Writer-director Megan Park’s upcoming film, My Old Ass, is something of a departure from her first feature The Fallout— the 2021 Jenna Ortega starrer that followed the survivors of a school shooting—although both films expertly center on a teenage point of view.
Bought at Sundance for $15M by Amazon MGM Studios, at first glance, perhaps the premise of My Old Ass seems like relatively light fare: a young woman coming of age in a beautiful Canadian lakeside town gets high on shrooms and meets her older self for a ‘what do I need to know’ chat. But then, Park works some magic, because at every screening, from Sundance onward, the audience has been reduced to sobs. Here, she explores how she stirred something deep in all of us: how quickly time passes; our missed chances, and those roads not taken. She also reveals how she first conceived of the story, connected to her LuckyChap producers and cast Maisy Stella (Nashville) as her lead, along with Aubrey Plaza.
DEADLINE: So, I have to tell you that both myself and everyone else in the screening I attended was crying. A lot.
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It’s pretty wild. We’re just in New York at a screening and I hadn’t sat through the movie, I think since Sundance, and a good friend of mine was there. I was like, oh, I’ll sit through it. It’ll be so fun. She was so hysterical that she had snot running down her face and I was like, oh my gosh. It had been a while since I’d seen that. It can really cut through. It’s pretty wild.
DEADLINE: You capture the time-travel Freaky Friday, 13 going on 30 body-swap thing, but you added two things that hit hard: no one tells you how hard it’s going to be, and that love is the worst, most painful thing that happens to you.
100%. I know.
DEADLINE: And you added magic mushrooms… Tell me about the light bulb moment you had with the initial spark of the story.
I mean, I’ve only written two movies, The Fallout and this, and with both of them, I’m still figuring myself out as a writer, but I’ve never written an outline. I don’t do it that way. I just think about it for a long time, figure out the people. It’s very cathartic for me. And then I open Final Draft and just start with page one. I don’t even really necessarily know where it’s going to go, but I think the light bulb thing for me was I was home and I was feeling so nostalgic. It was during the pandemic, I just had a baby and I was sleeping in my childhood bedroom, and I was feeling more of that feeling that Chad’s talking about in the boat scene where he’s like, it was the last time you play with your friends and you don’t realize it’s the last time.
And I was just sitting in that feeling for a long time and that made me think about wanting to have this fantasy of talking to your older and younger self. It was the title and the mushrooms that came together because the title for me kept me in the right head space where it didn’t get too dark, didn’t get too silly. I really wanted to walk the line and just keep it grounded. I’ve never done this before. When I started, I started with the title page. It was like, OK, I know it’s called My Old Ass. And for some reason that was such a north star for me that I kept going back to, and I kept thinking also that somebody was going to surely make me change the title. I was like, it’s just for me at least, and I’m writing the script, it’s called My Old Ass, but that makes sense in my brain of what this movie is. But here we are, and actually the title has stayed the same, which is incredible.
The mushrooms felt like such an authentic way into a really silly, crazy buy-in. I really was like, oh yeah, 18-year-olds in Canada going camping would 100% do mushrooms. And that feels like the perfect thing that’s not too serious, but it actually could happen, and you could walk away being like, did she actually have that trip? It wasn’t so magical that it wasn’t believable, but at the same time, obviously it’s not believable. It just made sense to me in terms of walking that line.
DEADLINE: One of the key things about this film and about The Fallout was that they were not didactic. You put the viewer back in the seat of being that age instead of looking at it from an adult viewpoint.
I think it’s a little bit of, I spent so many years in front of the camera when I was younger just saying words and being in movies that I was like, ‘This is not real at all to my experience and no other young person I know.’ I think there’s a little bit of frustration on that side of it. And also, the environment on a film set a lot of the times or a TV show is not, what do you think about this? Especially when you’re 18, 19 and the young woman, it’s not the vibe or it didn’t used to be at least. And so I think I had a bit of frustration about wanting to rewrite history a little bit and create an environment where it was like, would you wear that? Would you say it like that? How does that feel for you? Do you feel comfortable? That’s just not usually the case, truthfully.
Young people have such high bullshit radars and have such highbrow taste, and I think the problem with so much stuff that’s made for them is they can sniff out that it’s made for them.
And even with this movie, in a lot of ways it’s Old Ass’s message and journey and takeaway in a bigger sense potentially even than younger Elliot’s. It’s both of their stories. I feel like even though Aubrey’s not on screen as much as younger Elliot, it’s such a two-hander in so many ways. And I certainly can relate to parts of Elliot, but relate more to Older Ass.
DEADLINE: Maisy was great in Nashville and I know she wrote a song for The Fallout. Tell me about casting her in this?
I didn’t know her from Nashville. I knew her from the “Call Your Girlfriend” singing video with her sister (Lennon Stella). That’s how it all started, even Nashville. She’s so tiny in it, I want to say she’s 7 years old, 6 years old, and they did an acoustic version of “Call Your Girlfriend” by Robyn and it blew up, and that’s how Nashville discovered them and cast them on the show. I hadn’t really seen Nashville, I just remember from that video.
DEADLINE: It’s great that you took a chance and gave her the lead. It really paid off.
Yeah. Luckily, I had producers too. That was one of the gifts about—not to shit on the studio system—but sometimes it’s like, ‘who is the hottest person at the box office’, especially when it’s somebody who’s in every frame of the movie. And for them to be willing to take a chance on somebody that I believed in and just felt like was such a movie star… I mean, she just killed it so unbelievably hard, and I can’t believe it’s her first movie. It’s so unreal to me. And she hasn’t acted since Nashville, which is also insane.
DEADLINE: Tell me a little bit about working with LuckyChap. What are some of the ways they supported your vision?
I mean, I’m doing my next movie and a TV show with them, so if that says anything about how obsessed I was, it was incredible, it really was. And they deserve the hype they’re getting and obviously the repeat business they get with directors because they are so director-friendly. They’re really smart and they’re involved in just the right way and they all bring something so unique, all the executives there, to the table and it’s really collaborative and it’s been an experience I think it’s pretty hard to recreate. And that’s why I’ve been holding them so close and they’re such good people. And after three years when you never see a crack, you know it’s the real deal. They’re just so classy and so smart and so consistent. And it all really came together naturally because Bronte Payne, one of their executives there, had seen The Fallout and just wanted to take a general meeting. And she was the one that was like, do you have any other ideas? And the only thing I had was this idea of younger and older version meeting. It didn’t have the mushrooms yet. Then I met more people from the company, and so we collaborated on the script together and it was a really, really cohesive, easy process. And then they’re so involved. They were on set. Tom (Ackerley) and Margot (Robbie) were there the entire time and at the monitors. It was amazing. I feel very, very lucky.
DEADLINE: How did you connect to Aubrey Plaza for the role of Older Elliott?
It was really interesting because I was totally in my own way a little bit about casting the older Elliot and I had written the role for somebody I’d always imagined maybe late forties, early fifties even. And once we cast Maisy, it was like, OK, who looks the most like her? Side-by-side putting all these pictures next to each other. And I was really obsessed with, it’s got to be this visual match, but also this energy match, but also the right age. And it was really hard to figure out who that person was going to be. And we were really stuck on it. And I remember we were getting down to the wire and I was looking at a list of names of just ideas people had put out there, and I saw Aubrey’s name on the list. I’m a huge fan of her, and I knew Maisy was a huge fan of hers as well. I was like, wait a second, she doesn’t look anything like Maisy, she’s way younger, she’s not even 40. But, for some reason, her energy was so similar to Maisy in this indescribable way. And all of a sudden, I thought about it panning over on the log and seeing Aubrey, everything was funnier. The fact that the movie’s called My Old Ass and she’s not even 40 was funnier to me. I was like, I don’t care if they don’t look alike, it’s a buy-in. I’ll write some jokes about how they look nothing alike. And then hopefully their energy is so great together that everyone will just get over it.
DEADLINE: You shot on location in Canada on the lake. How was that experience?
It’s so beautiful. It’s unmatched anywhere else on the planet. I went there every summer as a kid. I went to a summer camp that was on an island up there.
We’d boat to dinners on the weekend together [on the shoot]. We picked up Aubrey when we first met her for dinner, at her cottage was across the bay from the DP’s cottage, and we literally took a paddle boat across and she was standing on the dock with a bottle of wine. And then she got on the back and we paddled back and she was like, what the f–k is happening? It set the tone for the movie.
DEADLINE: What’s it been like to see all these deeply emotional reactions to the film?
What’s interesting is the movie isn’t out yet, so it been limited with who’s seen it, but so many people have said to me, “I got in the car and I called my mom.” That seems to really be a big feeling. And a similar one is, “I called my parents and I apologized to them for just what a d–khead I was when I was 18, and not being more appreciative.”
I don’t know if this is me being an idiot or not, but as I’m writing, I’m not necessarily thinking about, what the audience is going to think and what is the takeaway going to be and what is the message I’m going to hope lands? You just don’t know. You don’t know what the movie is going to end up being when you’re on set, when you’re in the edit, at least I don’t. I think I have an idea, but things change so much. But it’s been really incredible, I will say, to see old dudes’ reactions to this movie, which I was not expecting. Old men lose their s–t. They cry so much. And I don’t know if it’s because this whole idea of time passing is really hitting them if they’re stereotypically repressed a little bit. But so many older men have really been shocked by their emotional reaction to this film, and that’s been really interesting to see and beautiful.
DEADLINE: What can you say about the TV show and the next movie that you’re making with them?
The movie is very different. It’s got a music and movement element to it, but it’s not a musical. And it’s very different. It’s, I would say, not coming-of-age, but it has a very over-one-night feel with a group of strangers coming together. I’m excited about it. It’s a big swing.
DEADLINE: What about the TV show?
I don’t think I’m allowed to say anything about that, but again, it’s with Lucky Chap.
My Old Ass is in theaters from September 13.
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