CATHERINE HARDWICKE (Director) was honored with the prestigious Director’s Award from the 2003 Sundance Film Festival for Thirteen, which marked both her feature film directorial and screenwriting debuts. Made for $1.5 Million, Thirteen went on to win the Jury Prize at the Locarno and Deauville Film Festivals, a National Board of Review special mention, the Best Screenplay Award at the Nantucket Film Festival, three Independent Spirit Award nominations (Nikki Reed won for Best Debut Performance) and appeared on thirty-nine 2004 Critics’ Top Ten Lists including the Washington Post and the New York Times. Evan Rachel Wood was the youngest nominee ever for a Golden Globe for Best Actress. Holly Hunter garnered both a Golden Globe and an Academy Award® for her performance.
A prolific production designer and architect, Hardwicke conceived Thirteen’s bold, visual style as a way of matching the intensity of a young girl’s journey, pulling from her experience of working with such critically acclaimed directors as Cameron Crowe, David O. Russell, Costa Gavras and Richard Linklater. Her vision for the film was influenced in part by Russell’s THREE KINGS, which embodied a high level of deeply felt kinetic intensity.
Hardwicke’s production design credits include: Three Kings, Crowe’s Vanilla Sky, Tombstone, Antitrust, The Newton Boys, Costa Gavras’ Mad City, 2 Days In The Valley, Tank Girl, Posse and Laurel Canyon. She was also second unit director on Linklater’s Suburbia. A native of the South Texas border town McAllen, Hardwicke studied art in Mexico and received a degree in architecture from the University of Texas at Austin. After graduating, she designed and constructed a 20-acre passive solar townhouse complex built around a manmade lake complete with waterfalls, swimming pools and sculptures of the residents.
She then enrolled in UCLA’s Film School, taking graduate courses, where she completed her first animated/live action short. It won her a Nissan Focus Award and toured in the Landmark “Best of UCLA” film program. Hardwicke has directed several short films and designed the production of more than 20 feature films.
Movie Database
In Theaters
(24 votes)