Background
Cretton was born in Haiku, Hawaii on the island of Maui, and lived there until he was 19 years old, when he moved to San Diego, California to attend Point Loma Nazarene University.
Cretton was born in Haiku, Hawaii on the island of Maui, and lived there until he was 19 years old, when he moved to San Diego, California to attend Point Loma Nazarene University.
After graduating, Cretton started working at a group home for at-risk teenagers while making short films as a hobby and later graduated from San Diego State University, where he attended film school.
He is best known for writing and directing his second feature film, Short Term 12 (2013). The short film that served as the basis of Short Term 12 was his senior project He wrote a feature-length adaptation of the short, which earned an Academy Nicholl Fellowship in 2010.
Funding for the adaptation was difficult to procure, so Cretton wrote and directed his first feature-length film, I Am Not a Hipster.
The film was an official selection at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, and helped get Short Term 12 funded. In 2014, Cretton was attached to direct and rewrite the script for The Glass Castle, an adaptation of Jeannette Walls’ 2005 bestselling memoir about a successful young woman raised by severely dysfunctional parents.
Hunger Games star Woody Harrelson is in talks along with Brie Larson to star in the Lionsgate’s film. The Larson role was originally scoped out by another Hunger Games star — Jennifer Lawrence, but she dropped off after the studio was searching around for the male lead.
Neither Harrelson’s nor Larson’s deals are closed.
In 2016, it was announced that Creed writer-director Ryan Coogler has teamed up with Cretton and poet/playwright Chinaka Hodge to develop Minors, a new television drama series produced by Charles Doctorate. King. The series will show how that system shapes young people over a one-year period. Chinaka will write the series, and Coogler and Cretton will direct.
Cretton has also teamed up with Creed star Michael B. Jordan for Just Mercy, a drama film based on Bryan Stevenson’s New York Times bestselling memoir: Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption.
Oscar-nominated producer Gil Netter (Life of Pi, The Blind Side) is producing. The story follows world-renowned civil rights defense attorney Stevenson (Jordan) as he recounts his experiences and details the case of condemned death row prisoner whom he fought to free.
The true story is one of redemption, passion and mercy, set against a backdrop of a corrupt judicial system which favors the death penalty and targets the poor.