About the Production

Director's Comments

From Stealing to Sex, Turning Vice into Inspiration
By Melissa Painter

In writing Steal Me, I wanted to use the framework of a boy who, through a series of encounters with women who are all at different points in their lives, gradually reveals the various facets of his whole self. Since I’m married to a man who grew up stealing things, in part because he was from the ghetto, and in part because of his relationship with his mother -- that was always an intriguing prospect to me.

Personally, my vice as a teenager was to be promiscuous, so I wound that trait into my husband’s childhood thievery, and fleshed out the character of Jake. The inspiration came easily, as I’m fascinated by people’s compulsions, in this case stealing and promiscuity, and how these actions are designed not simply to get something from someone else, but to fill a void within oneself. As a teenager, Jake has that massive disconnect between how he sees himself and how the world sees him. To me, the evolution of an adult is melding those two things -- stepping away from the tremendous concern over what others think of you, and discovering a sense of self.

Jake’s mother, being a prostitute, was too overtly sexual as he was growing up, and I wanted to convey how that would affect someone in their teenage years. The idea was to create something where I was never going to bored by a single scene, even three months into the editing process, so I wrote what I knew about -- things I’ve wanted to explore for a long time. The scenes in Steal Me are true, in a universal sense, and they’re very intimate to me.

I’m a mother myself now, and a lot has changed in my life, which gives me a little more perspective. In writing the part for Paz de la Huerta (Lily Rose), for example, I was able to create the character of a wild girl in a small town in a way that I never could have ten years ago, and that’s a subject near and dear to my heart.

I was also able to bring more perspective to the relationship between Tucker and Jake, which starts out almost as a love affair, and that lingers just under the surface throughout the film. When I grew up in San Francisco, before the AIDS crisis, if you were cool, then you were probably bisexual -- especially if you were in theater. Every guy I loved was bisexual, and the connection between Jake, Tucker, and Lily Rose comes from my experiences growing up in a time and place where people were exploring boundaries with less fear. In way, given the harsh realities of life today, Steal Me’s romanticism is a throw back to the early eighties.

I think what sets Steal Me apart is that it moves beyond the sex-on-the-surface syndrome seen in most Hollywood portrayals of teenagers, instead showing teen sexuality as we all remember it -- both sweetly romantic and painfully raw. To me, it’s all about what’s possible, and the feeling that anything may happen.