Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING]

FEMALE VOICE

'We are teenagers. But we didn't always exist.'

MALE VOICE

'First, we were just children. And then all of a sudden, we were supposed to be adults.'

JON SAVAGE

In the early years of the twentieth century, this new stage of life was defined between childhood and adulthood. And that stage of life was initially called 'adolescence' by G. Stanley Hall, an American psychologist, and defined as being between the ages 13 to 24. And this separate stage of life, having been defined, caused problems. It caused problems for adults and governments. And so it had to be controlled, either by groups like the Boy Scouts or by overt militarism, putting these kids into the army, or for actual, real-time adolescents, who, having been defined as a separate stage of life, began to think, 'Well, how is this going to work for us? What are the potentials of this if we're different, if we're something between childhood and adulthood, what are we? What could we be?'

FEMALE VOICE

'Our teachers and our parents didn't understand us. So we created our own world.'

FEMALE VOICE

'Whether they called us hooligans, flappers, jitter-bugs, or sub-debs, we knew who we were.'

JON SAVAGE

It was fascinating to me to look at, sort of, inter-war, pre-war material from the point of view of the youth culture that we know, so to find stuff that is, if you like, predictive. And the most obvious predictive youth culture is the Swing culture of the late thirties, which is fantastically exciting, nationwide, very popular, and has its own language, has its own clothes, has its own dances. It's a separate youth world. And as a result of that, the purchasing power of young people begins to become apparent. This new youth world begins to become apparent to adults. And this is the start of a half decade, you know, five, six, seven-year process that ends up in the teenager. In the winter of '44, '45, the word teenager passed into general use, which was a revelation to me when I found out about it. I knew there had been youth culture before that. And that happened principally because of Sinatra's success, and the mad, the frenzied young women. And pop culture often starts with frenzied young women, by the way, which is a very important point. And also parenthetically on that score, when writing the book, it's often young women's diaries, obviously most classically Anne Frank, but there are many others as well, who provide this wonderful information about the state. So young women are very important in this story, maybe crucial to this story. And they're often downplayed.

FEMALE VOICE

'In Germany, news of war was intoxicating.'

MALE VOICE

'The old had sent us to die. And we hated them.'

JON SAVAGE

The Nazis very much made youth a plank of their new world. Youth will create the new Germany. And there are lots of quotes from Hitler saying what he wanted from his youth. So I put it in the book, because it created this dialectic. This is the way that it can all go horribly wrong, as we all know, that youth can be regimented, that they can be seduced by promises of autonomy, of freedom, of their own world, and then bound and enslaved into a pitiless war machine.

FEMALE VOICE

'People thought there was no hope for youth, but we were searching for something to believe in, and we were willing to fight for it.'

JON SAVAGE

I always wanted to get away from the standard documentary format. And we just wanted to have a bit of fun, actually. I mean, I always think this is downplayed. It's a very, very serious subject. And I hope we've done that justice. I certainly feel as though we have dealt with the seriousness of it. But also, it's about young people. You want it to be innovative, or you want it to be different. And you don't want to talk down to people. Obviously, another feature of film is that it takes you there. It's an emotional medium, in a different way from music, but it's an emotional medium. And obviously, that stage of life, you are very emotional. So we need to capture some of that, but obviously, with a film-makers discipline. You're shaping a story. You're actually creating a way of telling it. And I'm very happy with the way it has turned out.

FEMALE VOICE

'A lot of people try to shape the future. But it's the young ones who live in it.'

[MUSIC PLAYING]