Caroline Dhavernas, Amanda Walsh and Holly Lewis in These Girls. Courtesy Seville Pictures.

John Hazlett makes an odd confession as we sit down to discuss his latest feature, These Girls. The film, set in a sleepy New Brunswick community, involves a trio of 17-year-old girls who blackmail the local town drug dealer into sleeping with all three of them on a rotating schedule. “Truth is, I really don’t know that much about the world of teenage girls,” the Montreal-based filmmaker says, matter-of-factly. “But if you’re a good writer, you’re supposed to be able to draw on things you don’t know first hand.”

These Girls, which was a hit at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, certainly feels well researched. On a budget that would make any American teen comedy blush (less than $2 million), Hazlett has brought together a name cast and pulled off a high-wire act. The plot of These Girls is pretty zany, but the entire affair comes across like something that could really happen in the often-extreme world of teens.

Here, David Boreanaz (of TV’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spin-off, Angel) plays the hunky town pot grower and dealer, Keith. He’s thirtysomething and married with child, but that doesn’t stop him from making moves on his teen babysitter, Glory, played by former MuchMusic VJ Amanda Walsh (now starring as a young single mom in TV’s Sons & Daughters). But when Glory’s two buddies, Keira (Caroline Dhavernas) and Lisa (Holly Lewis) find out, they both want in on the action. Soon enough, the babysitting/bed-hopping plot explodes, and Glory, who is convinced she’s in love with Keith, discovers that her best friends are sharing her covert lover. Keira hatches a time-sharing scheme in which the three girls take shifts with Keith. He’s not thrilled with the arrangement, but agrees after they threaten to blow the whistle to the police.

David Boreanaz in These Girls. Courtesy Seville Pictures.

The set-up is as silly as it sounds, and yet, with this able cast (they are universally excellent) Hazlett pulls it off. And despite his self-deprecation he did have some help in making the material ring true. “I was close to my sister when I was growing up, and she was just a bit older than I am,” Hazlett recalls. “I observed what she was going through, how she became this raging hormonal monster at one point. I also did a lot of research. At each stage of writing, I was sending the script out to my women friends. I was never 100 per cent sure I was in the ball park, so I tested it carefully.”

Hazlett also explains that he wanted the film’s scenario to be as much about the age of the characters as it is their gender. “Early in the search for financing, it seemed people wanted to see a clear villain or a clear victim. Who wears the white hat and who wears the black? I was more interested in the grey area of the characters. There’s lying, cheating and blackmail in These Girls. I tried to remember back to when I was 16. I have very vivid memories of that time in my life. If there was something I wanted at that point, the feeling of wanting it was so intense, I would do things that were wrong, but simply didn’t care about the consequences.”

After graduating from Montreal’s Concordia University’s film program, Hazlett moved to Calgary, where he produced The Suburbanators (1995) and Kitchen Party (1997), both directed by Alberta auteur Gary Burns. In 1999, Hazlett made his directorial debut, Bad Money, about four people desperate to make ends meet without doing an honest day’s work.

It was around this time that a friend sent him the play These Girls, by Vivienne Laxdal. Hazlett liked the story, but set it aside. A year later, he read a Calgary Herald review of a production of the play and began to envision it as a film. Hazlett bought the rights to the big-screen version. After moving back to Montreal, he began to rework the script extensively, removing many of its darker elements, including a subplot involving child abuse. He knew the style he was aiming for. “I like European art films as much as the next guy. But I really wanted to speak in the North American teen vernacular. While the film isn’t exactly like an American teen comedy, they are often similar. We wanted it to be bright and lively, to feel like a commercial movie. The script is funny, but it has a serious side, so we wanted to make sure we represented that. It’s a bit of a hybrid.”

Hazlett says it was also crucial that the titular trio in These Girls, despite all their dirty deeds, never be judged. “You don’t have to accept everything a teenager does, but you need to be able to step back and think about what they’re experiencing. Agree with it, don’t agree with it, it doesn’t matter — it’s what’s happening.”

This attitude has led to some angry e-mails in Montreal, where the film opened in early March. “Some people were calling it repulsive, others were saying this is no lesson for young women. I think people wanted me to present some kind of cautionary tale. I find that whole approach to movies really curious. But what made some people unhappy actually kind of cheered me up. If I wasn’t upsetting someone, I wouldn’t be doing my job.” At the same time, Hazlett points out, “these are young adults. We could have cast people who looked like they were 15 or 16. We wanted it to be a comedy though. We never wanted it to be creepy. It had to be funny, and that meant that their behaviour couldn’t be that terrible.”

These Girls opens in Toronto and Vancouver on March 24.

Matthew Hays is a Montreal writer.