The wider community was puzzled by this odd choice of subject matter for the persnickety action director. Even Jeff Berg admits, “Ridley’s not known for humor. Then again, Sydney Pollack was a very powerful director who was never known for humor, and he wound up directing Tootsie. The great directors—Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks—knew how to master three or four different idioms.”
“I knew with Ridley that it was a deal with the devil,” says Callie. “I figured it was going to have some grandeur to it, if nothing else.”
The director’s first order of business was to sit down with Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep one at a time. Goldie cracked Ridley up when she sashayed into the Four Seasons insisting she wanted a part so badly she would buy him breakfast. She was effervescent—and funny as hell. “But she was maybe a tad old at the time,” Ridley says. “I wanted to keep it below a certain age.” With Goldie, rewrites would have been necessary. He decided to move on.
Meryl Streep was slighter in person than he expected, and she bombarded him with thoughtful queries over the course of two meetings. Why would a man want to make a film like this? she pushed. Was the role right for her? All good questions. The character had to be working-class, he thought, whereas Meryl had a different air, a different pedigree about her. “Not that she was posh,” he says, “but the character needed to be tough.” He wasn’t sure that was the quality she conveyed. Besides, she hoped to spend the summer at home with her children while they were off from school, and Ridley wanted to get filming by then. Someday, he thought, he’d love to work with her, but with regret he let her slip away this time.
He also considered the double-edged bargain with the dominion of stars. Laddie was eager to harness it to sell the picture, but for Ridley, stars held less allure. To him, the power of stars—their CinemaScope dimensions, the vapor of well-known characters that wafted behind them from previous roles—was the very quality that worked against the most prominent candidates. He had plucked stars out of obscurity in the course of his work, helped to launch their careers, but once they were launched, he was leery of the reality-distortion effect they imposed on a film. With Ridley Scott, the film was the star, the look was the star. He cast his pictures with painstaking care; the actors had to fit within the scheme. He and Callie envisioned Thelma and Louise as regular gals. The sheen of stardom would muddle their function in the story.
Geena Davis’s agent had kept working the phone for months, despite rumors that megawatt stars had already sewn up the roles. “She’s still here,” David Eidenberg parroted, day in, day out. “Can she meet you?”
Ridley had heard about those incessant pleas. He made a point of screening The Accidental Tourist to see what the fuss was about. “I was attracted to Geena because she was ditzy, or seemed to be ditzy, but she wasn’t. She was very intelligent,” Ridley says. “I thought there was something in there that was Thelma.”
He saw Louise as what he called “the mum character,” the older, wiser, maternal figure. Thelma, on the other hand, had to appear childlike at first but also possess a hint of steel, allowing the story to twist partway through to let her take charge. Ditziness alone wouldn’t be enough. He wasn’t sure whether Geena could flesh out the other side of the role, but he was curious. Ridley skipped over many of the bigger names on the studio list and invited her to tea at the Four Seasons.
He hadn’t anticipated her . . . scale, for want of a better word, when she loped into the Windows Lounge. Towering, a magnificent creature, with legs and presence that went on from here to there. And that vivacious, demonstrative face—it was a director’s dream.
He knew she’d be gunning hard for a role when she slid in opposite him at the table, and she didn’t disappoint. Geena was an instinctive actress, loose on the set and averse to overrehearsing, but she plotted her career with the drive of an A student cramming for finals. By the time she met with Ridley, after spending the better part of a year begging, she was up to the test. “I had read the script one million times,” she says with typical enthusiasm, the italics audible in her voice. She had strategized with an acting coach over why playing Louise would be the better tactic for her as she closed in on the age of thirty-four. The more mature, responsible character, she concluded, would shift her career in a much-needed direction. She faced Ridley with a clutch of notes that spelled out the reasons why she was right for Louise.
Geena pitched her heart out for a good twenty minutes, bringing all her outré gifts to the effort—animated expressions, high-beam eyes, a voice that swooped two octaves with operatic zeal. “I need you to understand how passionate I am about this,” she insisted.
Ridley let her go on, taking in her gooney-bird glamour, her robust physicality, all the while envisioning her not as Louise, but Thelma. “Geena’s a tall girl, and I’d never seen that character as being that tall, but there it is, six feet,” Ridley says. “Very attractive. I thought her quirkiness was great, enough that I wanted it for the film. In talking with her, I realized she was it.”
Geena stopped long enough to take a breath.
“Soooo,” Ridley said quietly, “in other words, you wouldn’t play Thelma?”
To Geena’s credit, she blinked only for an instant, recalibrating the entire spiel: “You know, I’ve been listening to myself talk, giving you all these reasons why I should be Louise, and I’m thinking . . . it’s not a very convincing argument,” she backpedaled. “Now that I think of it . . . I should play Thelma.”
After a couple hours of frantic ad-libbing on her part, as far as Ridley was concerned, Geena Davis was Thelma Dickinson. From that moment on, he never considered anyone else. The next day her agent got the call: Ridley wanted Geena in the movie, depending on whether the actress he found for the other lead seemed compatible.
Weeks passed as she waited in agony for word. “We will both die if you end up not being in this movie,” her agent said. “But there is only so long you can wait and not get on with your life.” They delivered an ultimatum. Ridley had until five o’clock that Friday afternoon to commit to Geena, or she’d be forced to walk.
An unorthodox offer arrived as the final minutes ticked down. Geena would play one of the leads—or the other. It all depended who else signed on. “Getting Thelma & Louise was such an ordeal and such a long, drawn-out process that when I finally actually got it,” Geena says, “it was just a miracle.” Geena Davis was the first name up on the board. She would be Thelma. Or maybe Louise.
—
RIDLEY EXTENDED THE SEARCH FOR LOUISE, once again blithely bypassing the long list of stars the studio had dutifully compiled over the previous months. He had a certain ideal in mind, one that stood in contrast to the sugarcoated femininity embodied in the long line of Katherines gracing most of the movies at the time. In running his company and directing his films, Ridley had always viewed women without sentimentality or condescension, and he wasn’t about to start now that he was directing a bona fide women’s film.
He sought guidance from an unlikely source, Lou DiGiaimo, a New York–based casting director known for dead-on, deglamorized movies like The Godfather and The French Connection, populated with real-looking working stiffs and thugs, guys with scars. Lou brought up an actress no one had thought to mention before: the take-no-prisoners Susan Sarandon.
Bulbs lit up for Ridley when Lou suggested the name. They had met briefly when she worked with Tony on his first feature, the sexy vampire movie The Hunger. “Susan has always been a great actress,” Ridley says. “She would be the mum figure of the two, so it was good that she was older”—forty-four, almost ten years older than Geena. And Susan could nail the working-class persona, as she did playing a casino worker in Atlantic City. Stunning on-screen but without vanity, she invariably grounded her characters in reality.
Visually, which was how Ridley guided most decisions, he was intrigued by how the appearance of the two actresses might evoke the differences in the characters. Susan’s faint traces of crow’s-feet and cool, assessing eyes would distinguish her from Geena’s wide-open expression and butter-smooth skin. “The contrast in what their faces say to the camera—that visual image—would do so much of the work,” says Brett Goldstein, an assistant casting agent who worked with Ridley and Lou. “Their features and the quality of their skin showed who they were and where they each were in life.”
Jodie Foster and Michelle Pfeiffer both projected an almost glacial mien, whereas Geena and Susan, with their limpid brown eyes and wavy auburn hair, conveyed a warmth that could help stir audience sympathy for Callie’s antiheroines. Despite the similarity in hair color, says Goldstein, “Geena and Susan are so not interchangeable.”
Susan’s career up to then signaled other qualities that were right for the self-reliant Louise. In movies ranging from The Rocky Horror Picture Show to Bull Durham, she had chosen such uncompromising roles that it was impossible to imagine her as a robotically supportive girlfriend or wife. She declined to think in terms of commercial appeal, which may explain why her name had been omitted from the studio wish list of box-office favorites. Ridley called her personally and offered to send the script.
Susan may have been one of the only actresses in America who hadn’t lobbied for one of the parts. She hadn’t even heard of them, most likely because she was based in Hollywood Siberia: New York City. “I’ve always made it a point,” she says with pride, “not to care or watch or be involved with the corporate entity of show business.”
When she finally got a look at the screenplay, turns out she wasn’t all that impressed. There were some aspects she liked right away. “I thought it would be wonderful to be in a film with a woman,” she says, “because you don’t get more than one woman in a film, and if you do, they hate each other for some assumed reason that’s not even in the script.” Plus it would be a hoot to play bad girls and chuck the rules that governed women in the movies.
Like others involved in making this one, Susan didn’t perceive it as making a larger statement about women. “I never saw it as a feminist film,” she says. “I saw it in the genre of a cowboy film—except with women and trucks instead of guys and horses.” In that light, Ridley Scott didn’t strike her as such a peculiar choice to direct. They set up a meeting in New York.
If Ridley thought he’d gotten an earful from Callie, it was useful preparation for his encounter with the woman who’d been labeled “the outspoken Susan Sarandon” so many times that it might be considered her legal name.
“There are a lot of questions that need to be ironed out,” she told him before he barely had a chance to say hello. It wasn’t completely clear where the characters came from, she said, so she wouldn’t know what accent to use.
The British director didn’t know what she meant. “Just use the accent you have,” he said.
Susan laughed and explained that there were serious regional differences. She went on to knock the script for not making it clear how many days passed during the course of the story. It was crucial, she thought, for the time to be compressed so it would be credible for two women to take the emotional plunge toward suicide, or whatever they wanted to call it. The same concern led her to object to a romantic scene between Louise and her boyfriend halfway through the story. It would only serve to defuse the tension.
“I hear you,” Ridley said. The same issue had bothered Meryl Streep. “These are all things we can work out.”
Then she really got down to business. “Promise me that I will die,” she insisted. “Promise me we’re not gonna shoot this, then you test it and we end up at Club Med.”
“Oh, you will die,” he assured her. He wasn’t sure about Thelma, but Louise would make the plunge.
They spent even more time addressing her concern about the violence in the film. Susan’s progressive politics informed all her important decisions. She recoiled at accepting the role of someone who shot a man, rapist or not. “It’s a huge thing to take another life,” Susan said. “I am not interested in doing a revenge film. I’m not interested in being Charles Bronson or Arnold Schwarzenegger. I’m interested in the fact that taking a life has consequences, that she has to pay for that.” She said it bothered her that the script called for Louise to shoot the rapist “execution style,” a term Callie didn’t actually use. But the draft Susan saw did call for Louise to aim deliberately and shoot the guy in the face.
Ridley thought they could sort it out in rehearsal. Mostly he was struck by Susan’s innate intelligence and challenging nature, the way she goaded him to sharpen his focus. He knew she had the authority, the competence and the cheek to portray Louise. It wouldn’t be a quiet set; Susan wouldn’t pull punches. She would make sure her voice was heard. That didn’t faze Ridley the way it might have some directors. “For a guy’s guy, Ridley doesn’t think like a dumb-ass chauvinist,” says Goldstein, the assistant casting director. “Most producers, directors or studio heads are scared to death of a strong woman, because, basically, they’re all weak-kneed inside. Ridley wasn’t scared.” He offered Susan the part of Louise Sawyer, pending approval from the studio.
Unlike many of her peers, Susan relished the intellectual challenge of playing the more buttoned-up Louise rather than Thelma. “Even though Louise is not the flashiest or the most fun,” she says, “it interested me more, the demands of trying to keep the movie together and on track and literally and figuratively driving the movie.”
Even today, she admits she had no idea she was signing on to a project with any lasting significance or cultural merit. “It fit into my needs as a mom,” she says matter-of-factly. Filming was scheduled for the summer of 1990, a perfect opportunity to take her kids on location after school let out.
—
RIDLEY’S CASTING DIDN’T SIT WELL with everyone. Geena and Susan were respected well enough, but respect didn’t sell tickets. The two hadn’t reached the level of celebrity and box-office sway wielded by other candidates. They couldn’t open a film.
That suited Callie. She was content that these relatively underexposed actresses wouldn’t outshine the story, although she wasn’t exactly wild about Susan being in her forties. In Callie’s backstory, the characters were the same age, friends from high school. This could have been one of the few examples of a Hollywood director casting actresses who were older than written.
The actresses were even harder for Laddie to accept. “Those were Ridley’s choices, not mine,” he says. “I didn’t feel they were wrong for it, but these were very good parts, and most women in town would want to do it. I felt it lent itself to two well-known people.”
The studio could have fought the decision, but Laddie was unique in stepping back and allowing offbeat ideas and talent to prevail. His diffident manner was a godsend for directors in that he kept his nose out of their business, and those times when he did stick it in, ever so gently, his instincts were often correct.
“He tended to have the most successful, groundbreaking movies, movies that were the first of their kind,” says Becky Pollack. “They could also go out with a blaze of glory.” That was the risk.
A risk he decided to take in this case. You are the director, he told Ridley. “If those are the actresses you want, it’s fine with me.”
Industry onlookers who’d been following the casting maneuvers buzzed at the news. “Given the star power that people like Meryl and Goldie or Cher would have brought to bear,” says Diane Cairns, “probably no other studio executive would have backed the director on that play.”
But the play was classic Laddie: Pick the script. Pick the filmmaker. Now let the movie be what it’s supposed to be.