Hannah Fidell has a rather disturbing Google Alert set up to notify her whenever a female teacher is arrested for an illegal relationship with a student. By her account, it goes off every other day. “There are no statistics about it because it’s vastly underreported, and there’s no organizing body keeping track of how often this happens,” she laments.
“If you saw the two of them walking down the street together and they weren’t a student and teacher, would it be OK?”
But her focus on the subject isn’t just a macabre fascination. Her new FX miniseries, “A Teacher,” depicts a female teacher, Claire, who has an affair with her underage male student, Eric. The 10-episode series, which premiered Nov. 10, is based on her film of the same name from 2013. And though both projects cover the same treacherous subject matter, Fidell views them as entirely separate entities.
She’s also certain that the respective projects have debuted in vastly different environments, particularly for women filmmakers. “Just personally, I’ve seen a real difference in the way female writer-directors are treated, [and] the way female-centered stories are treated, as well,” the showrunner says. “The sort of cultural climate today is more inclined to tell complicated stories that involve women, more so than it was before, and that’s very exciting.”
How to Get a Show on FX Though the industry has changed considerably over the last seven years, Fidell’s telling of a story that centers around sexual abuse in 2020 has not been drastically informed by the advent of the #MeToo or Time’s Up movements. The series does investigate the power dynamics at play more thoroughly than its source material, but that has more to do with its form.
“The film had so many constraints placed on it because of budget,” Fidell recalls of the indie. “What was more interesting to me was focusing quite a bit on Eric’s perspective and the students, and being able to see how these relationships begin. To be able to develop Eric’s character more [for the series] was not necessarily a consequence of #MeToo and the cultural perception of what should and shouldn’t be on television today. We just have a name for it now.”
A demented love story of sorts, the series stars Kate Mara and Nick Robinson as the teacher and student. There are other characters, but just barely. A lot rides on the audience leaning forward and knowing what they’re watching is wrong, but being too compelled to look away. It’s a tricky balance to strike, one that both Fidell and the actors had to bear in mind.
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“Their chemistry is part of what makes this such a complicated thing,” Fidell says of her leads. Mara had been attached to the project for a while (she’s also an executive producer), so she and Fidell took Robinson to lunch to gauge his interest. Ultimately, Fidell saw in him a bit of what she saw in the character—a kind of intrinsic quality she always looks for when casting.
“I find just having a conversation is much better than having someone read. I even prefer to watch interviews over watching them tape,” she says. “They have to embody at least a bit of the character already, which obviously helps get it right. It’s also about being able to give actors the freedom to move in scenes. For me, it’s never about an actor hitting the mark. The camera’s always secondary to the performance, which I think helps add authenticity, because the actors don’t have to think about where they’re going to land. That just exponentially helps ground the performances in reality.”
Realism, unfortunately, will not be lacking in “A Teacher.” But that, Fidell insists, is the point.
“Whether it’s film or television, I’ve always been drawn to works of art that really force the audience to not be passive,” she explains. “If you saw the two of them walking down the street together and they weren’t a student and teacher, would it be OK?”
She pauses. “There’s just a lot to think about.”
This story originally appeared in the Nov. 12 issue of Backstage Magazine. Subscribe here.
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