Jon Poll Q&A

2 months ago 16th May 09:00

Charlie Bartlett is latest in a long line of teenage coming of age movies starring Anton Yelchin, Hope Davis and Robert Downey Jr.

Struggling to fit in Charlie becomes an underground, not to mention under-aged, shrink who only listens to the private confessions of his schoolmates, and makes the imprudent decision to hand out the pills he's proffered from his own psychiatric sessions.

Steering the project is Jon Poll in his first directorial effort since 1982 film The Tree.

Just how realistic is the movie’s theme?

There is a huge college black market in all prescription drugs. In all honesty, the film is not saying there is anything wrong with these drugs. We just want to point out that some people are given those drugs too easily, especially at young ages.

I know we kind of play fast and loose with it for humour sake but there are a lot of 17-year-olds being given Ritalin. I think we provide an alternative to the idea that prescription drugs are the quick answer.

We tried to make it as realistic as possible. There's a moment when Charlie first shows up at school and two kids are smoking pot. That literally happened to me while scouting locations in Canada. We didn't want it to look like a TV show with a bunch of 28 year-old actors. What was really important to me was that teenagers could see the movie and feel like it was real.

Where did the story come from?

The writer, Gustin, was working in the Burbank mall selling memory cards. Hanging out in the mall with a lot of teenagers, he would ask the kids what they thought of the teen movies, and they would say that they were really disappointed in most of them.

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