Telluride Film Festival
If anything or anyone is a break-out, on-the-rise element of this year’s Telluride Film Festival, it’s 19-year-old “The Descendants” star Shailene Woodley. She stars in the film opposite George Clooney as a teenager with the appropriate angst but gives a performance that has captured the attention of many in attendance here. Naturally, she’s frequently found herself stopped on the street by admirers and well-wishers praising her work and the festival’s most talked-about film.
When you talk to Woodley, you get the sense of a young person crossing that key boundary in life between adolescence and adulthood. Call it “finding yourself” if you like, but the experience of making the film in Hawaii with the likes of filmmaker Alexander Payne and actor George Clooney had a major impact on her.
“The four months in Hawaii really shifted who I am as a human being,” she says at the New Sheridan Hotel restaurant in town. “It was such a spiritual thing for me. It has a different energy than anywhere else. The pace there, the way you move and talk, it’s so different. I left there being authentically happy with myself. It was both being on set and hiking and being outdoors and meeting people. I feel so fortunate to have got a callback for this movie, let alone have done it. It’s mind-blowing.”