Swank: ‘Freedom Writers’ a million-dollar script

When Hilary Swank isn’t acting, she stays busy reading.

“I read so many scripts,” says the two-time Oscar winner. “I can’t tell you how many scripts I read, and I would say one in 20 is, you know, stellar.

“There’s no word for it, you just feel it. I felt it in this for a lot of different reasons.”

“This” is “Freedom Writers,” Swank’s latest film, in which she portrays the real-life teacher Erin Gruwell.

When confronted with a roomful of “unteachable” students at Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach, Calif., in the mid-1990s, Gruwell somehow found a way to get through to them.

“I read it and just got chills. To find one of these, a ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ and ‘Million Dollar Baby’ – and I put this right up there – is probably one in 50,” says Swank, 32, referencing the two movies for which she won Oscars for best actress.

Director Richard LaGravenese was aware of comparisions between the film and “Dangerous Minds,” a 1995 movie starring Michelle Pfeiffer that also featured a teacher seeking to connect with inner-city students.

“I know everybody brings up ‘Dangerous Minds,’ but I had made a promise to the real Freedom Writers not to do that,” LaGravenese says.

“It can’t be about a white knight who comes in and saves the ghetto kids. She had to be a human being and had to have her own flaws. Her one flaw was coming in with this sort of ideal about what integration is that many of us have.”

Swank’s own life story includes an often-related period of impoverishment as a teen when she lived with her mother in their car upon first arriving in Los Angeles.

“I really related to the kids (in ‘Freedom Writers’) and what they went through,” she says. “I never got shot at and I never tried to shoot anybody, but without comparing, I just felt like an outsider as a kid and I didn’t feel like I fit in at school at all.”

Fortunately for Swank, there was someone in her life who helped change that.

“I had my mom who believed in me, and to me the power of having someone believe in you is partly what this story is about and how one person in your life can make a difference,” she says.

“Freedom Writers,” in dramatizing Gruwell’s struggles to get her unorthodox teaching ideas past the education bureaucracy in her district, makes some statements about educational policy today in this country. According to LaGravanese, that’s not accidental.

“The education system in this country is based on the last business model, the assembly line. It’s test them, score them. If the numbers aren’t right they fall through the cracks,” the director says.

The film doesn’t exactly put a positive spin on integration, either.

“The teachers there hated these kids,” he says of the minority students who were bused into Wilson High in the 1990s.

“They had these really great jobs teaching these really smart white kids in this really great neighborhood and all of a sudden there was this, so they resented these kids and were just pushing them through the system to get them out of there.”

For authenticity’s sake, while casting “Freedom Writers,” LaGravenese wanted to find as many teenagers as possible who came from the environment depicted in the film.

“I wanted to have real kids, I didn’t want a lot of actors, and these kids came from the same stories,” he says. “They’ve been victims of gang violence, home abuse, homelessness. I remember thinking it’s got to be in their eyes.”

Such casting turned out to be invaluable for Swank.

“I have experiences of what’s worked in the past, I have an idea of what could make something work. It’s not my first movie,” she says.

“So when I walked onto a set with these kids, who had never done it before, ever, and they had no expectations except they were in the moment, it took me right back to the beginning for me and made me better, I think.

“I think I learned a lot, and not only as an actor. I get these experiences where I just feel so lucky and so blessed that I do what I do. I get to see life from so many different perspectives. It’s so rich.”