Volatile situations can often spark a burning desire to create. Although director Jacob Aaron Estes may still not have any kind words to share with the bully who tried to intimidate the young filmmaker at a San Francisco basketball court nearly a decade ago, the truth is that the writer/director's career probably would've taken a different turn if not for his athletic adversary. Driven by the need to channel his vengeful energy into a productive outlet, Estes wrote "Mean Creek," a script about a group of small-town teenagers whose seemingly harmless prank to turn the tables on the local bully, George (Josh Peck), goes much too far.

The script won the Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting, which was only one part in the project's long journey to secure financing. But after the money fell into place and a terrific young cast, featuring Rory Culkin ("You Can Count On Me"), Scott Mechlowicz ("Eurotrip") and Trevor Morgan ("The Rookie"), was assembled, the finished film played to much acclaim at both the Sundance and Cannes Film Festivals. "Mean Creek" is a welcome addition to the list of films such as "Better Luck Tomorrow," "Saved!" and "Thirteen" that have been expanding the boundaries of the "teen movie" genre in recent years.

Acquired for U.S. distribution by Paramount Classics, the film opens in limited release on August 20, 2004 and will expand to more cities in the following weeks. I had the pleasure of speaking one-on-one with Estes about his provocative debut film at "Mean Creek's" recent Los Angeles press day

EI: "Mean Creek" centers on teenagers, but isn't a "teen movie." How difficult was it to get the movie made?

JAE: It was very difficult to get this movie made. It's a story about teenagers dealing with extremely adult themes. There was always a question of who this was going to be marketed to. It was also clear from the beginning that it would be rated R because of the language. Really, it just boils down to a financial question from the point of view of people who are investing the money. There were seven years of asking people for money and studios flirting with the possibility of making this movie, but it never happening.

EI: Did you ever find yourself being asked to soften aspects of the script in order to raise financing?

JAE: No. Or if I ever was, I stopped talking to that person. (laughs)

EI: Apparently the script was inspired by problems you had with a bully on some basketball courts in San Francisco. Can you talk more about that?

JAE: About seven years ago, when I was 24, I was living in San Francisco and playing basketball almost every day at this outdoor court. At some point during the course of my tenure on this court, this enormous drunk guy started coming to the game. He took an instant disliking to me out of some instinctual reason. He had a lot of emotional problems and was very verbally abusive. Clyde (Ryan Kelley) has a line in the movie, "No one talks to people that way, George," and that came right out of the mouth of a basketball player on the court. As I tried to fend off the verbal abuse, it became physical in the context of basketball, and was very ugly. I was very territorial and loved this basketball game and wouldn’t stop playing at this court. Because of my continued exposure to this guy, I began to have all of these escalating revenge fantasies and eventually pursued one of them.

I had this idea to photograph a "No Parking" sign, and I did, and I took it into Photoshop and changed it to "No Greg" and listed all of his negative attributes. I got my ladder out, went to the basketball courts in the middle of the night, glued these signs to the backboard, showed up at the basketball court the next day and waited for him to show up and see it. He saw it, was humiliated and left, but he came back a week later knowing full well that I had served him that course. It just intensified his hostility and violence, and at a certain point I decided to leave that basketball court and channel my need for revenge into a screenplay.

EI: Why did you set the film in Oregon?

JAE: It was always set in a small town, and it had to be sort of a depressed small town with a river. The original setting I had in mind was Yuba City, California where I have some relatives. At some point along the road to financing the movie, there was a company in Oregon that agreed to finance it if we would shoot in Oregon. I started looking at photographs of Oregon, scouting it a little bit, and determined it was a great place to shoot. That company fired their creative executive and the financing fell through, but the next year when we finally did get the financing, Oregon was still appealing to us.

EI: The main characters in the film are very different individuals, especially in the case of Marty (Scott Mechlowicz) and Clyde, who seem like polar opposites on the surface. Do you think teenagers are more or less discerning than adults about those they choose as friends?

JAE: I don't know about more or less discerning, but it's interesting to me that Clyde would want to be friends with Marty. Marty is so emotionally abusive to him, but he still wants to be around this guy. I grew up in the city where you have people from the projects and people from brownstone mansions in the same high school. Particularly in the city I grew up in, Chicago, we were all able to be friends. It's a fantastic thing, but it's not necessarily something that sticks as we get to be adults and channeled into our chosen fields.

EI: It's interesting how you chose to develop Sam (Rory Culkin) and Millie's (Carly Schroeder) characters. They have a maturity that belies their age, and in many ways seem to be more mature than the older teenagers around them.

JAE: I've always thought that kids that age are incredibly intelligent and incredibly perceptive, and the actors just reconfirmed that. They're just as smart as I am, basically. The actors also confirmed that 16 and 17-year-old people start acting out -- maybe, it's because of puberty or pent-up sexual frustration or anxiety of becoming an adult that's not happening when you're 12 or 13. In this country, I think it's universally true that 16 and 17 is the age when kids start to become less mature. It's almost like you reach a certain critical point when your intellect and sensitivities are pretty high. That never stops but this other thing -- hormones -- kicks in and you have this need to rage. You become less mature for a period of time and then become 12 again. (laughs)

EI: One thing the film does very well is explore the ambiguity of morality. What do you think is most instrumental in shaping a person's morals?

JAE: It's some combination of nature and nurture, which I know skirts the question pretty severely. I think your parents have a profound impact on that. It's what your parents ask you to do or not to do. It's not that video games are a problem, but if parents allow their kids to play video games all day and do nothing else, you're going to have a bunch of depressed kids who never see the sunlight. Throw out your Xbox, throw out your TV and go outside into the sun!

EI: In a superb cast, Scott Mechlowicz, who plays Marty, is the standout to me. He seems to be a star in the making. Tell me how you wound up casting him.

JAE: Scott was about to go do "Eurotrip" and was three days from leaving when my casting director called me and said, "I know you're not looking at people for the part of Marty yet, but I would be a very bad casting director if I didn't insist that you look at this guy Scott Mechlowicz before he leaves to go do "Eurotrip." I asked him to tell me about Scott, and he said that he was 21 or 22, and that was an immediate warning sign. We were really trying to cast teenagers to be teenagers, but since he insisted, we brought him in. He came in and did a 30-minute audition. I had him do different scenes and make adjustments, and he was just so well equipped as an actor. He was able to make incredibly specific choices. I could see right away that he had al the tools to play the part. He also felt frightening to me in the room when he turned that on, which was something that we really needed.

He went away to Prague, which was another problem for me in casting him, because I had made a point to my producers and the other people who were auditioning that this was an ensemble, and I needed to see the group together -- without a group dynamic we didn't have a movie. I kept seeing people for the part of Marty and eventually came to the conclusion that he was the best choice. My fears of him being older than the rest of the kids, and my fears of him not fitting in exactly to the ensemble, were alleviated by the notion that he was an outsider anyway. He was physically and emotionally outside of the group. It also appealed to me to have another person who was more of an adult on set.

EI: His look and presence in the movie feel so familiar. I kept thinking that I'd seen him before in other films, although I hadn't.

JAE: Are you talking about him looking like Brad Pitt?

EI: His performance did scream to me Brad Pitt in "Fight Club."

JAE: I personally don't see that, but so many people have said it that it must be true. I can't even see the resemblance; maybe they have something similar about their eyes or nose. People also say that his voice is the same. Scott's not the next Brad Pitt; he's his own guy.

EI: What films inspired the look and atmosphere of this movie? The two obvious ones appear to be "Stand By Me" and "The Outsiders."

JAE: The touchstones for me were "River's Edge," a movie called "Over The Edge" with Matt Dillon, who was sort of a prototype for Marty. "The Outsiders" you mentioned, "Bad Boys" with Sean Penn, a great Belgian movie that came out recently called "La Promesse." Others were "Manny and Lo," "Dazed and Confused," "American Graffiti," and there are more. I watched a lot of those movies to get my bearings in the genre before I started working on the script.

EI: As a first time feature director what did you find most challenging about making this movie?

JAE: Staying healthy. The whole process is a marathon, and I knew it was going to be a marathon going in. Also, the fact that there was no money was a big challenge. It was difficult to keep going and to keep convincing people to spend their energy on this movie when they couldn't make any money off of it. It's had its own velocity as a result of the positive feedback we received in various stages of the project. I've had to push a lot. It's been exhausting but worth it.

EI: Finally, what's the best way to deal with a bully?

JAE: I think everything is very situation specific and there's no right or wrong way to do something across the board. Everyone has to make their own choices and be responsible for those choices. There are clearly times when you need to walk away and clearly times when you need to face things in a non-violent way. There may be times when violence is called for, but I'm not here to say what's called for in someone else's life. What I would say is that people need to think things through carefully before acting and try to resolve things in a non-violent way. That's the best way to approach it.

Warren Curry