The two actresses tackled the prep work with gusto, all the down-and-dirty stuff guys usually got to do. They took stunt driving lessons in the parking lot of the Hollywood Bowl, where they pulled squealing 180s with the emergency brake. Ridley sat in the backseat while they ran lines until driving and talking at the same time became second nature. They got the hang of pistol shooting at a target range, smudging their fingers and faces with gunpowder residue. It was freewheeling fun, certainly more fun than faking proficiency on the cello. A dialogue coach schooled them in an appropriate accent, with a drawl but not too syrupy, so the characters would seem sharp.
Geena realized she became Thelma in Susan’s presence, slavishly admiring her maternal competence. And Susan found Geena funny and loopy in a way that only someone intelligent can pull off. “She was game and brave and smart and certainly more diplomatic than I am,” Susan says. “That’s the basis for a love story, really.”
Ridley turned his attention to what many considered the real star of all his movies: the look of the thing. Callie’s screenplay guaranteed that Thelma & Louise wouldn’t take on the appearance of a typical women’s picture, all weepy close-ups under flattering key lights. Ridley already had a clear scheme in his head, planted there the morning he first read the script, when his painterly brain elevated the seemingly simple road movie to an odyssey, an epic—a women’s picture by Ridley Scott. He was convinced that in order to sell the ending, the film had to convey the kind of mythic grandeur he had in mind, to make a statement that befit the fate of two main characters flying off the known world to become the stuff of legend.
Whereas some of the directors he vetted had seen the story as visually ordinary, Ridley came at it with the fresh eye of a foreigner. He imagined a romantic vision of Americana, the notion of the old Route 66, the light and space, all of it the greatest possible contrast to his upbringing in the north of England. “European filmmakers get to look at America in a way that Americans can’t, because they are in the eye of the hurricane,” says Hans Zimmer. “We can hold up a mirror and make America look at itself, marvel at itself, be critical of itself or celebrate itself—not take it for granted. There’s the whole thing about guns, for example, the accessibility of guns. It’s culturally specific. There are these things you have in America that we don’t have in Europe, that sense of endlessness, vastness.”
Ridley saw his job as providing a proscenium for the actors that enhanced and multiplied the power of the story. In Thelma & Louise that proscenium would be America, for better and for worse.
The director didn’t have the luxury of constructing a detailed imaginary world on an expensive set, as he had in Alien and Blade Runner. Instead he would rely heavily on landscape, or three different landscapes, to frame what he saw as the three acts of the story. Act I: the green hills and commonplace hominess of the starting point in Arkansas. Act II: the wide-open fields and beat-up roadside stops of Oklahoma. Act III: the huge, impassive majesty of the Southwest desert and Grand Canyon.
Ridley decided to lean on the images he admired in the work of the midcentury realist painter John Register, a Californian who saturated his paintings of deserted coffee shops and bus stations with desolation. His work was often compared to Edward Hopper’s, but the stark light and shadows of Register’s weary interiors had a different feel, suffused by the blazing western sun outside the windows. It was bright but hardly cheerful. As Register himself has said: “I like the patina of things that have been battered by life.”
Thelma & Louise’s visual vocabulary would borrow that mysterious emptiness to foreshadow the ominous end for the heroines, as well as a sweeping, bright magnificence to celebrate the independence of their spirit. Ridley would start at the end and work back. It all depended on finding the right locations, beginning with the lip of that inimitable American landmark, the Grand Canyon.
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WHEN THE LOCATION MANAGER, KEN HABER, arrived at that most crucial destination and plot point, he had been on the road for a month, driving from Little Rock to Arizona, taking photos to send back to Ridley—hundreds of shots of dated diners, sagebrush-lined highways and country-western bars. The woman in charge of public relations for the Grand Canyon, wearing a park ranger uniform complete with a Smokey Bear–style hat, led Haber into her office so he could lay out the case for shooting the climax of Thelma & Louise in the jewel of the National Park Service. For an hour and a half, she nodded absently while he explained that the crew was professional, that it would restore everything to its natural state, that the scene was absolutely essential to the film.
“What do you think?” he asked at length. “Can we do it?”
Not a muscle moved in her stony expression. “No.”
Haber saw his job flash before his eyes. This is the movie, he thought. If we don’t have the Grand Canyon, we don’t have the movie. “Do you mind if I ask why?” he asked, his voice catching.
“I just don’t like the story,” she said. “I don’t like that these girls go off a cliff and commit suicide.”
Join the club, Haber thought. Gingerly, he pointed out that filmmakers enjoyed First Amendment rights, that legally they could say anything they wanted without a stamp of government approval.
She didn’t budge. “This might get a lot of copycats,” she said. “I just don’t like it.”
Haber broke the news to Ridley back in the production office on Melrose. They might try lobbying the Park Service or suing the government for permission, but they didn’t have years to burn for that.
Ridley scanned the pictures Haber had taken of the canyon. “It’s not going to work anyway,” Ridley said. “The scale isn’t right. See”—he pointed to the red rocks of the opposite canyon wall. “If the car goes off here, you’ll lose it in the vastness of the space.” In other words, the Grand Canyon was too big. Its source must start somewhere upstream, Ridley concluded. To find someplace smaller, Haber had to trace the canyon back to that source.
Meanwhile, when he had time, Ridley joined Haber and his production designer on the road to visit other sites Haber had selected. They covered some four thousand miles of southern heartland, listening to a cassette of songs that Callie had recommended to complement various scenes, including “Better Not Look Down” by B. B. King.
The scouting mission was an unlikely road trip—three mismatched outsiders in a car: Ridley, the Englishman of few words; Haber, a native of Brooklyn who’d never before been west; and Norris Spencer, the production designer of the film, well over six feet tall, who wore flowing scarves and smoked Marlboros with the filters cut off. Spencer, in particular, attracted curious stares wherever they went. Son of a Jamaican father and Chinese mother, he registered as a black Asian man with a thick British accent. “In Arkansas, that’s not a good idea,” Ridley says. “The racism was shocking.” A menacing clerk in a village store looked them over and asked, “Where you boys from?” They beat it out of there pronto. Other encounters were more fruitful. They met a woman driving a cement truck with a pack of cigarettes rolled in her sleeve and a perfectly aged trucker hat, a black cap with a faded American flag on the front. Ridley bought it for Thelma to wear once her character had evolved and toughened up. For all the skill of the production crews, Ridley felt, there was no convincing way to properly age a hat.
While Ridley could be uncomfortable with actors, he relaxed with the crew, especially those, like Haber and Spencer, who helped him craft his proscenium, something he could understand and control. All three had been art students who started in commercials, and they had worked on Black Rain together. Yet hours in the car ground them down. “I wanted to show America the way I’d like to see it,” Ridley says. “But Route 66 didn’t exist anymore. It was gone. There were only ghost towns left running parallel to the freeway. The rest was now garages, hideous hotels and parking lots with big stores.” If the West looked the same everywhere, he thought, why drag a whole bloody circus of equipment across four states? Grand Canyon aside, he could film everything within a couple hours of LA.
Armed with Haber’s photos, other scouts sought out look-alike locations for Arkansas around Los Angeles and its suburbs. Ridley fixed on the agricultural San Joaquin Valley near Bakersfield to stand in for Oklahoma. “I love Bakersfield because of the vast, open landscapes of these huge farms where there are no walls, there are no fences,” Ridley said. “It’s almost like the Dust Bowl before it became the Dust Bowl . . . the middle of this great landmass you call the United States of America.”
Laddie, a native Californian, was skeptical. No one admired Bakersfield for its scenery. But Ridley found beauty in what most Americans would consider mundane—fields of bobbing oil pumps, rows of spritzing irrigations pipes, pencil-straight highways lined with telephone poles. Cost was also a decisive factor. Ridley wanted to squeeze as much epic grandeur as he could out of an unimposing budget. Pathé had allocated just under $17 million for Thelma & Louise in an effort to hedge the risks for the female-led property. That was more generous than the allowance for the sort of independent film Callie originally had in mind, but significantly less than the $24 million average for a studio picture. It helped that Ridley had cast Susan and Geena. At $1 million apiece, their salaries were respectable for the time but less than the demands of top-tier stars. But Ridley calculated that with fifty-four locations needed to capture the women’s journey, he’d have to make do with some cut-rate choices. He’d shoot most everything in southern and central California. Now all he had to do was track down a stand-in for the Grand Canyon.
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ON A LITTLE PRIVATE PLANE over the desert near Las Vegas, Ridley turned to Haber and Spencer in the back and asked, “Have you ever seen Monument Valley?” He directed the pilot to take them down. They hired a Navajo guide to show them around, passing red sandstone buttes up to a thousand feet tall. The landscape offered depth and texture that were absent in a sprawling, flat desert. “It was so spectacular that I couldn’t speak,” Haber says. The men knew that John Ford had filmed legendary Westerns with John Wayne in the area, but not much in the way of filmmaking had happened there since. It could become the grand backdrop for Act III, the driving scenes near the end of the movie, but there was only one hotel in the vicinity—Ford had set up tent villages for his casts and crews. The logistics would be impossible. The three had to keep searching.
Then the Utah Film Commission suggested the area around Moab, Utah, a jumping-off point for Arches National Park. Haber found more red buttes and mesas and, better yet, a canyon in a neighboring state park called Dead Horse Point. The area practically vibrated with intense colors, orange-red monoliths against a sapphire sky. The canyon itself was small and broken up by formations that would provide layers of rock and contrast to highlight the car as it flew off the edge. A narrow strand of the Colorado River sliced through the bottom, well upstream from the Grand Canyon. A local guide led Haber to survey details like access roads and secondary locations, when suddenly, for no reason whatsoever, he broke down and cried on a stretch of highway, to the point where he had to pull the car over and stop.
“Don’t be embarrassed,” the guide assured him. “It happens all the time.” Grown men often bawled like babies in the desert, she said. “Everyone here knows the strength of this place.” Haber developed a theory that the fierce color contrasts in the brilliant light—he called it color vibration—stirred up uncontrolled emotions. Whatever the reason, he was the first of many working on Thelma & Louise who would weep when confronted with the intensity of the setting. He and Ridley had found the place that would hold its own with his epic vision.