I was going through some boxes in our storage room at the end of the summer, and I came upon a big one filled with my old journals, some albums, and a few sheaths of printed film. Before I even opened them I was reminded in a flash of those days when we’d wait for our film to develop at the “One Hour Photo”. I remember the excitement of taking the little packets out of the plastic bag and flicking through them when they were still warm. The smell! No Millenial will forget it. When I opened my little discovery, I found that it was a few rolls of film from when I was filming the movie “Saved!” Tucked inside were also a bunch of polaroids we had taken as a cast during the months of shooting in Canada.

Last year, the film Saved! celebrated 20 years of its release in theaters. I remember at the time being astounded that so much time had passed. Saved! was a little indie film, which has become a cult classic over time. It did pretty well in the theaters (thanks to Mandy Moore and Macaulay Culkin being in it, I’m sure!), but it wasn’t a huge smash. However, most of the people who approach me in public now share with me that Saved! was a movie that changed them, helped them, or comforted them during their life. That’s pretty wild for a movie that came out over 20 years ago!

Saved! is about a teenage girl who attends a very conservative Christian high school in her very conservative Christian community. She’s part of the cool group of girls who have a very set box of what it means to be “good” and worthy of God’s Love. When Mary, the teen, tries to “save” her gay boyfriend by having sex with him, she gets pregnant. Her boyfriend gets shipped off to a religious conversion center for gay youth, and Mary starts trying to hide her pregnancy, all while having what can best be described as an existential crisis. I play Cassandra, the only Jewish girl at the Christian high school, who is a total rebel and goes against the grain. The movie is funny, tender, moody, and does such a great job of showing that real life always falls within a moral grey area, and that love, friendship, and connection can be the most grounding methods of faith for people of all ages.

My own involvement with this movie started when I was only 16! I auditioned for the role, and ended up coming back for a call-back with the producers. I still remember this call-back, and the fact that a random assistant from my Mother’s agency had to drive me to it because I didn’t have a license or any way of getting anywhere. I also had only auditioned like 10 times ever and probably didn’t do it at all “right”. It’s the perfect example of how sometimes being a little different or “green” in an industry can really set you apart. I also had a pixie haircut which was basically the teenage girl equivalent of saying FUCK OFF. I got the part!

When the movie first came together, we were supposed to be filming in Miami, and Anne Hathaway was attached to play Hilary Faye. This is so strange for me to think about now, because in my mind Mandy Moore IS that role, and made it iconic. People don’t realize that so many movies you know and love are like this! There are often entirely different casts attached when a movie is first being put together, which then changes based on funding or schedule availability of the actors! I had never lived on my own before at that point, so my Mom brought me down to Miami on a Friday to get me settled in the hotel room I was going to be living in while we filmed. Over the weekend, we got word that the movie was still not completely funded. This happens a lot with Indie movies, though maybe not always when the cast is already on location to shoot! We waited around for a few more days, and then I ended up packing up and going back to New York. The movie pushed, and the cast changed.

When we finally started shooting, this time in Vancouver Canada, I was a senior in High School. I had emancipated myself to be able to work adult hours because I was only 17, and nobody in Hollywood wanted to hire a teenager who still had to have a tutor on set and adhere to the minor rules. I had actually gotten my GED a year earlier, just for work, but told nobody outside of my manager. I continued to go to high school. One caveat with filming Saved! was that not only would I be working adult hours, but I also had to complete all of my high school assignments, and my college applications, in my free time while in Vancouver filming the movie. I told my parents I could totally do this, no big deal. In reality, I look back on the experience and have NO idea how I pulled it off. In between scenes, on lunch breaks, and at night and on the weekends, I worked on my studies. I read novels and wrote papers. I took two foreign languages. I even hired my own math tutor to help me on Saturdays because it was such a hard subject for me to understand when I wasn’t getting the instruction in class.

I faxed my high school my completed assignments, checked in once a week with them on the phone, and filled out college applications before heading out on Friday and Saturday nights to meet up with the rest of the cast. I still had the best time of my life LOL. I guess it’s a good thing that teenagers have endless energy, or else I probably wouldn’t have survived it! I also was just endlessly excited to be doing any of it at all. I would say that the experience of managing work responsibilities, school responsibilities, my own food, money, and health, and then also having fun and being a teenager was ultimately one of the most formative experiences of my entire life. Probably second only to becoming a mother for the first time. I learned SO much.

From day one, the entire cast of the movie clicked. I remember being particularly intimidated to meet Macaulay. Not only was he pretty much THE actor of my generation, but we were playing love interests. This was only my third movie in a real role EVER, I had never kissed somebody on camera before (I had kissed very few people in real life either!), and I was mostly focused on not fucking it up. On all levels. When I met Mac (as everyone calls him), I was immediately put at ease. He is such a bundle of joy and light, he was so kind to me, funny, and a total homebody. He just had zero pretense at all. Our scenes together were so fun to shoot.

I was SO happy to have Jena Malone as the movie’s star, too. She and I had bonded years ago when she filmed Stepmom with my Mom, and aside from being an incredible actor, she was also super independent like I was. She had been working since she was a little girl, had been living on her own from a very young age, and was filled with gritty spunk and creativity. I felt so comforted knowing we would be side by side for the experience. Besides Jena, my other two besties on the shoot became Heather Matarazzo and Patrick Fugit. Heather and I would cook a ton together, and she and Jena, and I would go thrift shopping all around Vancouver in our time off.

Heather and I would always spearhead “family dinners”, where we would cook for the rest of the cast, and sometimes the crew, too! I remember Heather teaching me how to make her family’s lasagna like it was yesterday. When we didn’t want to cook, we’d go in groups across the street to Denny’s and eat at the counter, or order peanut butter and jelly sandwiches from room service. They came with a side of celery and carrot sticks like the perfect kids’ meal. Ha! After dinners, or on weekends, one of our favorite things to do as a cast was to either walk around Virgin Megastore (remember THAT?!) and buy new CDs that we’d trade each other, or go out to sing karaoke. We’d get a private room, have a few drinks, and just hang out for hours. Jena is incredible at Karaoke, and we would have so much fun! Mandy Moore singing karaoke was a little unfair considering she was a platinum recording artist. LOLZ.

Mandy had a serious boyfriend at the time who would visit, and so she didn’t spend as much time with us as some of the other cast members. I do remember her hanging out at times, though, and chilling in the hotel rooms with us while we watched classic movies and shot the shit. She was so great at the role of Hilary Faye, the character everyone loves to hate! This was pre-Mean Girls, by the way, but the vibes were similar! Saved was the first dark comedy Mandy had done, and the subject matter was a huge risk for her at the time considering her “image”. She had just come off of A Walk To Remember and had the short haircut. They ended up giving her extensions for Saved! to fit with the character of Hilary Faye and had her tanning in the tanning booth to get that beauty queen teen look to her. I thought it was cool that both of us in real life had decided to chop our hair off– it was pretty rare at that time and against the trends!

And Patrick! I was pretty much obsessed with him. I can say that now, and I’m sure he knew at the time, but I thought he was so cool, and I had the HUGEST crush. He’s not too different from his character in Saved, in fact, and we had so much fun watching movies, listening to music, and sneaking into the hotel pool late at night to swim and goof around. Almost Famous was one of my favorite movies, and it was constantly surreal to be working with him in the wake of that! One day on set, close to Halloween, Mary Louise Parker and I decided to surprise him while he was shooting a scene. We got a bunch of Halloween decorations and decorated his entire trailer so that when he opened it after wrapping it was filled with everything spooky!

It’s wild looking back on how young I was and how I managed to balance it all and operate like an adult with minimal supervision. I was only about 6 years older than my own daughter is now! I also find it really sweet how wholesome the entire experience was. We weren’t young people clubbing and doing crazy drugs just because we could. We were telling a coming-of-age story at work, and coming home to make lasagna and watch classic movies. It felt like a little bubble in so many ways, and we were all just stuck together telling a story that wasn’t so far off from our own ages and experiences. While filming, I felt super uninhibited. It was a very chill vibe on set, and Brian the director was young-spirited as well. It felt like we were all kids making this little movie together.

I wasn’t in my head at ALL, and just focused on really knowing who this rebel character was at heart. She was misunderstood, a tender-hearted girl who had to wear so much armor because everyone saw her as one thing when she was really another. In a lot of ways, I could relate. I was a pretty soft-hearted person myself, who felt like I needed to be grown up to protect myself. Playing Cassandra was so freeing for me, because I was NEVER the rebel in real life. I was absolutely not a perfect angel (let’s not misunderstand LOL), but I was the straight-A student who finished her weekend homework on a Friday night and always thought before I acted. I feel like I took a little bit of Cassandra’s bravery home with me, and her independence. I see my performance in this movie to be really so pure. It was before bad set experiences, humiliating auditions, and constantly getting rejected that broke my spirit. I didn’t realize at the time how protected I was able to be within this experience, and I’m truly grateful for it.

I think it’s almost time for me to show my kids this movie. It has a great message, and I love that so much of who I actually was at that time, and what I was experiencing, come through in the film. In lots of ways, it’s like a time capsule of my teen years. It’s strange to look back on one of the first experiences you had in a career and be able to wholeheartedly say it was the best, but it really was. The work of it, the creativity of it, and the life of it. I think I hoped for the entire rest of my career that I would have an acting experience that would match it, but only a couple of projects ever came close. I’m so lucky that I got that little slice of time that I can keep with me forever.

Let me know if you have any specific questions about filming!