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Before this year, Catherine Hardwicke had directed two films—Thirteen, an intense depiction of a seventh-grade girl rebelling against her single mom and getting into all sorts of trouble, and Lords of Dogtown, an edgy drama about skateboarders in the 1970s. Both films featured sex, drugs, and plenty of profanity.

So, when veteran producer Wyck Godfrey went looking for a director to bring the story of the Virgin Mary and the birth of Christ to the big screen, guess who topped his list?

Hardwicke.

"Catherine has had great success capturing the lives of young people in particular, and the conflict and crisis and pain of being that age and growing up," Godfrey says. "The idea of her bringing that point of view to biblical times is very interesting."

Hardwicke with Keisha Castle-Hughes, who plays Mary

Hardwicke thought so too, and signed on to direct The Nativity Story, which opens worldwide on Friday, Dec. 1. The film covers a little over a year leading up to the birth of Jesus, focusing primarily on Mary (played by Keisha Castle-Hughes) and Joseph (Oscar Isaac), and with concurrent subplots inside Herod's palace and following the journey of the magi.

When CT Movies visited the set in Italy in May, Hardwicke, 51, joked that The Nativity Story sort of completed her "teen trilogy" of movies. When we caught up with her again recently on a media day in Los Angeles, we wanted to explore, among other things, how the making of Thirteen—which she directed and co-wrote—prepared her for directing this assignment.

Thirteen was a very personal film for Hardwicke, based primarily on her friendship with a neighbor's daughter who almost literally changed overnight from a sweet, innocent preteen to an angry, rebellious seventh grader obsessed with beauty and boys. Hardwicke remained friends with that girl, Nikki Reed, trying to steer her to good choices, and the relationship ultimately ended up as a working partnership: Reed co-wrote and co-stars in Thirteen, which received widespread critical acclaim and positioned Hardwicke as a director to watch.

And now she's "befriended" another young teen—while doing her research on the Virgin Mary—and tried to bring the revered icon to life, in a very real and believable way, in The Nativity Story.

The following conversation is primarily drawn from our exclusive interview with Hardwicke, and is supplemented by a few comments she made in a roundtable discussion with several journalists.

How did your friendship with Nikki Reed and making Thirteen—getting into the heads of young teenage girls—prepare you for making this movie?

Catherine Hardwicke: Good question, and nobody's ever asked me that before. Nikki was my friend, and I've known her and both of her parents through the traumatic process of divorce and all kinds of things. I think that is what made me want to make this movie, because when I finished reading the script and started researching Mary, who would have been 13 or 14 at the time, I thought, What if Nikki or one of her friends received this calling? You're trying to figure out so many things in your life at that age. Knowing Nikki really made it real and personal for me, and exciting to try and explore that.

What was it like watching Nikki suddenly change from a sweet little girl to a rebellious 13-year-old?

Hardwicke: I couldn't believe it. I had been out of town for about six months, and when I came back, Nikki was a new person. She literally woke up at 4:30 in the morning, and spent two hours on her hair and make-up till she looked just like J-Lo—in 7th grade. I thought, What's happening to girls, and what pressures are on them that feel they have to look as good as that girl in a magazine to be anybody?

I started hanging out with Nikki's friends, trying to become more involved and understand what's going on with kids. What are the pressures? All of the advertising: 3,000 images a day are hitting kids. And then there's maybe one voice of the mom: You know, honey, you're beautiful on the inside. Well, it's hard to hear that kind of message. I think that's what really compelled me to be interested in teenagers and what they're going through these days, which is really a difficult thing to navigate.

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