Hey Hey It's Esther Blueburger

Hey Hey It's Esther Blueburger (2008)

Sometimes to fit in you need to stand out

With help from a new friend, a misfit at a fancy private school secretly enrolls at a public school as a foreign exchange student.

Date of release
2008-03-20
TMDB
5.9 / 10 (26)
Runtime
1h 43m
Genres
Comedy, Drama
Director
Cathy Randall

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Box office: A$864K
  • Awards: 0 · Nominations: 3

Hey Hey It's Esther Blueburger is a 2008 Australian independent teen film written and directed by Cathy Randall. It stars Danielle Catanzariti, Keisha Castle-Hughes and Toni Collette. The film follows Jewish 13-year-old Esther (Catanzariti), an outcast at her posh school, where she has no friends. That changes when she meets nonconformist Sunni (Castle-Hughes) from the local public school.

Production

Cathy Randall's script for Hey, Hey, It's Esther Blueburger stemmed from her desire "to make a film about a kick-ass chick, a heroine for teenagers

and people of all ages", wanting to take a female twist on The Catcher in the Rye's Holden Caulfield. She said that she had "always been struck by the fact that there are not enough role models for teenage girls". Esther's character was drawn loosely from Randall's own adolescence; like Esther, she had a Bat Mitzvah, she had a twin brother and she attended both a private and a public school.

Based on her original script, Randall was awarded a fellowship to the Los Angeles Film School's Feature Development Programme in 2002. She said that, under the mentorship of the school's faculty, "The screenplay evolved by becoming lighter and funnier and also the story and structure got tighter." In 2003, Randall was nominated for an Australian Writers' Guild AWGIE Award for Best Unproduced Screenplay.

To cast the title character, the film's producers worked with a casting agent to find experienced actors but also held open auditions for 12- to 15-year-old girls in search of "a new face". The producers had spent four months overseeing over 3,000 girls' auditions before Danielle Catanzariti attended a cattle call audition advertised in a local newspaper for minor roles and extras.

Keisha Castle-Hughes was Randall's first choice for the role of Sunni based on her performance in the New Zealand film Whale Rider (2002). Castle-Hughes agreed to star in the film when she first read the script at age 13, but was 16 by the time finance had been raised and filming began. Castle-Hughes' pregnancy was announced shortly before production was scheduled to begin but filming went ahead unaffected.

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