Thelma is the story of a 93-year-old woman determined to get back at a scammer who duped her out of a lot of money. This film, released earlier in the year has charmed audiences with a well-tuned blend of comedy and drama featuring an excellent lead performance by legendary actress June Squibb.
Writer and director Josh Margolin has crafted a timeless film that deals with modern problems and aging with a wonderful cast, including the final performance of Richard Roundtree as well as Parker Posey, Clark Gregg, and Malcolm McDowell. With his feature directorial debut, Margolin has crafted a classic dramedy that makes you laugh and feel emotion in equal amounts.
[This conversation has been edited for length and clarity]
So what was your inspiration for this film?
This was loosely based on true events. My grandma got a call where someone was pretending to be me and saying they had gotten into a car accident and hit a pregnant woman and I needed to be bailed out of jail… Almost verbatim what’s in the movie. Luckily in real life, we were able to intervene before the money got sent.
I started imagining what might’ve happened if she had sent that money and set out to get it back. That sort of seed of an idea became really an excuse to write a movie that celebrates her spirit, her grit and her tenacity, while also exploring her struggle to hang onto her autonomy just as she was living alone for the first time, as her senses were starting to dim. The confluence of those two things happening at the same time was sort of the moment in which this incident occurred.
Casting-wise, what did you find inspiring about June?
She was first and only for the most part. She was someone who I’ve always loved as an actor. I just love seeing her and want to see more of her. She was amazing in Nebraska. When I was writing the script, based on my grandma, I was struggling to imagine anybody playing it. Aside from being an incredible actor, she had so many of the qualities as a performer and I sort of thought or sensed as a person that there was a lot of overlap there in terms of gumption and tenacity and toughness, but also an inherent humor and funniness and vulnerability that she could tap into with ease.
She is just somebody who could kind of play all the notes of it in a seamless way and move from moments of introspection and drama and also hit comedic beats with ease. I was fortunate in that my friend Beanie Feldstein had just done Humans with June, and they were close. She also knows my real grandma, Beanie does. So she heard about the project and said, “I hope you’re going to go to June Squibb”.
One performer I want to talk about, speaking as a big fan of the film Shaft, you have the final performance of Richard Roundtree. Professionally and personally, what did you appreciate about him?
As June likes to say, it was heaven. That’s her words, but I would second those. I think it’s a great way of putting it. He was lovely. He was just a kind, warm, funny, charming guy who was just honestly a joy to have on set. I feel very lucky, very sad that this ended up being his final film, but very lucky that we got to work with him on it and spend the time with him that we did.
I think he was someone everybody loved working with. Whenever Richard was on set, I think people just felt happy to be there. He treated everybody with respect and kindness and just added to a certain feeling of comfort being there. And I think he thinks was itching to play a different kind of part, itching to show kind of a softer side of himself.
When I first met with him about this role and this part, I think I could kind of feel that from him. And he just carried that through the whole process. He was having fun and he also, I think, felt like he had something he wanted to say. I wonder, in retrospect now, if he had some sense of the fact that he wasn’t doing well. I don’t know if it was even subconscious that he just felt like he was at a moment in life where he wanted to express something that I hope and think that this role at least gave him some opportunity to express.
He’s great in the movie. Let’s talk locations. Obviously, this was shot in the Valley, so please, tell us a little bit about choosing different places over certain ones.
This always felt like a movie that I wanted to set here in the Valley. Just it made intuitive sense to me. Maybe it’s just my love for Paul Thomas Anderson movies, but a tradition of jaunts across the valley and something about setting it there just felt right for the character, felt right for the world, felt like you get the right cross-section of areas that both feel very, very LA to me. Also, it’s not showbiz.
It’s not like the quintessential kind of Hollywood lens of Los Angeles as much as just what LA also feels like when you’re just living here and have a life here. And on top of that, a big partner for us became the Motion Picture & Television Fund (MPTF), which has a campus in the Valley. And that’s where we shot all the senior living stuff. They are a wonderful charity and organization that helps people in the industry when they are down on their luck.
I love that this is a comedy and drama. Did you have any apprehension when you were first putting it together in terms of getting financing for this? Almost everything we see now has some sort of genre project, while this is such a human movie.
I was lucky to have my producers, Zoë Worth and Chris Kaye, who were with me from the start on this one. They were just fierce advocates for the movie who really kind of pushed the boulder up the hill at every turn. We just tried to be decisive and stick to our guns, but also try to be nimble when it made sense and bring in more partners and bring in more support. And just what was nice is that everybody who jumped on our other producer, Nicolas Weinstock and our casting director, Jamie Ember, and our financiers at Zurich Avenue, everybody who jumped on was sort of all in and I that ended up creating a team of people who were dedicated to just making this happen.
What was it like working with Malcolm McDowell? I mean, he’s one of my favorites – especially in If… and O’ Lucky Man and, of course, A Clockwork Orange.
He’s great. It was great. He was a lot of fun. He was only there for about two days, but it was a very surreal two days to just be holed up in the back of this antique store with Malcolm McDowell dragging around an oxygen tank and grumbling at June. It was fun. That was a surreal moment for me when it was the three of them, when it was Richard, Malcolm, and June playing out legends. I just felt like, in the company of them, you’ve got over a century of incredible Hollywood history.
June did her stunts for the film, what was that like?
It was amazing because it does give the movie that extra glint of reality, that extra bit of stakes when you can actually see your lead character who is fighting quite literally for her autonomy throughout the movie, kind of taking charge and doing some of those things herself.
You are watching someone in their nineties do the things for real that are slightly smaller in scale than an action film, but no less dangerous for that person. The fact that June is such a physical performer, who has a long history in dance and physical performance in the theater so she ended up doing a lot more of it than we thought she would.
Age has become a common theme in current films (The Substance, The Last Showgirl), what do you think this film adds to that conversation?
I think it’s a movie about aging, not just about old age, in that each character in the film is going through kind of a transitional moment. I think this movie for me was a way to explore that and work through some of my anxieties about my grandma’s aging and my own aging and just being faced with these transitional moments in life.
A pair of films from the 70s came to mind while I was watching it, Harry and Tonto, and Going in Style. Films that dealt with aging in a sophisticated way that never looked down on its characters.
I appreciate that, the aesthetic especially, and sort of the sensibility of just trying to be very character-forward and give things a sense of reality and try to, as we play up some of the genre elements, still try to live in a world that feels kind of textured and filmic and looks like a place that has a history. I feel like so many of those movies have that look in that. That DNA was something that we talked about and we’re hopeful that the movie could have a little bit of that spirit.
What do you hope audiences continue to get out of this film? The film already come out and it’s been wildly successful for an indie comedy…
I hope people will maybe think twice before counting people out that they might think have no value to them in some way or cast aside in society. I think realizing people are sometimes more capable than we give them credit for is important. I also hope that people who need help or need assistance, but feel like it’s somehow a threat to their identity or their sense of self will open themselves up to the possibility of it while also being able to retain who they are.
Thelma is available to stream.
