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Table of Contents
KIDS + MONEY Screenings
Lauren Greenfield JASON SOEDA: Aloha! It's so nice to meet you. Are you excited about screening KIDS + MONEY in Hawaii? LAUREN GREENFIELD: I am honored that my film was selected for the festival and am always excited about coming to Hawaii! I am eager to have the opportunity to bring KIDS + MONEY to Hawaii and will also be giving a lecture about my photographic work at the University of Hawaii on Oct. 11 (details at laurengreenfield.com). JS: Tell me about the origins of KIDS + MONEY. Was this a project you've had in mind for a long time? LG: The actual filming of KIDS + MONEY happened quickly and intuitively after New York Times Magazine asked me to interview kids about the subject of money. That said, once I began, it took over my life (as my documentary projects often do) and I realized that I had been working on the subject of KIDS + MONEY for many years (really from the start of my career). So the making of the film came about somewhat spontaneously but the subject and ideas had been germinating for years. One of the reasons I jumped at the chance to make KIDS + MONEY was because it was an opportunity to return to the subject of my first book, Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood (Knopf, 1997). Fast Forward was my first photography book and was about how kids grow up quickly in a media-saturated environment and how they are affected by the culture of materialism, the cult of celebrity, and the importance of image. Phoebe, one of the characters in KIDS + MONEY, is 16 in the film and appears in Fast Forward at 3. Even though she is the only character I returned to literally, many of the themes in the film are ones I have explored in my photography for the past 15 years. JS: What was your biggest challenge during the making of this film? LG: One of the creative challenges was making a "talking heads" film visually and dramatically interesting. I tend to prefer cinema verite (the style of my last documentary, THIN) but knew that this film had to be interview-based. I used two cameras (which also brought some unexpected challenges) and shot diverse "b-roll" as well as still lifes of the material worlds of the subjects to intercut with the interview footage. The practical and logistical challenges were many. We had a short production schedule. We had a very limited budget. Teenagers can be unpredictable and hard to schedule. And unlike my last film, THIN, which was commissioned by HBO and produced by Actual Reality Productions, I made KIDS + MONEY independently and had to figure out many of the parts of the production process myself. JS: You documented a variety of young people in Los Angeles. Which of the kids in this film fascinated you the most? Which, if any, frightened you the most? LG: I was fascinated by the experience of all the subjects, which is why they are in the film. I have now seen the movie a million times and still love to listen to them. We spent two months on the casting and pre-interviewed many, many kids so the ones we ended up filming were really the stories that had to be told. I wasn't frightened by any of the subjects but do think they have stories that are vital to listen to - they are truth tellers and have cautionary tales. These kids are on the frontlines of an aggressive consumer culture against which they have little protection. Their experience is not unique and many young people and parents will recognize aspects of what they intelligently observe in their own lives. The power in their stories is in their ability to cause us to think critically about our own values and that of our culture. We should not point the finger at them but raise a mirror to ourselves. They were the ones brave enough to tell the truth about their worlds. JS: What would you like people to take away from your film? LG: I would like people to consider the consumer culture that creates the context for our daily life - particularly with respect to the values it instills in young people. I would like the film to provoke discussion about our values, our lifestyle, the materialism we impart to our children, and the world we create for them to grow up in.
JS: You're an award-winning photographer and filmmaker. Do you like one field more than the other? LG: I really love both. Film is new for me (my first film came out in 2006) and the collaboration with others is very exciting and stretches me in different ways. Photography is probably more true to my individual voice. All that said, the really exciting part about working in the visual media today is the cross-fertilization and multi-media that is possible. Digital technology opens up many new creative opportunities and the Canon professional SLR camera that will come out next month offers video as well as high-resolution still images. The future is increasingly hybrid. JS: What's next for you, Lauren? LG: I am working on a photography book about wealth - inspired in part by KIDS + MONEY. I am also developing some new documentary film ideas. I have a photography show opening at the Annenberg Museum in Los Angeles in March 2008.
Just For Fun: HIFF Survey
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![Photo of [NAME]](images/laurengreenfield.jpg "Photo of [NAME]")
