Unveiling the Untold Vision: Daniel Destin Cretton’s Revolutionary Approach to Storytelling
The film was directed by Daniel Destin Cretton, based on his original screenplay. The script won a Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting in 2010. I contacted the film’s producers and managed to connect with Daniel for a fascinating conversation about the journey of Short Term 12 from screenplay to the big screen. Here is the interview in its entirety.
Scott Myers: I have your IMDb Pro credits and all the way down at the bottom, I see this short film in 2002 you did called Longbranch: A Suburban Parable. When did you catch the bug about film making?
Destin Daniel Cretton: I guess it depends on when you consider it a bug. I don’t know because I was one of six kids growing up on Maui in Hawaii. The first time I caught the bug was when my grandma loaned us her VHS camcorder when I was about ten. That was when we first started, my family and I, my brothers and sisters, we got addicted just making silly movies as kids and things when we were young.
I didn’t ever think that, “Oh, I want to be a film maker when I grow up.” But I did know that I loved it. I was always the guy who was, for summer camp, doing those videos. I’ve always loved the process of doing it.
But that film Longbranch was that the first actual film that I ever made that I submitted to festivals and things. I had a bet with a friend of mine, Lowell Frank, and shot it in around 2001.
It went to festivals including Tribeca. We got to travel around with it a little bit and just watching something on the screen you slaved away at, seeing people react to it and hearing them talk about it afterwards, I got hooked after that.
It wasn’t so much, I want to do this for living. It was more of, I want to figure out a way to continue to do this the rest of my life, even if I have years of not really doing it.
Scott: After college, you got a master’s at San Diego State in film?
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