The last week of August. Time to settle the argument that had bedeviled everyone who came into contact with Thelma & Louise since Callie brought the screenplay into the world. By now one or both of her leading ladies had shot a rapist, robbed a store, blown up a truck, had sex with a stranger and drunk Wild Turkey while driving a car at a ridiculous speed, but would they be allowed to gun that car off a seven-hundred-foot cliff? If so, they would play out Callie’s vision of liberation, sacrificing themselves as an ultimate act of resistance to the place they’d been dealt in society. Staged grandly enough, they’d fulfill Ridley Scott’s concept of a passage into legend. But there was no getting around it—they would also be killing themselves. The scene would test all known limitations on what was acceptable for women on-screen.
Laddie spoke with Ridley again two days before. Had anyone come up with another ending, if only to give them options in the editing room? The answer was no. The two men agreed: they would let the movie be what it was supposed to be. If preview audiences rebelled, that might be another story.
On Monday, August 27, the production descended on Dead Horse Point, thirty-five miles outside Moab over rocky, barely graded roads, following an exhausting three-day shoot of a car chase. It had taken more than sixty complex setups to film some dozen police cars, a cavalry in hot pursuit of the Thunderbird, barreling through an old ghost town, home of the old prospector and his attack chicken. A stunt driver handled some of Susan’s chores, although she sometimes had to steer for close-ups. Geena often hung on for dear life as the passenger.
Time was running alarmingly short. When tire tracks from rehearsal marred a field where a wedge of police cruisers would pursue the T-bird, the frantic crew ran out with brooms. “Stop,” Ridley ordered. He directed a helicopter to make low passes over the ground. The downdraft from the rotors smoothed out the dust to render it tidy enough, if the audience didn’t look too closely.
The chase reached a smashing conclusion thanks to a police pileup at a railroad crossing. Then the car broke free for a momentary respite as it headed toward the lip of the canyon. The scene offered the last chance for the heroines to get away, Ridley thought, but if so, the legend would die instead of them. This had to be the final leg of the journey.
Thelma and Louise pushed forward on that bit of road, grim, determined, with bursts of near-hysterical laughter, the car skirting the edge of the cliff. In ravishing close-ups, their movie-star faces looked burnished against the red-rock landscape, their eyes shaded by their battered hats. Geena’s strong jaw jutted out in profile under the bill of her trucker cap. They shared a cigarette.
I guess I went a little crazy, huh? Geena said.
You’ve always been a little crazy. This is just the first chance you’ve had to express yourself.
Watching on video, Ridley thought them handsome, for want of a better word, handsome and strong. To him they seemed sexy, businesslike, heroic. Women would like to be like this, secretly, he thought. It killed him that time pressures didn’t allow him to film that scene in the car, that he had to watch it later, once removed: “I wanted to be there with them.”
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CAST, CREW, STUNT DRIVERS, HELICOPTERS and multiple versions of the Thunderbird converged at the final location with only four days and a daunting thirty quick scenes to go. “It was sick how much we still had to shoot,” says Steve Danton, the first assistant director. That included shots of swarming police, a confrontation over tactics between the law enforcement adversaries Harvey Keitel and Stephen Tobolowsky, the last words of Thelma and Louise and, of course, the plummeting car. No one could be sure whether it would fly into the canyon as the production hoped, or tumble ignominiously to finish the epic with a dud. Only three vehicles were available to launch, one for a test run and two for usable takes. This had to work, and fast—everyone was booked to fly out to other commitments by the end of the week. Ridley had already scheduled prep work for his next project. If filming on Thelma & Louise ran over through the weekend, it would carry the production more than $600,000 beyond the budget.
Dead Horse Point, with its glorious vistas of mountains, canyon walls and the Colorado River two thousand feet below, had once been used as a natural corral for wild mustangs, with a narrow neck of land serving as the only route in or out. The name stemmed from a legend about a herd that died there once, unable to find its way to food and water. The film unit set up on a plateau called Fossil Point, midway between Dead Horse and the river. It took five months for the production to secure all the permissions and permits to film on the parkland, including promises to roll camera only when rafting trips were halted on the river and to clean up the remains of the totaled cars. The crew arranged hundreds of bushy weeds to lend texture to the sandstone promontory.
Plans for shooting had to be airtight. The temperature topped a hundred all week, which meant that the helicopters that appeared in some shots and carried cameras for others couldn’t take off without reducing their weight, carrying only enough fuel for ten-minute sorties. Everyone swallowed the red dust that gusted through the air. “It was physically taxing,” says Stephen Tobolowsky, who stood out amid the tumult in his standard-issue wool suit. “It takes a really experienced general to command this sort of thing. I remember thinking, Who better than Ridley to be at the helm? This is what he does. Geena and Susan were focused and professional, too. Given the brutal conditions, Tobolowsky says, “Thank God the people in the lead on this movie weren’t assholes.” He allowed himself to break his affectless character just once. Concerned that he would have to reloop his dialogue later because of helicopter noise, and frustrated at Harvey for stepping on his lines again, Tobolowsky yanked Harvey up by the lapels to shout at him.
Ridley’s greatest concern was how to marshal all the moving parts to lift the final scene into a realm of nobility. Since his talks with Meryl Streep, he’d considered saving Thelma at the last, letting her emerge from a cloud of dust after Louise went over the edge. But he decided they’d earned the right to die together, and the stars heartily agreed. Now they would have to deliver on a tall order, investing their final scene with enough heart to grant the characters their immortality. Ridley was also determined that the car should defy the laws of physics and take off on an upward trajectory, which would look more positive than a dead drop or a stomach-churning somersault. The crew had to manage it all without the benefit of special effects, which the production could not afford. That car had to fly for real.
The crew stripped everything of any weight, including the engine, out of the three Thunderbirds and built a ramp at the brink of the cliff to slingshot them off at an angle. The plan was to yank each one forward with a heavy cable. After looping through a pulley at the ramp, the cable would continue at a right angle to be hauled by a speeding sixteen-cylinder Jeep. If all went as planned, at the last moment the cable would release and the T-bird would soar.
The first afternoon at the point, the production prepped for two hours, then cranked up the mechanism and let it fly. The car barely cleared the cliff top, wobbled at a weird angle and tumbled like a rock. There was a thud a long moment later, then a soft collective groan.
Nothing for it but to try again the next day. “I didn’t believe we were going to pull it off,” Ridley says. At four o’clock, in perfect light, cameras in place, Thelma and Louise dummies in the front seat, the crew cranked up the whole Rube Goldberg contraption again. This time the car sailed away in a perfect state of uplift. One hubcap detached and trailed off behind. The crew never launched the third car.
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THE LAST DAY OF PRODUCTION looked impossible, one of those “bloody huge quandaries” Ridley claimed to love. “We were going to have the plug pulled, and that was it,” Ridley says. “I think we had forty setups, which was insane.” First thing in the morning, he tried something he’d never done before. The son of the brigadier general gathered the entire unit, a sunbaked, disheveled gang, hardened by three months of down-and-dirty roadwork, in a circle around the car and insisted, “We are going to make this [deadline]. The light is going to go away, and we’ve got to be out of here by five—or else.”
Among the shots to capture before the final scene of dialogue was one of the women grasping hands as the car careered toward the edge. Susan stepped aside for a stunt driver, but Ridley wanted Geena on board. “I’ll operate, so if there’s an accident, I’ll die, too,” he promised.
It’s almost unheard-of for the stars’ last scene in a movie to be the last one filmed, but Ridley wanted them at the height of their golden-hour beauty. He played chicken with the sun by scheduling their final moments, when they would make the decision to die, as the last of the light threatened to disappear. With only forty-five minutes left and a few rays scarcely peeking over the hills, they had time for only two takes. “This was it,” Geena says. “There was no getting it another day.”
It’s hard to imagine a moment when the emotions of a story and the people tasked with telling it would so mirror and magnify each other. Geena and Susan were saying good-bye to their characters, to each other and to the experience of making this extraordinary movie. So was the entire crew. Even after many years, Ridley couldn’t watch the footage without feeling a stab. “Everyone had become so close on this fabulous project, and now we would go our own ways,” says Anne Ahrens. “Thelma and Louise had become real people to us. It was devastating that they would be gone.”
The hair-and-makeup team fluttered over them nervously and then cleared out. Two cameras operated simultaneously, framing heroic close-ups that nearly burst the boundaries of the screen. With an army of police behind them and the canyon in front, the stars turned to each other, awash in russet light.
Let’s keep goin’, Geena said, hope, fear and epiphany written on her wide-open, childlike face.
What do you mean?
Geena cocked her chin toward the cliff. Go.
You sure? Susan dropped her shield and looked incandescent, as happy as she had ever been through the story. She reached across and kissed her friend on the mouth.
Yeah, said Geena. Hit it.
“We did two takes,” Geena says. “And then the sun went bip!” It was over. Just like in the movies.