The door to Thelma’s garage flipped open first thing Monday morning, June 11, 1990, and the camera rolled as Geena Davis burst out, dragging enough luggage for a reenactment of the Lewis and Clark expedition rather than a weekend fishing trip with Louise.
The moment marked the official start of principal photography on a movie already freighted with more doubt than your typical multiplex fare. Yet Thelma & Louise had made it this far, and still none of the principals had given much thought to such weighty issues as whether this gender-bender road picture had something sweeping or controversial to say about women, men and the evolving deliberations over what constituted fairness or justice between them. Right now the set functioned pretty much like any workplace in America at the time—men and women bent to their tasks, collaborating, cooperating and bringing their various skills to bear.
This was a simple scene, but important: they had to get Thelma down the driveway to Louise’s turquoise 1966 Thunderbird on a leafy suburban street in the Los Angeles suburb of Tarzana, ably standing in for Arkansas. It would mark the first time Thelma and Louise shared the screen in the course of the movie, setting the benchmark for their rich but complicated friendship.
After a 6:30 a.m. call for hair, makeup and costumes, Geena, Susan and Ridley met at 8:30 to roughly block out the action. Afterward, they’d let it fly. They shared the belief that rehearsal killed the adrenaline and the spontaneity they prized.
Geena, as usual, came prepared. She knew exactly how to play the moment: she would open the faucet on all her own bottled-up adrenaline, all the emotions on one of the most momentous days in her career, and let them flow into her character. She put to use her full awareness that she had spent nearly a year pursuing this rare and coveted female role, her first as a major lead, her first that wasn’t a kooky girlfriend to a vampire or ghost or bug, a role that she’d spent hours prepping with an acting coach and with Callie, scribbling notes on every available margin of the script, spelling her lines out phonetically to nail the Arkansas accent. “I’ll do whatever it takes,” she said to herself, “not to mess up this brilliant part.”
She believed that Thelma felt the same way she did. All the beleaguered housewife was doing in this scene was taking off for what most women would consider a commonplace jaunt, a weekend getaway with a friend. But for Thelma, Geena knew, the action carried uncommon significance. Although the scene was the first to be shot, in the film it would follow an earlier setup in which Thelma decided, for the first time in her life, to defy a domineering husband and skip out without his permission.
“It was a huge deal, a big, giant moment in my life that I was doing this,” Geena says in a comment that applies equally to her character and herself. “It needed to be treated as such.”
So while the props department had deposited a whole load of stuff by the door—suitcases, lantern, cooler, fishing pole, fishing net—and told her to choose what to bring, Geena opted for everything. She minced down the driveway, all elbows and knees and toothy grin, dragging the awkward jumble of paraphernalia toward the car, investing the character with her own over-the-top preparation, eagerness to please and fear of making a wrong step. She gave the simple scene a sense of momentousness.
We don’t need the lantern, said Louise, jumping out of the car to help. The place HAS electricity.
Thelma took the lamp anyway, just in case. What if there was a psycho killer on the loose?
The final effect was perfectly comic. Done up with flouncing, curled hair, a ruffled white dress and a baby-blue jean jacket embellished with absurdly dangling strings of pearls, Geena looked like Big Bird dressed as Dolly Parton. But like any natural comedian, she didn’t play it for laughs. “Thelma’s not silly,” she insists. “I’m serious about what needs to be done here. We need to be supplied, because who knows what we might do? It’s new rules.”
Susan’s Louise met this spectacle with a fond, indulgent chuckle, but her getup indicated a very different character from her friend’s. A scarf was wound tightly over her hair and tied snug at the neck. Sunglasses shielded her eyes, and a long-sleeved white blouse, buttoned to the top, masked the famous Susan Sarandon décolletage. Red lipstick turned her sensuous mouth into a strict line. As Geena heaped her bursting luggage into Louise’s pristine trunk, Susan’s brow creased with momentary worry. Careful, careful, she ad-libbed. In contrast to Geena’s sweet, childlike Thelma, Louise already came across as bottled up and cautious.
Unlike Geena, Susan hadn’t consulted Callie about her character’s backstory. Much of the actress’s preparation for the role had arisen from her own initial concern about steering clear of a Charles Bronson revenge fantasy. She thought Louise should be driven not by anger or vengeance, but by a will to understand what had happened to her in Texas, and an effort to regain control of her life, to get a grip. The actress had asked the set decorators to supply Louise’s house with photo albums filled with images from the past, artifacts that Louise could study and decipher, even though the movie audience would likely never see them.
In keeping with that idea, Susan suggested that she and Geena take a picture together as their journey began, to document the moment. Before they hopped into the car, Louise whipped out a Polaroid camera, held it at arm’s length, and the two flashed wide, winning smiles, heads together in casual intimacy. The shot came to be regarded by many as the first selfie. It certainly became one of the most famous. One scene in, and the movie was breaking ground.
Susan still intimidated Geena, a parent-child dynamic that Geena used in her performance. But Susan already felt during the coziness of taking that selfie that the two had the capacity to form a potent combo. “You know when somebody is going to be your equal, if not better,” she says. “You don’t have to take responsibility for them, because they’re always going to be on time and prepared and have their own ideas, and they’re strong and smart and sassy. It opens your heart. You’re free to go full force.”
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RIDLEY COULD SEE THAT THE CASTING was working as he intended, which freed him to go full force on his end. “It was a good mix,” he says. “Susan as the mother figure or older sister. And Geena as the child who makes all the mistakes.” The contrast would be all the more striking when the roles reversed later in the film. He relaxed. With the actors taking care of their business, he could take care of his, finding the visual statement that would amplify the story.
He had twelve weeks to get everything in the can—a little over a month in Los Angeles to film the Arkansas scenes, a few weeks around Bakersfield for the road trip across the plains and a month in Utah for the stark endgame in the desert Southwest. To stick to the schedule, the cast and crew had to keep moving, keep it loose, catch each moment and move on. Not the ideal environment for a stickler like Ridley.
Nor was the everyday world of middle-of-the-road Middle America. Most of the settings for Thelma & Louise were planted squarely in the realm of the ordinary, and there could be nothing ordinary about a film by Ridley Scott. He and Norris Spencer had developed a shared mania for showy visual pyrotechnics on their other projects. “The fact that Ridley and Norris had television-commercial backgrounds gave them a visual style that was full of impact,” says Michael Hirabayashi, the assistant art director on Thelma & Louise, who came from the same ad background as many on the crew. “They knew how to make an image punchy, make it pop.”
Ridley invariably packed dimension and movement into every shot, filling the frame with layers of shiny objects, surfaces that reflected light and things that moved, like rows of ceiling fans. Even the very air took on texture in a typical Ridley Scott film, as he routinely puffed a cigar near the camera lens to saturate the shots with smoggy atmosphere. On The Duellists, says Harvey Keitel, he once had to say, “Get rid of the damn smoke!” He couldn’t see Keith Carradine, who was trying to act with him on the other side of the room.
The director couldn’t bear flat, frontal lighting, the TV-sitcom look that resulted from pounding light directly onto a set. Backlighting, which he preferred, lent more depth to an image, alternating darker and lighter areas within the frame and leaving more unsaid. The technique allowed him to create a rim effect, in which light from an obtuse angle outlines a body with a shimmery glow and separates it from the background. Ridley employed backlighting so often that Norris Spencer called him the Prince of Darkness.
That was all well and good in the murky atmospheres of Blade Runner and Alien, but how to achieve such effects in everyday settings, under relatively broad daylight, in Thelma & Louise? The budget wouldn’t allow Ridley to wait for sunset every day in search of burnished light. And how to make a working-class home in Arkansas gleam? Or a flat road in Oklahoma?
The challenge was to raise ordinary settings and costumes to a more elevated plane while maintaining a grip on reality. “It’s hard to find somebody who can dress ordinary,” says Ridley, speaking of the art and costume designers who created the movie’s look. “Grand is fairly easy. But to dress normal is the most difficult thing to do. What are ordinary people like?”
He and Norris plucked the relatively young Anne Ahrens for the key job of set decorator. At thirty-three, she thought Ridley might have chosen her for a film like Thelma & Louise because she was a rare woman in the field. Ridley demurs, saying he admired her for bringing flair to a conventional milieu in her previous work on The Fabulous Baker Boys.
Anne had entered USC film school, one of six women in a class of sixty, hoping to become a cinematographer, but her classmates wouldn’t sit with her or invite her to join them on their projects, so she settled on more-solitary screenwriting instead. Even then she was criticized for material that was labeled as overly female. “We don’t do anything about women and growth and that kind of stuff,” she was told. After graduation, a friend got her a job set decorating for music videos, and from there, a stint on Hardbodies, a beach-bunnies exploitation picture. Working with director Wes Craven on A Nightmare on Elm Street boosted her into more-mainstream projects.
Still, her heart jumped when she took a call from Norris Spencer, on behalf of Ridley Scott. From Norris’s voice, she pictured an older British gentleman with a top hat and cane, asking her if she wanted to set decorate a small film about two women on a journey. Ridley wanted a lot of layers, Norris explained, because the women had a lot of layers. “The denser the look of an image, the more interested we are in it,” he said. She quit a TV job as soon as she hung up.
Set decoration is a crucial element in a film’s overall design, both indoors and out. Anne prepared by assembling a truckful of fake tumbleweeds and road signs for locations on the road, and she wrote her own backstory for the characters so she could furnish their homes in character—Louise meticulous and even a little paranoid, Thelma disorganized and artless. Ahrens’s screenwriting background drove her to invest the physical with the intent of the story. Her understanding of Ridley’s aesthetic informed her shopping at swap meets and junk shops—she loaded up on lots of shiny things, the better to glisten in Ridley’s backlight.
Her handiwork showed in the first shot outside Thelma’s home, where lawn sprinklers twirled and spritzed, catching and refracting the sun. A jumble of odds and ends cluttered the driveway and yard—piles of wood and a cement mixer from a half-finished construction project, a garden hose, trash cans, lawn ornaments—making for a dense image. The disarray also illustrated the state of Thelma’s marriage. “We wanted to show chaos in her life,” said Ahrens. “She’s trying to hold it together, but Darryl doesn’t really care about the house. He doesn’t provide for her.” Thelma’s car in the garage was a beat-up Honda, whereas an earlier sequence would show her husband leaving for work in a red Corvette.
The costumes hit the mark from the first scene, just as the decoration did. They were designed by Elizabeth McBride, a thirty-five-year-old who answered to the same heightened-ordinary imperative as Ahrens. Ridley had selected a woman for this job, too, but again based on past work rather than gender. He’d seen McBride master the art of dressing ordinary people, southern style, on Tender Mercies and Driving Miss Daisy. Like Callie, she was known for wearing cowboy boots and showing a bit of swagger. McBride’s job would be to bring texture and interest to commonplace clothes, adding the pearls to Geena’s jacket, for example, or later sewing rhinestones around the pockets of her jeans, and then evolving to a tougher style as the story progressed.
With those details in place, Ridley could turn his attention to the quality of the light. He had decided that each of the three acts in the film would have its own lighting signature. The Arkansas scenes would feature soft, gray tones, with a lot of rain and greenery, to distinguish them from the golden radiance of the plains and the blazing red sun of the desert. Ridley drew artistically accomplished storyboards for each shot, often on the fly on the set, to show the crew what he had in mind. The drawings captured the personalities of the actors and always indicated, through shading, the source of the light in any given shot. His director of photography, Adrian Biddle, a big, burly, amiable guy who had worked with Ridley before, knew how to create the lighting effects he wanted but also when to step aside, because Ridley preferred to operate the camera himself, starting on day one. “The magic goes through the viewfinder,” Ridley liked to say. He needed to see for himself.
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THELMA AND LOUISE PULLED AWAY from home as the last shots of the first day’s filming wrapped up. Sun winked off the chrome of Louise’s Thunderbird, gleaming like her pride and joy. Ridley thought of it as her dream vehicle. “She probably goes over it with a Kleenex and a toothpick after she’s cleaned it,” he explained.
Green trees waved overhead, reinforcing the verdant signature of the Arkansas scenes. More lawn sprinklers sprayed the street. A truck followed close behind, adding movement. Ridley squinted through the camera, riding on a platform mounted to the side of the car, capturing a close-up of Geena’s face, the sunshine behind her creating a golden corona around her hair. Thelma explained that she hadn’t told Darryl about the trip.
I left him a note. I left him stuff to microwave.
Susan let out a whoop of laughter and hit the accelerator. Ridley grinned on the other side of the lens. They were off.