Actress Eliza Scanlen and writer-director Laurel Parmet talk about their new film and its unflinching look at a 17-year-old protagonist in an inappropriate affair with her youth pastor.
In “The Starling Girl,” actress Eliza Scanlen plays Jem Starling, a 17-year-old girl from a fundamental Christian church in Kentucky who pursues a relationship with a youth pastor a decade older.
“All the filmmaking choices were coming from this place of wanting it to feel immediate and wanting the audience to really be with Jem moment to moment,” Parmet says. “But at the same time not pushing an opinion onto the audience. Letting the audience come to their own conclusions. “At first, I was like, ‘Oh, this is kind of twisted,’” she says of the way in which the women she met were expected to subsume their own needs and desires to those of the men in their lives. “But the more I thought about it, the more I was struck by how we have a lot of similarities. Just in terms of growing up to have shame about our desires and the responsibility to not tempt men. That it was always the woman’s fault.
Years later, after the pandemic had slowed progress on the project, Parmet got the screenplay to Scanlen, who says she was as excited to play Jem as Parmet was to have her.
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