The road to Saint Clare was paved with different intentions. Anyone who has followed the story knows that the adaptation of Don Roff’s Clare at 16 novel went through various stages before reaching its final form. At one point, Riverdale‘s Madelaine Petsch was attached to star, while Mark Pavia had been eyed to write and direct the film. Ultimately, Petsch and Pavia departed the project, as Bella Thorne jumped on board to play Clare Bleecker, and Mitzi Peirone signed on to direct and co-write the script with Guinevere Turner.
The tale of different drafts
As Peirone revealed, though, Turner and her never wrote the script together. They penned separate drafts, as Peirone searched for the story about who Clare Bleecker truly is and what shapes her into becoming a serial killer.
“I wanted to bring in the fact that she’s an antihero,” Peirone said. “She’s a female antihero. I wanted to bring in the ethical questions, the religious influence, the spiritual influences, and also the sociopolitical influences, because I think that the reason Clare’s a vigilante is because she does not trust institutions. She does not trust that the authority will bring the social justice that we all seek, that she seeks, and because she has this traumatic incident – her kind of antihero inception scene teased at the beginning of the film and then revealed in full later on – from that moment on, she becomes basically this great tragic antihero. Because from a young age, she was cursed with blood, and blood will continue to trail after her.”
Thorne, who was a producer on Saint Clare, clicked with Peirone’s draft. “I think that the reason it became the shooting script was because Bella specifically wanted to sink her fangs into something that was dark, complex, and multifaceted,” Peirone said. “Instead of it just being the female Dexter – I love Dexter – but the film does bring in a lot of different themes and different influences. I feel like I would not have done my job if I hadn’t considered the character from every point of view.”
What Bella Thorne brought to Saint Clare
Discussing what Thorne brought to the role of Clare that wasn’t on the page, Peirone praised “the quiet magnitude” that the actor brought to the part. “Knowing Bella, personally, she has a great deal of gravitas,” Peirone said. “That girl is heavy in the soul, very heavy, and I don’t think that it’s been portrayed so far until Saint Clare. I don’t think that Bella had gotten a chance to showcase that side of her. I think that at times the minimalism with which she played the character helped the grounding of the character.
“But at the same time, I know that Bella can get very, very cerebral, and so I worked with that. In the moments, such as where Clare’s having a full-blown mental breakdown at a point in the film, I knew that it was all in Bella’s wheelhouse, so I wrote it thinking about her, knowing that she could get there, but she grounded the character and made it so much more lyrical and violent at the same time. Violent as in dramatic as in the whites are very stark and so are the blacks. It’s just very dramatic – theatrical, but grounded.”
How to make a film in 15 days
Saint Clare was a 15-day production, which is surprising since it doesn’t look like it was shot in just over two weeks. Peirone revealed that it wasn’t easy and overwhelmed her at first, but she believed she could get it done – and she did, making her feel like a much stronger filmmaker today after the experience. “I had an incredible crew,” Peirone said. “I had an incredible cast. The method to the madness was I prepared with my department heads to the point of lunacy, where I storyboarded basically every shot of the film. My hotel room looked like the den of a serial killer. I had drawings and then pictures of saints and martyrs everywhere. And so you prepare. You prepare to the point of madness, mania.”
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Saint Clare arrives in theaters, on demand, and on digital on July 18.
