I Was a Teenage Auteur: Senior Prom Director Nicholas Terry

Nicholas Terry made a quality feature film for peanuts (between $100 and $300, depending on who you talk to). It’s screening at the most-attended film festival in the country. Without trying, he’s getting the kind of regional media attention that most aspiring filmmakers would kill for. And he’s navigating the avalanche of press interviews like a pro. In a lot of ways, it’s a typical story of a first-time director getting his vision seen by a large and appreciative audience, except for the fact that the director in question hasn’t yet graduated high school.

With his slender frame, slightly mussed head of red hair, and polite smile, Terry’s combination of awkwardness and precocious smarts suggests Neil Patrick Harris by way of Topher Grace, but he possesses a clarity of focus that’d be impressive in anyone–never mind a seventeen-year-old. That singularity of purpose makes sense in the context of the movie he’s made.

Senior Prom received its world premiere to a packed house at the Seattle International Film Festival’s SIFF Cinema last Friday (it also plays at 4:30 p.m. today at the same venue). It’s one of the buzz movies of the festival, largely because of its solidly homegrown pedigree. Terry, a Mountlake Terrace High School senior, devised and directed the movie as a senior class project. He cast several of his school drama pals in the leads, and encouraged them to freely improvise on his basic outline of a story about high-school seniors preparing for that most momentous of hurrahs: senior prom.

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Rough around the edges as it is, the movie’s incredibly entertaining, more Waiting for Guffman than Sixteen Candles. Its characters alternately conform to and transcend expected high-school tropes: There’s Miles (Michael Ward), the not-as-cocky-as-he-acts sorta-jock with an unrequited crush on all-business ASB president Brittany (Jessica Weight); exuberant nerd Zach (Max Watson), who pines for razor-tongued wiseacre Lynsey (Lynsey Lorraine); and the annoyingly lovey-dovey steady couple Shelley and Shawn (Alix Deenan and Alan Garcia), among others. Senior Prom manages to be funny as hell, while still acknowledging the little pains and dramas at the root of being a teenager, and it pulls that balance off with a first-hand immediacy that could only come from someone living on those front lines.

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Terry openly acknowledges the influence of Guffman and Christopher Guest’s other improvised ensemble comedies. “When I was first putting the movie together,” he explains, “We had a barbecue at my house, and I screened Waiting for Guffman for the actors to give them an idea of the style I was shooting for. They all got it right away.” The TV show The Office also informed the finished product. “[That show] kind of captured what I was going for, too–the way it cuts away for visual gags while characters [deliver] dialogue.”

More surprisingly, the director mines laughs with a refreshing absence of scatology or crudeness, going instead for a more classicist set-up. “I’m not a big fan of grittier comedies like Superbad or The Hangover,” he says. “I really love classics like What’s Up, Doc…The Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy….”

Terry shot Senior Prom over the course of about five months, utilizing locations in and around his Shoreline stomping grounds. “I was pretty much my own crew,” he admits. He also edited the movie and composed the score. “It’s a mockumentary, so to make it feel more real, I didn’t use the music a lot–only during the montages, and for a couple of key scenes.”

The story behind Senior Prom’s ascension from class project to Official SIFF Selection sounds like something out of a movie in its own right. “Once I’d finished [Senior Prom] and saw how it turned out, I’d intended to submit it for the NFFTY [National Film Festival for Talented Youth] Competition,” he says. “But my dad saw it and said, ‘Why don’t we submit this to SIFF? Since it’s locally-made, they’ll waive the submission fee.’ So we did.”

Terry heard about his acceptance into SIFF while helping one of his friends with their class project, a one-act play. “We were in the middle of rehearsal when I got the call. I didn’t really realize how big of a thing it was right away, but very quickly it went from ‘yeah, this is cool’ to ‘wow! that’s incredible!’” SIFF Education Programs Coordinator Dustin Kaspar attended the second screening at Mountlake Terrace, fell in love with it, saw how it played in front of an audience, and was instrumental in its acceptance as a festival entry. “He totally took me under his wing,” Terry says.

It’s easy to see why Kaspar (and audiences in general) responded to Senior Prom: For one thing, the characters feel as well-rounded and serendipitously funny as the leads in any quality indie comedy. The director’s quick to credit his actors, whose improvisations gave him an immense amount of raw material to work with. He estimates that he shot about ten hours of footage (“I’ve been telling people about ten [hours], but it’s probably more than that.”), and had to make some tough editorial decisions to tighten up the film. One of Senior Prom’s most amusing sequences–in which the clueless Miles and his even more clueless buddy Kyle (Tennyson Morin) attempt to book catering and a venue for the prom over the phone–had to be boiled down from over an hour of footage. “That was a tough one, because it was so funny, but it ran really long….I did edit down that scene with Michael and Tennyson…to a fifteen-minute [clip] that I put on my Facebook page so people could enjoy it by itself.”

“I wanted to hit a lot of the cliches,” Nick explains, “and yet at the same time make them not-cliche. I made Miles the jock a football player, but instead of always getting the girl, he doesn’t get the girl. I wanted to show the couple that’s just ooey-gooey in love that you cannot stand–we all know that couple–and then at the same time just have him want out of the relationship. I wanted [the audience] to see people that they know through the characters, and yet at the same time turn that world upside down.” He denies intentionally patterning any characters after specific people, but did find himself feeling a special kinship with lovestruck nerd Zach as the shooting progressed. ” I think a lot of people will relate to [Zach], because we’ve all been in that situation where we like someone, but they don’t even know we exist. I just think he’s a really relatable character. He does what we wish we could all do, which is just go for it, to try as hard as he can to talk to this girl.”

Terry did toy with the idea of acting in the film himself (“Christopher Guest does that with all of his movies,” he notes with a laugh), but eventually thought better of it and kept himself behind the camera as an offscreen interviewer. “There were times when I’d picture a character in my head, and how I’d play the character; so I’d kind of tell the actor how I’d do it. Then they would take that idea, and make it ten times better than anything I could’ve come up with. I think it worked with me behind the camera. I was able to steer the interviews in the direction I needed.”

Most of the actors fit quickly into their roles, except for one happy accident. “Michael originally auditioned for the role of Shawn, the boyfriend in the lovey-dovey couple,” Terry explains, “But after awhile he sort of asked if he could try playing Miles, and he just hit it perfectly.” Ward’s work as Miles marks the movie’s most hilarious portrayal, yet in some ways its also the saddest. Terry wouldn’t have it any other way. “Some of the characters have character arcs, but I liked the idea that Miles starts out as one kind of character, arcs, and then hits the point where he changes–where he likes just this one girl–then just kind of goes back to where he was at the beginning, which was ‘I like GIRLS.’ So his arc kind of makes a loop instead.”

As for short term plans, Terry intends to stay local for the next year or two by attending a regional university or community college. Then, he says, he might consider transferring to a film school in New York or Los Angeles. But he’s extremely fond of the Northwest, as a home and as a location for shooting. “I love the area I live in. It’s a great area to film in. With the overcast [weather], you have some great shooting opportunities. So ideally, I’d go to college in California, maybe make some connections there, then just come back up here to make movies, to work around here locally.” You can take the boy out of the Northwest, it seems, but you can’t take the Northwest out of the boy.