- Guess you got your bastard back.
Aren't you even a little embarrassed?
- Embarrassed about what?
- Well seems like you're being passed from guy to guy.
I mean, whoever the father of this one is,
and then before that, what's his name?
The, the guy that you thought was your brother
and then before that, Philip, your actual brother.
My character in this series is not the nicest person.
She does take a fair amount of pleasure
in making life difficult for poor Dawn,
but I think it comes from a place of being wounded
as a child.
- Hey.
- Are you lost?
So when Clara Jean first meets Dawn
it's kind of the opposite of love at first sight.
They're really not destined to get along
um, which kind of gets a little worse
when they find out that they're actually related
and it's all downhill from there unfortunately.
- At first when Clara Jean meets Dawn at school,
Dawn inadvertently gets her in trouble.
- I think it's coming from there.
- [Michele] So she starts out not liking her
for that reason.
She also doesn't like Dawn
because Dawn's the new girl and she's pretty and she's nice.
Clara Jean's brother, Philip,
clearly likes Dawn from the moment he sees her,
for just the same reasons that Clara Jean doesn't like her.
So right out of the gate, Clara Jean sees Dawn
as competition and she wants to put her down.
- What gives you the right to put
your filthy hands on my stuff?
- Clara Jean, you haven't lived here in like a decade.
- You had no right to do this.
- This is my hotel and I am telling you to leave.
(dramatic music)
(Dawn grunting)
- Out of these movies,
I think you can expect a lot of twists and turns.
A lot of reveals.
- Daddy?
- When you think you know what's going on,
you don't.
- I can't wait.
- Cutler's Cove belongs to the Cutlers,
and there's only one Cutler in this room.
- Only one legitimate one.
- Only one period.
Your father Randolph turns out he isn't exactly your father.
- The Dawn series is really great for Lifetime
because it really serves up
that journey of human against elements
and people that are creating issues for them.
I think it really is a story of a girl
who has to battle against a lot of stuff.
- You can whine for the rest of your life
about our mistreatment of you,
but if you didn't get anything useful from it,
well then that's just a waste
of some perfectly good suffering.
- [Michele] So for a lot of the movies,
Dawn maintains all those good qualities
that we appreciate at the beginning.
- Are you all right?
- I'm perfectly fine Mother.
- [Michele] She's a warm and loving person
and later on in the series
a warm and loving wife and mother.
But after she meets the Cutlers
and starts to learn how they behave-
- Wake up!
- [Michele] She gets a little bit wiser,
and we even see that she starts to behave in a way
that even Grandmother Cutler might admire.
- Michael here can take care of the check.
My daughter made that for you.
- You changed Dawn.
- You noticed.
- [Crew] Take one.
- [Michele] One thing that we love about working
with Lifetime is you often get to work
with female directors and you know
we were so fortunate to get to work with two on this series.
Linda Lisa directed the first two films
and then Jackie the next two,
and what was great on the first two
Linda Lisa really had a vision
for what she wanted the movies to look like,
and she really felt the emotion of these characters.
So that was a real pleasure
and she really embraced the kind of period element.
When Jackie came on for the next two movies
she inherited these characters
and she really embraced the insanity.
- I've been looking for both of you.
- Why? What's going on?
- Whenever you're dealing with something
that's intimate whether it's like a love scene
or it involves violence,
I think that you just have to make space for the actors
to find the performance
and the dynamic between the two people
so that they are able to communicate with each other.
- These stories by V.C. Andrews are books
that people grew up reading.
You could easily have died out there.
One person actually said that his mother
used to read it to him.
I went, really?
And so it's just natural that you wanna see it
because it's such a family saga.
- Where is she? (dramatic music)
(Dawn sobbing)