The T-bird barreled down a highway with tractor trailers screaming along on either side, horns blasting, chrome gleaming, headlights piercing the darkness. Susan Sarandon at the wheel and Geena Davis in the passenger seat shouted their lines over the noise. Scene completed, skidding to a stop, they turned to each other and shrieked, “We’re in a Ridley Scott movie!”
On Friday, July 20, their simple road picture hit the road. The move to central California hurled the production into the core of the story, where the relationship between the characters deepened and transformed. Louise would push forward in the face of guilt and fear, her big saucer-shaped eyes looking into an abyss. Thelma would morph from homebody ditz to Amazon road warrior. The friendship of the characters would reach a level of feeling rarely achieved between two women on-screen. This was the moment when the creative tension that started to simmer when Callie entrusted her baby to a grandiose action director could reach a rolling boil. Would Thelma & Louise emerge as a thoughtful character study or a flashy action film?
For the most part, mutual respect prevailed. Ridley stuck to the script as he lavished attention on the visuals. Geena and Susan worked to stay true to their parts. But they all had to broker underlying tensions as Susan, in particular, fought to defend the values of her character and the conscience that would give meaning to all the dazzle.
An activist actress, a guy’s-guy director—it was a classic yin-yang matchup. “The experience was an interesting collaboration, because you had me at one end of the spectrum and Ridley at the other end of the spectrum,” Susan says. “The atmosphere was very male. The guys on the crew were all shirtless with their T-shirts around their heads, like a band of cigar-smoking marauders. They adored Ridley and would follow him off a cliff.” Together they chased sunrises and sunsets, making spectacular shots of the two women in the car. “The joke was the whole movie would be voice-over,” Susan says. “Because he was getting such fabulous footage, why do scenes?”
Nothing in the script indicated that the intimate story needed such an opulent stage. “He brought that to it,” Susan says. “We filled in the emotions and the people.” Once she saw the finished film, she understood: “Because Ridley put us in this heroic setting, the film had the impact it did,” but that wasn’t so apparent at the time.
The actresses would plan subtle emotional adjustments for a scene, only to arrive on set and discover that there would be a train passing through the shot. “Or now there’s a cattle drive all around us while we’re having an intimate talk about sex,” Geena said in a newspaper interview when the film came out. “We just did it. We just said, ‘Well, okay, I guess we’re shouting this scene.’”
“We were shouting all the time,” Susan agreed. “Every time Geena and I got on the set, we were shocked by what was going on around us.”
Their concerns for their characters distracted Ridley, prompting him to grumble in the same interview: “Every scene was a bloody debate.”
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THAT DIDN’T STOP HIM from sticking to his storyboards and packing every shot with trademark visual density, a particular challenge in the San Fernando Valley, which had to fill in for the Oklahoma flatlands for seven shooting days. The wide, flat agricultural fields and long, straight highways wouldn’t crack any guidebook lists of scenic drives. Their visual interest would probably strike some directors as nil. But Ridley Scott was fascinated with settings that most Americans would consider plug-ugly—“All those watering machines and those railway lines, where any Englishman goes nuts because he doesn’t see that in the UK.”
He dug into his bag of favorite tricks. Instead of smoke, now he had . . . dust! Instead of ghastly furniture and kooky lamps, he sought out backgrounds with irrigation sprinklers, telephone poles and oil pumps that bobbed like feeding birds. A sorry motel off a highway in Gorman hit all the right notes as a one-night shelter for the fugitives. The ground rumbled from trucks on the too-close freeway as Thelma, wearing an absurd ruffled bikini and still trying to salvage a sort of vacation, tried to sun herself beside a pool surrounded with cracked concrete, a John Register painting come to life.
Norris and Anne added layers of artifice to enhance even the most barren settings. They didn’t go anywhere without their supply of fake boulders, tumbleweeds and strips of reflectors to line the highways and make them shine. They brought along weather-beaten billboards and a stash of satellite dishes to project the feeling that no matter how remote the territory, the outside world was encroaching, even watching, as the heroines tried to disappear. Ahrens dressed up a gas station with shiny pinwheels that spun in the wind. She etched graffiti into the glass of the phone booth where Thelma called her husband and said, Darryl. Go fuck yourself. And to break the monotony of the open space, the prop people designed little structures, like a concrete sinklike form for Brad Pitt to sit on when the women encountered him on the road.
It wasn’t only the backgrounds that were loaded with interest. There was constant motion to keep the scenes spinning. When the crew saw a crop duster working at a nearby field, the pilot accepted two hundred bucks to fly by the car as the women waved. He let a camera ride along for free to film from above as the plane swooped away.
Most of all, the boy in Ridley delighted in trucks, American eighteen-wheelers that were bigger, shinier and louder than their counterparts in Europe. “These gigantic trucks covered in lights—he thought they were better than sliced bread,” says Ahrens. But ordinary trucks weren’t enough for him. Crew members souped them up with extra chrome and borders of red lights that outlined their curves.
Whenever possible, Ridley garnished his already lively tableaus with human props—colorful extras like a cowboy on a rearing horse, an oiled-up bodybuilder lifting weights or guys with potbellies and shaggy hair gunning their Harleys. “That’s all just part of America,” Ridley says. “I tried to show America the way I like to see it.”
He pushed for more, then more again. “When the script said we pull into a gas station,” says Susan, “it didn’t say we floor it backward with a guy pumping iron and smoke everywhere and he’s half naked. That’s what Ridley brought to it.”
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GEENA AND SUSAN PROVED formidable enough to claim their share of the screen, however many moving parts Ridley crammed into it. For the Central Valley locations, the women would mostly carry the story on their own, save for some traveling scenes with Brad Pitt. Ridley also brought Chris McDonald and Harvey Keitel to the set a couple times so they could deliver lines from a few feet away in scenes when the leads phoned them from the road. The plan lent immediacy to the conversations.
It took greater focus to bring intimacy to dialogue when the car zipped along the highway, top down, wind roaring, but Ridley did his best to help there, too. The production spent $115,000 to buy five vintage Thunderbirds and trick them out to various degrees. Some looked pristine riding on their own. Others were set up so a rig could pull them from the front, or cameras could be mounted on platforms on any side.
Ridley operated the camera from a side mount for one of the first speeding-car scenes, when Thelma and Louise discussed whether they should hightail it to Mexico rather than turn themselves in. Goddammit, Thelma, Louise said, every time we get in trouble, you go blank or plead insanity. Their hair tossed around their faces and other cars kept pace with them, yet they managed sensitive, even tentative line readings. Ridley smiled encouragement from behind the lens.
“It was the only experience I’ve had, and I loved it, where the director was the camera operator,” Geena says. “He loved our characters. He was smiling the whole time. He was on the periphery, and we had to tune him out, but to see him smiling was so comforting and warm, and very intimate. He just made it very comfortable.” He often set up scenes so two cameras filmed at once, the better to let the actresses work off each other’s performances. It took greater skill to light such scenes, but it also saved money and time.
It was even harder for the actresses to concentrate in the seemingly delicate scene when Thelma questioned why Louise wouldn’t travel through Texas, with the intimation that she had been raped there. If you blow a guy’s head off with his pants down, Louise said in the script, believe me, Texas is the last place you wanna get caught. They were flummoxed when Ridley had the car pull to a stop in front of a railroad crossing, and the women delivered the lines as a train roared by, because . . . well, Ridley wanted a train to roar by. The actresses soldiered through.
But they balked at a request that Geena herself embody a visual diversion in a forthcoming scene. Thelma and Louise, having resolved to make a run for Mexico, would feel a liberating sense of release as the car sped along next to farmland while they bopped along to the Temptations’ song “The Way You Do the Things You Do.”
When the crew broke for lunch beforehand, Ridley pulled Geena aside. “This afternoon,” he said, “you two are driving along and listening to music and you are feeling just great. This is the time when it all feels right. So what would you think if your character just sat up on the back of the seat, and you took your top off? You’re exhilarated and you’re throwing your shirt around or something.”
“You know what?” Geena fumbled. “I think they need me at lunch. Ah . . . I think I better go.” She cleared her throat. “I think they want me to eat. Yes! They want me to eat.” She kicked herself that she’d bungled the moment, that she couldn’t come up with a better excuse to avoid the question, let alone answer it.
Geena found Susan at a picnic table. “Susan!” she said in an exaggerated whisper. “Ridley says for this scene he wants me to take my top off.”
Susan stopped midbite. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said. “Can you think of any reason why you should?”
“No.” Geena gulped.
“Then that’s exploitation,” Susan said. She marched over to Ridley and said flatly, “Ridley, Geena is not taking her top off.” That was that.
Susan walked straight back, and Geena thanked her. But she kicked herself again for not finding a way to stand up for herself. “As it turned out, he was not bothered by the answer,” she says. “It was just so built in for me to be worried about offending anybody, or somebody not liking me because I said no.”
Susan shared no such scruples. But they all remember Ridley’s reaction a bit differently. He says he simply answered, “Yeah, fine.” But in Susan’s memory, he came up to her later and said sarcastically, “Thanks a lot.”
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AFTER EIGHT YEARS IN THE BUSINESS, this was the first time Geena had found herself every day on a movie set with another woman, an equal, someone to emulate. “I wanted people to like me, above everything,” Geena says. “I always had to make sure to dance around to get what I want. Ever since Susan, I’ve always tried to be like her.”
Susan reveled in the companionship, too. It fed the real affection and comfort of the performances. “I hadn’t really done a part before where it was two women and it was about their friendship so much. We really did hit it off and get along terrifically, in our real lives as well. It was very impactful and important for me.”
With so many remote locations, there was no retreating to a trailer between takes. The two of them often hung out in the back of the car, gnawing on beef jerky sticks that were always on hand as props, a patio umbrella overhead to ward off the heat and sun. They planned their upcoming scenes, strategized or just talked. Sometimes they killed time by asking the makeup artists for tweezers and then plucking hairs from their legs.
They entertained the crew by making kitty noises, a nutty contest of meows and purrs, even as they upended the clichés about catty female stars undercutting each other to compete for glory.
“Isn’t it fun with girls?” Susan said several times, apropos of nothing.
“Oh God, yes,” Geena replied.
Once, they pranked Ridley when he was shooting one of his sundown beauty shots. He panned from the vista to the two leads, only to find an empty seat as they ducked onto the floor.
In their personal lives, the two stars found themselves in different places. Susan was fully occupied when she wasn’t on the set. She had brought her kids along, and her brother and manager, Phil Tomalin. Tim Robbins sometimes visited on weekends. Geena got the crew whispering by spending some downtime with Brad Pitt during the few days he was on location. The whispers got louder the more time they spent together. Geena was in the final stages of her three-year marriage to Jeff Goldblum and was already separated. She filed for divorce at the end of the shoot, insisting that the split had nothing to do with a Thelma-like rebellion.
To the crew, Geena was the funny one, Susan the troublemaker. “Look, she’s more diplomatic,” Susan said of her costar when the film came out. “But she’s a strong gal. She was in the midst of a relationship change, and that figured in there.” As they filmed more scenes in the car, some members of the crew thought Ridley focused on his art-direction thing while Susan pretty much directed the performance, but Susan insists it was an equal collaboration all around. “Ridley pretty much listened,” she says. “He trusted us to take care of the stuff that was in our jurisdiction, and he took care of the stuff that was more than we could have imagined.”
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THE PRODUCTION OF THELMA & LOUISE had wound up in the hands of a male director, but there was no question that women’s voices were being heard. Back then, women usually made up only about 20 percent of movie crews, a statistic that has remained about the same ever since. The Thelma & Louise workers, outside of the cast, were 22 percent female, not much of a variation from the norm. Many of them filled slots typically occupied by women—costume design, script supervision, makeup, office work. But a number of others wielded untraditional authority.
Mimi Polk, as a first-time producer, continued to toggle logistics throughout, bouncing between the home office in LA and the set. Some found her warm and enthusiastic, a strong advocate for the film. Others regarded her as cool or scary depending on which face she chose to show to get what she needed done. Lisa Dean, the art director, worked closely with the production designer, Norris Spencer, and supervised a crew that constructed sets. Kathy Nelson, the music supervisor, chose the widely admired “needle drops,” popular songs that set the mood of the story along the way. And Anne Ahrens ran the team of half a dozen guys who arranged the sets.
While the number of women wasn’t great, it felt to members of the crew as if there were more around than usual, perhaps because they had greater say than usual, led by the two female stars. They also weren’t exposed to the kind of denigrating treatment that held them back on other movie sets. “Thelma & Louise had a different feeling,” says Ahrens. “Because it was such a women’s story, women were respected on and off the set.”
One member of her crew, Ken Turek, performed a function called lead man, responsible for supervising the placement of Anne’s set decorations. He had worked on a dozen movies before, but never one written by a woman. The female-centered story struck him as refreshing, he says, in part because his girlfriend, who worked in the same field, turned down a project at the same time called Boxing Helena, about a woman imprisoned with her limbs cut off. “Thelma & Louise was the opposite of that,” he says.
Turek had worked with a few female set decorators before and witnessed their struggles to be taken seriously. Sometimes, he says, a set decorator gave instructions, then left to scavenge for props, only to find when she returned that the men had taken off right after she did, without accomplishing a thing. “They were almost insulted by having to work for a woman,” says Turek. “They didn’t know how to react to a female telling them what to do. It was like their wife telling them to do something.”
The eighties corresponded to the influx of crew members who had studied film in college rather than worked their way through the trade, and that made it harder for them to win respect from seasoned blue-collar hands. Traditionally, Turek says, there had been many gay male set decorators, but the crews were accustomed to them and less likely to give them a hard time. But a woman? “She must be on the rag,” guys said when she gave an order. Or “She’s crabby. Her husband must be out of town.” Turek had seen and heard it all.
“The female set decorators had to be tough,” he says. “They tended to be more on the ball. They made better lists—like things were actually legible—and they were better educated. But they had to prove themselves every day.”
Crew members in various departments recalled other shoots where they witnessed or heard about disrespect and harassment. Stories circulated about people like the female assistant director Candace Allen, one of the first African American women to hold the job, who once was ordered to stand in the rain until her T-shirt was soaked and to jump up and down so the director could watch her breasts bounce. She tried lowering her voice at work to come across as less feminine, and she always addressed her colleagues as “Gentlemen,” hoping they would take the hint. Kathy Nelson resolved to underreact to affronts. A music executive once chased her around her office and forcibly kissed her before she broke free. The next day she tried to pass the incident off as some kind of accident so they could keep working together.
On some of her other films, Anne Ahrens says, she encountered “guy banter and gags, boys-will-be-boys stuff, which I didn’t get on Thelma & Louise. On this movie, it was like we were all on a journey together and everybody was just as important.” While some directors’ methods could be more rough-and-tumble, Ridley held meetings where softer-spoken workers could have their say. “Everybody’s voice was heard, which I don’t think happens much on other films,” she says.
If Ridley set such a tone from the top, it wasn’t a conscious effort to promote a gender-free utopia so much as a reflection of his personality and mostly gender-blind management style. Some practices on the set were stuck in the typical Hollywood groove. Memos all referred to Geena and Susan as girls, and in one of Ridley’s hand-drawn storyboards of a car chase later in the movie, he depicted Geena without a top on. Like many men in many a workplace, he was more comfortable talking with guys. But his all-business approach to directing meant that everyone’s contribution got the same degree of respect, and it was based on performance. “I don’t think the guys on the movie looked at it as a women’s picture,” says Steve Danton, the first assistant director. “They just looked at it as good filmmaking.”
The crew agreed that Ridley Scott set an example for a smoothly functioning shoot. Utterly confident, decisive and experienced, he didn’t act out of insecurity or play favorites. “I don’t think he was buddies with anybody, except maybe the camera crew,” says Tracy DeFreitas, who helped manage the office on location. “He had to be focused, and he had to stay on a really tight budget.” He also worked harder than anybody else, but then he let it go at the end of the day to enjoy a good dinner before he watched the dailies.
“He was mischievous and, I would suspect, a kind of gentleman hedonist,” says Jason Beghe, who played the state trooper who stopped Thelma and Louise for speeding. Beghe was one of the few members of the cast or crew who had personal conversations with Ridley. “Ridley enjoyed life. He was a discreet guy, but wine, women and song were things he embraced, I don’t think to an unhealthy degree. He was not overly serious, but he was professional as hell and knew where his talent lay. If you think about that, it’s a healthy and intelligent recipe for any artist.”
The production process had turned into one long, rolling negotiation among director, actors and crew as they strove to settle on the right details and, more important, given the loaded subject matter, the right tone. Susan Sarandon even raised the possibility that the picture benefited from the leadership of someone who didn’t necessarily share her point of view. “Ridley is pretty interesting,” Susan said in a newspaper interview a year later. “I don’t trust him as far as I can throw him, but I love him, and I would work for him again in a flash. Our agendas were not always the same, our priorities were not always the same, but it was not a question of what’s right and what’s wrong. If anything, this movie shows that you can have people coming from completely different perspectives creating a third thing. If this had been directed by a really serious feminist trying to make some kind of statement, it may not have had the air that it needed.”
The usually dour director told people he had enjoyed himself more than on any other film. “Part of what made it so good,” says his friend Hans Zimmer, “is that it was almost like a hobby for Ridley to direct it. There was an ease about it, a complete lack of cynicism.”
On time and on budget, it was all going so well that Ridley had to wonder, as the production sprinted toward its denouement in the canyonlands of Utah: Was this all too good to be true? When he got to the editing room, would there be a movie there?