Madeline Hettrick, photo by Jeff Arban/Rutgers University
Madeline “Maddy” Hettrick initially wanted to be in front of the camera, acting. Then she got behind one – and decided to stay there.
Hettrick, a Rutgers University-New Brunswick junior pursuing a double major in filmmaking at the Mason Gross School of the Arts and English at the School of Arts and Sciences, wrote and directed His New Girl as a sophomore.
What started out as a class project will be featured in the 2025 Spring New Jersey Film Festival.
Actors Yasemin Goncu (left), Ashavari Bhattacharya and Meg Moynahan appear in the 5-minute short, "His New Girl." Photo courtesy of Madeline Hettrick
The short film, which Hettrick described as “a comedy sprinkled with dramatic moments,” focuses on three college students (performed by Mason Gross students Ashavari Bhattacharya and Meg Moynahan and Yasemin Goncu, who also attended Rutgers) hanging out in their apartment as one gets ready for a date with her boyfriend.
“I like to go into the relationships between characters and just try to figure out the ins and outs of people's minds,” said Hettrick, a 20-year-old East Brunswick resident.
A series of short films, including Hettrick’s 5-minute piece, will be screened at 7:00pm on Friday, January 24, in Room 105 of Voorhees Hall, 71 Hamilton St., New Brunswick. (General admission tickets for the festival are $15; student tickets for the in-person screening are $10.)
“We go out of our way to show films by New Jersey residents as well as Rutgers faculty and students, but they have to be good enough,” said Al Nigrin, who is the executive director, curator and founder of the Rutgers Film Co-op/New Jersey Media Arts Center, which presents the film festival. “Our judges felt Madeline's film fits that bill.”
Nigrin, a cinema studies lecturer at Rutgers, added, “Madeline's film is very well edited, has excellent sound and is well crafted. It is perfect for our festival given that our student audience will surely relate to its story. It is a no-brainer to screen it.”
A fan of actor and screenwriter Mindy Kaling, Hettrick got bit by the movie bug while attending East Brunswick High School, during which she took three pre-college digital filmmaking classes at Mason Gross as well as courses offered through her high school.
“They all centered around becoming comfortable with a camera by participating in different in class exercises with the equipment,” said Hettrick, adding that by the end of each course, she had completed at least one short film from a script she had written.
Madeline Hettrick sits by a monitor displaying the title of her short film at the Rutgers Filmmaking Center. Photo by Jeff Arban/Rutgers University
“I originally wanted to join them because I was interested in acting,” said Hettrick, who during the summer worked at Mason Gross as a teacher assistant. “I thought that if I joined film classes, I would be able to act in other people's films. But I was immediately drawn to filmmaking more so than acting. I just loved being able to be behind the camera and being able to give actors advice on what to do and be the one driving the story and coming up with different plot points. That always really interested me.”
Hettrick, whose older brother Nathaniel attends Rutgers Business School, said she added English as a second major at the beginning of her sophomore year, “and that was through the realization that my favorite part of filmmaking is screenwriting.”
She added, “I've always been drawn to writing – and high school English was always my favorite class.”
Scheduling the filming of His New Girl proved tricky: Hettrick said she had a three-hour window to shoot her film, a class project for “Intermediate Film Production II,” a course taught by Christopher McCarroll.
“Madeline had a very strong sense of what she wanted to achieve with this project and, obviously, executed it extremely well,” said McCarroll, a filmmaking lecturer at Mason Gross.
While McCarroll said he provided some structural guidance during the editing stage, His New Girl “is thoroughly the product of Madeline and her excellent student collaborators.”
A still from "His New Girl" features a mirror reflection of actors Ashavari Bhattacharya (left) and Meg Moynahan. Photo courtesy of Madeline Hettrick
After graduation, Hettrick said she is considering graduate school – specifically with a concentration in screenwriting.
“Outside of that, any job that has to do with writing,” she added.
As for Hettrick’s top films, the recently released We Live in Time, a comedy-drama starring Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield, makes the list.
“I was just so blown away by and impressed by it,” she said. “I think something that's really important to me in the films that I'm writing and the stories that I tell is just the relationships between characters.”
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