Filmmakers eschew formula, conventional narratives to capture reel life

When Catherine Hardwicke found her primary location to shoot “Thirteen,” she didn’t just choose a real lower-middle-class residence as a home for Evan Rachel Wood’s troubled teen Tracy, with cramped hallways, worn-out carpets and stifling rooms. A vet production designer, Hardwicke, with designer Carol Strober, decided to fill the chest drawers in Tracy’s bedroom with clothes, socks, underwear and everything else a 13-year-old-turning-woman might desire.

What sounds like indulgence (repeat viewings of “Thirteen” barely reveal the drawers’ contents) is actually strategy. “There’s the practical aspect,” says Hardwicke, “because I learned as a designer on set that you never know when you’ll need something like a sock. But the mission behind my movie was to create a complete, enveloping sense of the real, even hyper-realism. It was the only way I could convey teenage life teetering out of control.”

This is not your father’s Hollywood of false storefronts that still teem the back lots like so many ghost towns, but a concerted effort toward naturalism. Just this year, it includes a broad spectrum of films, from the hand-held approach of “Thirteen” and Robert Altman’s fly-on-the-wall look at the Joffrey Ballet in “The Company” to Michael Winterbottom’s perfect illusion of a docu for “In This World” and the nonemphatic attitude of finding the extraordinary in the every day in Tom McCarthy’s “The Station Agent.”

While CGI-fed forces wave the banner today for “The Matrix,” “The Lord of the Rings” and “Pirates of the Caribbean,” films are being made around the world with largely nonprofessional casts, staged in real time and with a semidocumentary approach. From works by Iranian modern realists to Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation,” Peter Mullen’s “The Magdelene Sisters” and Gus Van Sant’s “Elephant,” certain filmmakers seem content to pull back from conventional storytelling and allow the drama to unfold as if presenting real life.

What motivated the filmmakers to refrain for preaching, sentimentalizing or manipulating? Patty Jenkins, who directed an almost unrecognizable Charlize Theron as real-life serial killer Eileen Wuornos in “Monster,” offers that it’s in response to a market inundated with big-budget sequels and franchise series. “It gets so unedgy it causes this backlash that probably goes too far. I think you can see that in films of the ’50s and the ’70s, incredibly nuanced films by Elia Kazan and Hal Ashby were at the forefront of a movement toward stories driven by character.”

In today’s Europe, the cause has been most flamboyantly held by Dogma 95, whose code of all things natural and minimal is something Hardwicke says she’s taken to heart. But her inspiration goes back even earlier. “John Cassavetes’ films really worked on me, their powerful sense of putting the audience right in the moment with the actors, who are almost finding their characters as we’re watching them,” she says. “These get me going, as do Rob Nilsson’s ‘Heat and Sunlight’ and Scorsese’s early work like ‘Mean Streets,’ where you feel like you’re getting punched in the face.”

The medium of movies, easily able to record the world in front of our faces, would seem to be the naturalist’s natural home. But, just as in the rest of the arts, there’s always been a bigscreen battle on two fronts, starting with the Lumiere brothers’ and Thomas Edison’s films of everyday life on one side and Georges Melies’ fantasies of flying to the moon on the other.

As Andre Bazin argued in his own gently convincing way, part of what the Italian neorealists, from Roberto Rossellini to Luchino Visconti, were rebelling against in the early 1940s wasn’t just their own country’s artificial historical epics and superficial comedies, but Hollywood’s ultrastylized trips to lands and characters free from the impact of the Depression and war.

If the neorealists’ impact was felt in the U.S. in such disparate ’60s works as Kent Mackenzie’s Bunker Hill ode “The Exiles” and Cassavetes’ partly improvised films, then it gained full flower in the ’70s cinema of Jerry Schatzberg, Bob Rafelson and Sidney Lumet.

But even though they all yearn for a real world captured on film, the new naturalists hardly resemble each other. “The Station Agent’s” McCarthy, unlike “Thirteen’s” cinematic equivalent of ADD, aims for a patient study of three characters who take their sweet time to discover and eventually like each other.

Noting that he’s drawn to Francois Truffaut’s early films such as “The 400 Blows” and “Shoot the Piano Player,” “which let the stories unfold on their own,” McCarthy felt the difficulty during shooting “to take the time to just linger over a scene or a shot, and see how real time could play out. But it’s hard in America, since our country’s built on action and revolution. It’s hard for us to slow down.”

Winterbottom says the only fair approach to conveying the desperation of those fleeing Third World poverty but trapped in ruthless human trafficking was to draw up a likely scenario for refugees’ flight to the West, and cast actual survivors.

Casting, in fact, is key to the naturalistic style, says McCarthy. “If you’re telling your story with naturalism, it lives or dies by the actors, so the acting seems invisible.”

Altman, whose 1975 film “Nashville” seemed to eavesdrop on more than a dozen characters in the world of country music and earned five Academy Award nominations in the process, has approached his latest film with the same disregard for Hollywood formula. Even though she’s ostensibly the star of “The Company,” Neve Campbell told the helmer from the outset that she didn’t want to be seen as the star onscreen.

“She wanted to be one of the dancers, and seamlessly blend into the ensemble,” notes Altman, who observes the effect this had on the film’s cast of nonacting pros from the Joffrey. “I couldn’t make the dancers actors, so I had to make the actual actors (Campbell, James Franco) seem like nonactors, so they don’t stand out. And as I shot group scenes, the dancers never had any idea what their dialogue was going to be — and they almost never knew it was dialogue at all.”

Which only stresses the paradox of naturalistic movies, of which Altman is one of the grand old foxes: Naturalism never means just making it up on the spot and letting things happen as in real life; rather, it means carefully contriving everything, from your star to the socks in the drawer, so it seems that way.