After a six-month search that included four open casting calls, producers Lee Alan and Jennifer Erfurth found the 18-year-old lead actress for their first feature, Lizzie, in a bar. “We didn’t know anything about her, except that she looked too young to be in the bar,” says Alan, who also wrote and directed the digital-video thriller. “She was talking to my friend, who’s a bartender there. We said, ‘Sally, who’s that girl?’ and she said, ‘That’s my daughter.’”
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The girl is listed as “Anonymous” in the film’s credits–to create mystery, says Alan. Although the most acting she’d done was a tiny part in a high school play, she turns in a disturbingly realistic performance as an outsider who spends her time doing drugs with her slacker pals, arguing with her father, cutting herself, playing tricks on her best friend, engaging in the occasional bout of autoerotic asphyxiation, and capturing it all on tape for her senior-year video diary. The film’s story is told through the diary, which is introduced as evidence in the murder trial of Lizzie and her three friends, who, as the film opens, stand accused of killing her family. That footage is framed within the story of the ill-fated debut of TrialVision, a low-budget cable channel broadcasting courtroom coverage.
The video diary leaves out as much as it shows, and is meant to raise questions. “I tried to make a puzzle that doesn’t necessarily have an answer,” says Alan. “People are so quick to judge and so quick to point the finger at one direction or another as the cause for things. It could be the parents, the kids, sex, drugs, rock and roll, the Internet–whatever. The whole point is that it’s not just one thing.”
