Two feature-length directorial efforts in and it's clear that Kelly Fremon Craig has a handle on this whole filmmaking thing. After making the phenomenal (and critically acclaimed) The Edge of Seventeen, she took on an adaptation of one of Judy Blume's iconic novels: Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.
From her office, which featured some cool movie memorabilia including one of Hailee Steinfeld's jackets from The Edge of Seventeen and a theater-sized poster of Margaret, Fremon Craig spoke to ClutchPoints about her career thus far.
Margaret is one of the best films of this year — and still remains the favorite of yours truly. But this was a film that meant the world to the writer-director. The film holds a 99% score from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, to which she jokingly agreed with me condemning the one percent that went against the perfect 100% score.
You'd think that having a film this well-received would be pure joy, but it's a feeling of relief for Fremon Craig.
“You want to say that it's euphoric, but it's really more just relief as a filmmaker because you put so much blood, sweat, and tears into a project and you hope that [it is] everything that you wanted it to be and it turns out to be. So when people get the message you were trying to convey, it just feels like, ‘Oh, phew, thank God,' so yeah, that's sort of how it feels,” she revealed with a laugh.
She needed a break, however, and after the well-received release of Margaret, Fremon Craig went on a break.
“I'm still on it,” she revealed. “Obviously, partly because of the [WGA] strike and stuff — everybody's on a break right now.”
Nevertheless, there was a seven-year gap between her directorial outings.
“I really believe, at least for myself, in this idea of just stepping away and just being a person and like letting yourself get inspired and being on input for a while because I find that when I'm making a film, I'm just like constantly emptying my gas tank into the project, so I have to just then remove myself and go and be a person and like, fill up before I can dive back into something else.”
Mom first, filmmaker second
It's not just needing a break from the grind, though — Fremon Craig is also the mother of a nine-year-old boy.
“Yes — that was one big reason why [there was a seven-year break],” she said about wanting to be a mom after being a director on The Edge of Seventeen. “So there was first, just like, ‘Okay, I just need to be a mom.'”
Being a mom and working in the film industry is like Spider-Man attempting to live two separate lives in No Way Home — a reference that made Fremon Craig chuckle. We may think of those in the film industry as these stars above doing the normal day-to-day grind that we normal folk do, but Fremon Craig wanted to be a mother after wrapping The Edge of Seventeen.
“[When] I made The Edge of Seventeen — I was away for two-and-a-half months from my son at that time, and that was really hard to do; I was so guilt-ridden about that that I left — I filmed in Vancouver — the country for two-and-a-half months and saw him on FaceTime essentially. At the time, he was two-and-a-half years old,” she recalled. “When I got back, I just thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I need to not do anything except mom stuff because I've been away' and [about] how I need to make up for lost time and really thrust myself into all of those things.”
It took time, but Fremon Craig did realize that there is a balance between being a mom and a filmmaker — and rarely can you have both.
“Ultimately what I had to realize is [that] I have to find a way to balance those two things — my role as a mom and my role as an artist and filmmaker. Oftentimes, those two things can live in contradiction to each other because in order to do one, I have to drop the other.”
During the process of deliberation, there's one question that repeats in Fremon Craig's mind: “There's a constant question of which do I drop in favor of the other and when, and a lot of times that feels like a moral question in a way because I take my role as a mom so seriously and I feel like there's nothing more important than raising a human being,” she confessed.
And every time she steps away, a feeling of guilt does arise.
“Every time I step away, I feel sort of feel the guilt of, ‘Oh my gosh, am I not there enough?' You know?” she asked.
It's a balance, though, as “at the same time, I do want my son to grow up. watching his mom chase after her dreams and do the things that she loves — and I think that's important too.”
This whole balance is not a perfect science, and Fremon Craig is still trying to figure it out.
“Trying to balance all that out is a challenge that I don't pretend to have overcome even now,” the director said with a smile.
A few years later, and Fremon Craig's young son is nine years old. He's still coming into his own, but are the films that Fremon Craig makes in any way a love letter to her child? It sounds dramatic, but as she noted, she wants her son to see his mom “chase after her dreams and do the things that she loves.”
“That's a good question — I actually think that's a great question,” Fremon Craig said with a radiant smile in response to my love letter question. “You know, my son absolutely loves movies that I will probably never make. He loves like every superhero movie and he loves Mission: Impossible [laughs], so I don't know if he'll see them as ‘love letters' [laughs], even if I [was intending them to be]. And I think I am really more just trying to express something that I feel is true,” she disclosed.
Not all hope is lost, however, as Fremon Craig hopes that “one day he watches them and gets something out of them.' In the meantime, her son questions the type of films she makes.
“Right now, he's definitely like, ‘Wait a minute — so you make movies where people just talk to each other? But, like, who's the bad guy?” (The argument could be made that the bad guy in Margaret is puberty, but I digress.) Fremon Craig said, laughing. “There are no explosions, there's no high-speed chase, he just doesn't get it at all.”
Granted, her son is still young and I know that nine-year-old me was still inundated with the world of the MCU. The lead of Margaret, Abby Ryder Fortson, starred in the first two Ant-Man films as the daughter of Paul Rudd's Scott Lang, Cassie. Fremon Craig revealed that her son has seen the Ant-Man films, but we're unsure if he ever made that connection. All parents make sacrifices, and Fremon Craig's recent one has been watching all of the Mission: Impossible movies ahead of taking her son to see the newest film, Dead Reckoning Part One.
“He loves Tom Cruise, [he's a] big Tom Cruise fan [and] wants to watch everything Tom Cruise,” she said.
After wrapping The Edge of Seventeen and deciding to search for her next project, there was a lot of demand for Fremon Craig's services — and rightfully so.
Decisions, decisions
“Once I dove back into [figuring out] what I want to do creatively next, I was fortunate to be sent a zillion different things to do. But I think that actually can be to a person's detriment because you're spending all your time just reading scripts and passing,” she said.
“It's like playing defense instead of offense, you know what I mean?” Fremon asked with a smile. “So somebody's [constantly] ringing your doorbell and you're answering the door, so you're not actually stopping and saying to yourself, ‘What do I really want to say?'
It had to have been a big adjustment. Fremon Craig described it as “you go from obscurity to suddenly being sent everything in the world, which is really exciting, and so I wanted to make sure I was being respectful of all those offers and everything.”
However, the seven-year break came without her selecting her next feature, at least as a director.
“At the end of the day, most of my time was just spent reading and passing [laughs], so it wasn't a great use of my time in hindsight,” she said.
This time wasn't spent twiddling her thumbs, though: “During that time, I was doing a lot of rewrite work, so I wasn't just hanging out. I was doing a bunch of these weekly production rewrites, which essentially [means] you're kind of like an ER script doctor [laughs], so my time was definitely spent doing a lot of that. So I did do a lot of projects, but that's all uncredited work.”
One of those rewrites included the Transformers prequel film, Bumblebee. That film features The Edge of Seventeen star Hailee Steinfeld in the leading role, and Fremon Craig writing a second project for her was a coincidence. When I asked if she knew about Steinfeld's involvement in the project prior to taking the job, she called it “sort of a coincidence” and revealed that she had been hired first after Bumblee director Travis Knight saw The Edge of Seventeen. Knight had “hoped” to land Steinfeld” before ultimately doing so — which made Fremon Craig smile.
But Fremon Craig was adamant that during this time of “reading and passing,” there weren't any projects that she regrets not taking on — even if her “no” sounded like it had an invisible question mark next to it. That's because she knows that she wants a project that allows her to express herself and the time commitment of making a feature film.
“I don't actually have regrets [about] that because I understand what a leave of absence it is from your life to go direct something. I mean, it is all-consuming, at least for me. It may not be for other filmmakers, but for me, everything in me goes into a film, so I have to really love it, and I have to really, really, really want to say what the movie wants to say [laughs] because I have to live with it for so long.”
Eventually, Fremon Craig was ready to really get into the nitty-gritty of selecting a project, and the inspiration of adapting Margaret came out of looking into her past.
“I thought, ‘Okay, what do I really want to do next?' and I thought of the books that most impacted me and I thought of this book [Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret], and I dove into that.”
Rediscovering Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.
Of course, this refreshed sense of inspiration came at a time when the world would force everyone to hit pause on their lives: COVID.
“But then other things happened like COVID, so then that was its own delay,” a laughing Fremon Craig revealed. “So yeah, there are a few different things that made up those seven years, but hopefully it won't be as long the next time.”
For fans of the director, they also likely hope that it won't be seven years before Fremon Craig's next film. But again, the project has to mean something to her. She recognizes that she's “probably not” the type of director that releases a movie too frequently.
“I do realize [that] I'm probably not the type of filmmaker that can make a film every year or whatever. I mean, those filmmakers that do that, I so admire their ability to do that, but I don't think I have it in me,” she revealed. “I need a bit of a break. Like I said, I need some time to go out and be in the world and be inspired and figure out what it is I want to say.”
In the present day, the reality of it is Fremon Craig has likely made the quintessential adaptation of Blume's Margaret novel. She called that very idea “wild” and “surreal.” That's because, like many other girls, Fremon Craig grew up reading Margaret.
Fremon Craig, with a glowing smile, said, “It's hard for me to accept that this is the book that 11-year-old me was in love with and now adult me has made the film — it's like I almost can't quite compute it. But I feel really lucky that I was given the opportunity.”
Luck is a funny word. Too often we interchange luck and hard work. Everyone needs their “big break,” but Fremon Craig did her time before getting the chance to adapt Margaret. Her first film, The Edge of Seventeen is stellar. The authenticity of how she portrayed high school, especially in 2016, was true-to-life for someone around my age. Perhaps that's due to the lengths she went to when writing the film. After writing an initial draft of the film that was just “laugh, laugh, laugh,” as Fremon Craig put it, she went out and interviewed a bunch of high schoolers per the request of producer James Brooks. As he puts it, doing this research can result in you “glean[ing] certain details that you couldn't have made up.”
Somewhere along the way of the interviews — which ended up being anywhere between 50-100 interviews — Fremon Craig realized that her initial script only tackled “one aspect of the story,” that being that it's funny. The other aspect, as Fremon Craig learned, is “the story of adolescence” and that it's “painful and it's lonely and it's very complicated.”
It took a few sit downs, but Fremon Craig eventually was able to identify with these teenagers who are younger than her.
“Once I sat down with those teenagers, first of all, I instantly was shot back to that time in my life. I was like, ‘Oh yes, I remember all of this. I remember all the insecurity and fear and awkwardness.' So I threw everything away and started over and started with that new ambition in mind to try to really capture what I had experienced in those interviews and just hanging out with teenagers at that time.”
Some things change, but some don't. Being a teenager, in Fremon Craig's estimation, is still largely the same.
“I was just struck by how very much the same it is, you know? I was like, ‘Gosh, it's just nothing has changed — we're just still worried about the exact same things,' and [thought] ‘Isn't that wild that everybody goes through a similar thing?'” she revealed.
That does come with a bit of a loophole, though: social media.
“Clearly, everything is different because of social media, but it's really not that different. It's just taking all the things that I went through and heightening them because now they're being blasted out 24/7 on social media channels, you know?”
It worked out for the best, and The Edge of Seventeen is up there with Booksmart as one of the best high school coming-of-age films in recent memory (and perhaps all-time). While not a box office smash hit by the standards of blockbusters, it did gross $19.3 million worldwide, and that, along with the positive reviews, was enough for STX Entertainment — the film's distributor — to attempt to make a spin-off.
The spin-off series has since been canceled, but Fremon Craig revealed that it was STX's wish, not hers, to turn The Edge of Seventeen into a TV series. Now she may tell the stories she wants to tell, but at the time, it was up to STX.
“I actually didn't want to do a TV show spin-off, but they own the rights,” she candidly said with a laugh. “So they said, ‘Well, we're selling it,' so they set it up with, at that time it was YouTube Red, so the show was going [to happen] whether I liked it or not.”
Fremon Craig then decided that “if it's going, I might as well jump in and try to guide it because if it exists, I'd like to at least try to make it good.” She helped find a young writer-director who could tell a story “in tandem” with the Edge of Seventeen's film. The series wouldn't have shared any characters, but it would have “existed in the same world” with the same “tone,” she revealed.
As a high school coming-of-age film, it's hard to see what an Edge of Seventeen spin-off series would be — especially without someone like Steinfeld returning to star in it. Fremon Craig shared this concern, but she assured that the series would “be about two high school girls. It was very much about female friendship and how complicated that can be and relationships with parents.” Thematically, it's quite similar to the film, but Fremon Craig assured that “it was really sort of its own thing” despite some similar threads.
But it didn't happen. And given her less-than-enthusiastic response to the initial prospect of an Edge of Seventeen spin-off in the first place, I'm sure that Fremon Craig was relieved by the fact that it never saw the light of day. She revealed that “right in the middle of us making it — I mean, I think we were just in the middle of finishing our edit — YouTube Red imploded. So the studio went away.”
Fast forward a few years, and Fremon Craig's adaption of Margaret hit the big screen. The film follows the titular character, played by Abby Ryder Fortson — whom Fremon Craig called a “gem” and a “rare talent” and is excited to be “one of the first people to launch her — after her family moves from New York City to the suburbs of New Jersey (anybody's worst nightmare). Despite a rift in her family that's caused by religions — her parents, one Christian, one Jewish, don't want to push her in any sort of direction with what she picks — Margaret begins using God as a crux to answer her prayers.
Given that she's a middle schooler, Margaret's prayers concern the trivial matters that you can look back on and laugh about as an adult. However, at the moment, they're big deals from your first kiss to your first “party.”
The party scenes in Margaret are nailed to perfection — with the right amount of awkwardness sprinkled in. While Fremon Craig, like myself, is years removed from going to middle school parties, this came instinctually for her. Unlike The Edge of Seventeen, no interviews were required for these sequences.
“All the research was internal,” she revealed.
With a laugh, she continued, “It was not difficult for me to peel back into that awkward time. Similar to you, I remember those parties being so painfully weird and awkward — nobody knew what to do with their hands, oh gosh, so making that come through felt important.”
That wasn't the only instance of Fremon Craig identifying with Margaret and being transported back to her adolescent years during the film's shoot. The scene of Margaret's first kiss was a big one for her, she revealed.
“That moment was one of my favorite scenes to film because there's such a heart-pounding feeling that I associate with adolescence. So that scene just made me feel so many different emotions filming it.”
One last fun one was when Margaret is dancing around with her “sock boobs.” Fremon Craig revealed that it reminded her of adolescence because “I definitely did that.” As a result of her own experiences, “It wasn't difficult to go back to that place in my own memory.”
And, yes, Margaret does feature a scene where a young child is running around with “sock boobs.” Some of the young girls also recite the iconic — as Fremon Craig put it — “we must improve our busts” chant. ” But it's always done tastefully. After all, your subjects are all middle school-aged girls. This is something that Fremon Craig put a lot of thought into — specifically with the framing of the film.
“I definitely put a lot of thought into how to shoot things, particularly moments that were more intimate like Margaret trying on a bra. I knew I wanted the camera to be really close on the back of her head or really close on her face, because even if you saw one inch too much of her back, you could feel when it was too much, and you were like, ‘Whoa, whoa, no, zoom in,' you could feel it instinctively when it crossed a line that was hard to even [toe] — it wasn't like you saw anything, but even again, just an inch of skin on her back felt like too much,” she recalled.
Parents can rest easy that it's not just Margaret who goes through an arc in Fremon Craig's film, which is one of the big reasons it works so well. In both of Fremon Craig's directorial features, the role of mothers is complicated. In neither case are they vilified, but they also don't get off the hook and are shown to be flawed. As a mother herself, she finds “motherhood to be fascinating and complicated.” In the case of Margaret's mother Barbara, who's wonderfully played by Rachel McAdams in the film, she has to adapt to new surroundings just as her pre-teen daughter does.
Apparently, this wasn't in the book. Fremon Craig said that she wanted to give Barbara “a real story of her own, a real arc that came out of little seeds that were planted in the book.” That may seem obvious, to try and expand an underwritten character's story arc, but this was born out of the fact that Judy Blume's novel was written from its titular character's point of view.
For her film, Fremon Craig “wanted to expand on that and understand the adult characters and spend some time with them and understand what this journey is like for them running in tandem with Margaret's journey.
Margaret's other parent, Herb, is played by the wonderful Benny Safdie. Safdie, who made a name for himself co-directing films like Good Time and Uncut Gems with his brother Josh, has begun taking on more roles as an actor in recent years. After starring in the aforementioned Good Time, Safdie would go on to star in films such as Pieces of a Woman and films from directors Paul Thomas Anderson (Licorice Pizza) and Claire Denis (Stars at Noon). His latest credit is as physicist Edward Teller in Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer.
But does having an acclaimed director who also acts complicate the dynamics when you're directing him? Not in the case of Safdie, who seemed to be like-minded with Fremon Craig. On top of being a lovely human being, she called him a “multi-talented human being” and claimed that “there's almost nothing he can't do.”
On top of all that, he's attentive to little details that make a film great.
Fremon Craig revealed, “He is also obsessed with realistic details in the same way that I am. So that is, that always excites me because I'm completely nutty about getting all those little teeny tiny details right.”
She then recalled a specific example from a scene in Margaret that ended up on the cutting room floor in which Herb eats a sandwich: “In one scene, he's eating a sandwich — actually, I think it got cut — but when we saw the sandwich that the props department had made, they'd made this really perfect-looking sandwich that was cut into triangles and both [of us] were instantly like, ‘No, no — he would never cut it into triangles and it would be s******r looking than that' — it wouldn't look as pretty as that sandwich. And that's such a tiny detail, but I think those details are important in terms of creating a world that feels just real through and through. So he cares about all those little teeny tiny things in a way that put us very much on the same page.”
Naturally, given her background as a writer, the topic of the WGA writers' strike arose. Fremon Craig called the whole thing “really disheartening,” and like most people involved in the situation, hopes that “it'll be resolved soon because it not only affects writers and actors, it affects everybody in the industry.”
While many have the idea that everyone in Hollywood makes Tom Cruise-level money, that's not the case.
“I think people can have this idea that writers and actors make bazillions of dollars, and some of them do, but a lot of writers and actors are really just getting by or like barely trying to make a living — particularly in TV for writers, it's tough. It used to be that you could make a steady income as a TV writer, but it's much, much harder now because of the way things have turned around just in terms of the model and, and whatnot,” she revealed.
She continued, “All sorts of people are struggling because of this, but we're at this inflection point where as the business changes, the way artists are compensated has to change too. Otherwise, they just won't be compensated.”
On the topic of if the strike is affecting any of her projects directly, she revealed that she's “definitely on a pause from everything.” However, she does have some rewrite deals in place that can't be worked on.
High school to middle school to … elementary school?
The second that the credits rolled during my screening of Margaret, I remember making the connection that both of Kelly Fremon Craig's films are coming-of-age films and have gone down in age from high school in The Edge of Seventeen to middle school in Margaret.
Will her next coming-of-age film go up or down in age? I can't think of a coming-of-age story set in elementary school, and in Fremon Craig's hands, it'd be even more exciting.
She laughed at my (somewhat) facetious question but did oblige with an answer: “Oh, gosh, I think I'd probably go older, but who knows?”
That makes sense — there are plenty of college films out there but very few (if any) elementary school films. Fremon Craig revealed that she loves working with young actors, whether they're kids or teens given their openness to improvisation — something she likes utilizing in her films.
“It's exciting to see them start to trust themselves and really ride their own instincts.”
So maybe an elementary school coming-of-age film isn't in the cards (for now) for Kelly Fremon Craig, but she's creating the stories she wants to create, telling the stories she wants to tell, and saying the things she wants to say. After two stellar films and plenty more on the way, you can't deny that Fremon Craig's presence in the world of independent film is a true answer to prayer.
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. is available on Blu-ray, DVD, and digital now.
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