Zendaya’s ‘The Drama’ Director Admits to Dating a Teen Girl in Unearthed Essay

We’re a week out from the release of Zendaya and Robert Pattinson‘s new movie “The Drama” … and things have gotten more, well, dramatic.

Director Kristoffer Borgli is coming under fire after Reddit users started circulating scans of an essay he wrote for a 2012 issue of the Norwegian magazine D2. In the article, he apparently admits he had recently been in a relationship with a teen girl … and he was 27 at the time of writing.

On Thursday, The Hollywood Reporter published a version of the essay translated from Norwegian to English. In the translation, Borgli writes he’d begun seeing a girl “ten years younger” than him, saying … “I had to find something that could recalibrate my moral compass.”

The legal age of consent in Norway is 16 … but the director wrote that his friends condemned his relationship as not “within bounds.”

In the essay, he describes waking up next to the blonde high school student, recalling … “I chose to see her that way, to define her by her age, and I chose never to see her again. But you can’t choose what the heart wants.”

Borgli continued … “Emotional dilemmas like these drive me to seek out films and books with similar and relevant themes.” He cited Woody Allen‘s movie “Manhattan,” saying it “completely changed my attitude.”

He rationalized … “If a film made in 1979, in which Woody Allen’s 42-year-old character has a public relationship with a 17-year-old girl, is portrayed exclusively in a positive way and causes no controversy in its own time, then why shouldn’t my relationship — with a considerably smaller age difference — in 2012 be ‘within bounds’?”

In the translation, the director describes how his teen years were spent getting drunk and playing video games, while the girl he was seeing was apparently partaking in activities he felt were more mature.

Borgli described taking the girl to restaurants and bars “where they didn’t check ID” and recalled spending “long days” with her watching Woody Allen movies because “she was also a fan.”

Remember … Woody Allen infamously married his adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn when she was 27 and he was 62 — after having met her when she was just 10 years old.

Borgli described his own short-lived relationship with the teen as “the best and most exotic summer I’ve ever had,” recalling a time he had to sneak out the window of her parents’ apartment because they had come home unexpectedly.