Michelle Danner is best known in Hollywood as an acting coach par excellence. Working with stars like James Franco, Gerard Butler and Penelope Cruz, she’s made quite an impact on the industry. She’s also done a bit of acting herself, and has tried her hand at producing and directing. Now she’s working on a subject close to her heart – the damage done by school bullying.
Danner’s latest film, Hello Herman, tells the story of a boy who snaps one day and kills several people at his school. It’s framed through a later interview with a radio host, the only person to whom the boy is willing to tell his story before being taken for execution. Asking questions about what caused Herman’s actions and where responsibility should lie, it has a strong anti-bullying message at its core but Michelle’s determination to approach the subject with due sensitivity meant there was a difficult balancing act involved.
“It was a tricky film,” she says. “I was very aware that I didn’t want to be preachy but I think that when you’re dealing with subjects like this that have a lot of social relevance then it’s important to keep the conversation going.”
She’s concerned, she says, that whilst everybody theorises about school shootings just after they happen, there’s too little discussion at other times and not enough focus on possible ways of reaching out to troubled young people before things go wrong.
Hello Herman was actually due to open in December last year, but was delayed by three months after 20 year old gunman Adam Lanza killed 20 children and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. “I just thought it was too soon,” she says. But she was determined to tell a story that, while entertaining people, could move them and “affect change, however minimal.”
“I just attended an event organised by a big anti-bullying organisation,” she explains, “and I heard stories that brought me to tears. Reaching these kids is hard to do and inevitably some kids do fall through the cracks. Somebody has to reach out.”
This, ultimately, is what the character of the radio host manages to do. “Without condoning the idea of what this kid has done the idea was to have someone reach out. In this storyline, this kid is not psychotic. He just needed somebody to do that early on. After these tragedies happen it always emerges that something could have been done and that’s what breaks my heart. Somebody realises that they can intervene, and thinks about it, and doesn’t follow through. I suppose the message is that we need to be aware of the consequences of cruelty.”
Michelle has a supporting role in the film herself, playing Herman’s mother. I ask what attracted her to the part.
“I was drawn to her culpability,” she says. “Her character arc after she realises that she failed him in a very profound way. The reason why I played it is that I judge that mother – or father – so I need to know where they’re coming from, from the point of view of the character. I can judge people and go ‘This would never happen to me...’”
She takes a breath and explains that she just lost one of her dogs – a big dog that lived to the age of 16 – when it drowned in the pool. The memory is obviously fresh and very painful.
“You can’t control everything in life," she says. "I really wanted to be able to justify the mother’s point of view. there’s the line where she says ’I made work my top priority’ and put like that it sounds really callous, only what she’s really saying, of course, is ‘I made putting food on the table my top priority.’”
Acting and working as an acting coach inform one another, she says- and teaching is “about giving something back, giving the next generation the tools to help in their performance, in their own storytelling.”
Tackling bullying also seems to be part of that process of helping the next generation. “Bullying is a huge problem,” she sighs. “It always has been but I think it’s gotten to more monumental proportions. It keeps happening so it keeps needing to be talked about and we have to keep that conversation going.”
Next month, when the film will be released on DVD, is anti-bullying month, and Michelle is hoping that stories of real life bullying will be included in the extras to share valuable experiences. She is now taking into schools, where young people really seem to be connecting with it. “I’m happy people have all kinds of opinions,” she says. “The worst reviews, the best reviews, I’ve gotten both. But the teenagers’ reactions have been very good. There’s some violence in it but I think, you know, that if a teenager is old enough to watch [film]The Hunger Games/film] then they’re old enough to watch this, and then they can carry on the conversation.”
As for the future, she says she has a couple of other “intense, socially relevant” films to make, but that a recent encounter with Ang Lee got her thinking about that. She’s a huge admirer of his and much of that has to do with his eclecticism, his ability to slide between genres. “So my next movie is actually about an abandoned hound. It’s a little like Home Alone, with dogs and crooks and kids, very light and fun.” Then there will be further comedies to be made before she takes on a subject as tough as that in Hello Herman.
