From Wizards to Wallflowers in the Suburbs
NOBODY ever got through high school without being a little aimless and more than a little dramatic. Not so long ago Emma Watson discovered that for herself. Ms. Watson was in this leafy suburb of Pittsburgh, a 30-minute drive from the glass-and-steel downtown, filming a movie that’s set at Peters Township High School. Every day she arrived at the sprawling campus, with its swim team and banners promoting reading, to experience the youthful rites that, as the Oxfordshire-bred star of the “Harry Potter” franchise from age 10 to 20, had otherwise eluded her.
“Oh my goodness, so many firsts,” she said, speaking in an excited rush during a break from filming. “I did the prom! We all get dressed up and we go in a limo, and get photographs. It’s been really fun for me to get to graduate. Eating in the school canteen; all these things that I’ve always sort of said to my American friends, ‘Oh, that looks amazing, that looks so fun, I’m jealous.’ And I get to do it for this movie.”
The film, an adaptation of the young-adult novel “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” a beloved coming-of-age tale published in 1999, will be the next starring role for Ms. Watson, 21, and practically her first that doesn’t involve a cast of wizards and trolls. Though she earned legions of young fans as the plucky Hermione Granger in the “Harry Potter” series (and as the fashion-forward face of several luxury brands), Ms. Watson has never played a regular girl, let alone a suburban American.
Set loosely in the pre-Internet age of the early ’90s, “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” which is due in theaters next year, is the closest Ms. Watson has come to playing a contemporary character not too far removed from herself, she said. It’s not a grown-up role, but carrying the film — helping get it made at all — is a newfound adult responsibility.
Like her co-stars Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint, Ms. Watson has been defined by J. K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter,” with audiences watching her mature, as a person and a performer. Now multimillionaires, the cast mates “have grown into nimble actors, capable of nuances of feeling that would do their elders proud,” A. O. Scott wrote in his review of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1” in The New York Times. “One of the great pleasures of this penultimate ‘Potter’ movie is the anticipation of stellar post-‘Potter’ careers for all three of them.”
Mr. Radcliffe is now making his name in theater, currently appearing in “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” on Broadway; Mr. Grint has a slate of films. And Ms. Watson’s move away from “Potter” begins with “My Week With Marilyn,” a micro-biopic starring Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe, which is scheduled to premiere at the New York Film Festival on Sunday. In shoulder-length brown hair and red lipstick, Ms. Watson has a small part as the wardrobe girl who gets involved with Laurence Olivier’s assistant on the set of his film with Monroe, “The Prince and the Showgirl.” There is some charged repartee and some smooching before she inevitably loses the boy to Marilyn — a nonmagical romance.
Though she relished the chance to play a young working woman — “It’s definitely important to do something that I feel is stretching me,” she said — Ms. Watson spent only a few days on set for “Marilyn,” nothing like the time and preparation that “Perks” entailed. “It’s been the most intense five weeks of my life,” she said in an interview in the school library, toward the end of shooting this summer. Holed up on location immediately after wrapping the “Potter” series, and playing Sam, a feisty, precocious high school senior on the cusp of a new life, was, she said, unexpectedly cathartic. “I really lost myself in it,” she said with pleasure.
“Perks” had something of the same effect on Stephen Chbosky, the writer (of the book and the movie) and first-time director. Mr. Chbosky, a native of Pittsburgh, began writing the slim novel in college and returned to it in earnest at 26, when he finally moved out of his parents’ house. Told in letters by a shy loner, Charlie (played by Logan Lerman, star of “Percy Jackson & the Olympians”), it follows him, Sam and her stepbrother, Patrick (Ezra Miller, soon to be an indie heartthrob), as they navigate the perils of adolescence in 1991. It has the requisite era-specific pop-culture references (the Smiths’ “Asleep”; midnight screenings of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”) and deals with thorny subjects like sexual abuse, suicide, drug use and homosexuality: “The Catcher in the Rye” crossed with “Go Ask Alice” for an emo generation.
It was a quick sensation after it was published, earning cult status and a place on many school reading lists. Mr. Chbosky, 41, moved from Pittsburgh to New York and then Los Angeles to work in TV and movies. He wrote the screenplay for the film version of “Rent,” but is best known as the show runner on “Jericho,” a short-lived CBS series set in the aftermath of a nuclear attack. (“I love my Stephen King” was his explanation for his ranging tastes.)
Though he recalled being a well-liked athlete in high school, “on the inside I was a misfit kid,” he said. Afraid to participate in “Rocky Horror” himself, he had Charlie do it in “Perks.” Mr. Chbosky said he had many offers to turn the book into a movie over the years, but resisted unless he could direct it himself. “It was so personal,” he said. “I’ve seen the effect the book has had on certain kids who’ve seen bad things. Some of their stories, which they’ve told me in letters, would break your heart.” He didn’t mind waiting and treating the material preciously.
“I don’t need the money,” he said, eating chocolate cake in the school cafeteria during an interview. “What I need is for that 14-year-old kid to know they have a chance.”
“Perks” found the right collaborator in John Malkovich’s production company, Mr. Mudd, which has made other indie films about adolescents and oddballs, like “Ghost World” and “Juno.” “I asked our assistant if there was any book he could turn into a movie, and he named this book,” said Lianne Halfon, a partner in Mr. Mudd. “We’d never heard of it.” Once news of a potential adaptation got out, Ms. Halfon said, she too was inundated with e-mails from fans of the book, people who were “lonely in their families,” as she put it. “For them this book is very important.”
Nonetheless the film version did not have the necessary financing until Ms. Watson came on board. She went to Los Angeles and promoted her interest in it; eventually Summit Entertainment, flush with cash from distributing the “Twilight” series, picked it up. “That I could get a movie made is kind of incredible to me,” Ms. Watson said. “It’s the first time I realized I had that kind of power.”
Although the geography is vague in the book, Mr. Chbosky insisted that the film be shot in Pittsburgh, as a tribute to his hometown. (“I finally was able to put the words ‘chicken paprikash’ in a movie,” he said.) Costumes were culled from local thrift stores, and an architectural quirk of the city — a surprise vista that emerges from the Fort Pitt Tunnel, of the downtown skyline gleaming over the city’s three rivers — plays a big part, as it does in the book.
On location the cast, which includes the young stars Nina Dobrev of “The Vampire Diaries” and Mae Whitman of the series “Parenthood,” and Paul Rudd as the sensitive teacher, jelled quickly. As he is on screen, Mr. Miller, 18, was the bad-boy dreamer. “When I first got here, I did decide that some of the co-stars needed a solid does of corruption,” he said, smoking on a bench outside the school.
Mr. Lerman, 19, a Beverly Hills High student and natural showbiz type who religiously watches “Inside the Actor’s Studio,” prepared for his wallflower part by going Method. “I came out here a week and a half early and just stayed in my hotel room,” he said. “It was perfect for creating that social awkwardness.”
And Ms. Watson, accustomed to acting alongside people and in a story she had known for a decade, “started freaking out,” she said. She threw herself into research, e-mailing friends about their high school experiences and worrying about how to create a bond with this new, unfamiliar clique. (Shades of the encyclopedic Hermione are there, and of Ms. Watson’s semesters at Brown University, where she plans to return to complete her undergraduate degree.)
But studiousness wasn’t necessary. They just hung out. They formed a hotel-room band: Mr. Miller drummed, Mr. Lerman played guitar, and Ms. Watson sang. They jokingly called themselves Octopus Jam. Friends dropped by; noise complaints followed. Before she knew it, the world of Hogwarts had receded.
“That’s a different chapter of my life, which, kind of through doing this, feels like it’s closed,” she said. She pointed to a scene in “Perks” as symbolic of her new beginning: standing in the back of a pickup truck, she and her high school crew take a late-night joyride through the Fort Pitt Tunnel, the city lights shining on the other end.
“Summit didn’t want me to do the stunt, but I insisted,” she said, even though she was scared. “The car’s moving at 60 miles per hour, I had one little thing attaching me to the truck,” she recalled. She ended up going through seven or eight times, screaming her guts out. “Oh my God, it was so fun,” she said. “One of the best nights of my life, without a doubt.”
