Off the Cliff

by Becky Aikman

  But Ridley felt certain this remote, almost forgotten pocket of the American West offered him the epic proscenium that could transfigure the final scenes of the film, turning them into the stuff of myth. For four weeks, a place where John Ford filmed some classic Westerns would frame controversial set pieces destined to blow the usual ladylike movie mandate to smithereens. Ridley’s antiheroines would lock a state trooper in the trunk of his cruiser, blow up the rig of a sleazy truck driver, lead the cops on a car chase and skyrocket off a cliff, if the studio would still let them. Ridley’s plan was set, the storyboards drawn, but Geena Davis, Susan Sarandon, Callie Khouri and Alan Ladd Jr. had opinions of their own.

  —

  GEENA AND SUSAN STRODE ONTO THE locations looking wild, tanned, windblown and looser without traditional makeup. In fact, it took the makeup artists longer than ever to prepare the stars each day, layering sunscreen, followed by bronzy fake tans, followed by smudges of dirt and even tiny individual painted freckles. Every night, the costume crew dutifully washed their clothes, now swapped out and ripped apart. Every morning, Susan and Geena rolled around on the parking lot to dirty them up again—jeans and a jean shirt with the sleeves ripped off for Geena, jeans and a white tank top for Susan, with strips torn from Geena’s sleeves to knot around her neck. Ridley loved how they looked—more truly themselves, as Callie had envisioned. His camera seemed to worship them in close-ups that outshone the scenery.

  Members of the crew appeared more than ever like a band of landlocked buccaneers, bare chests brown from a daily blast of vitamin D, wet rags tied around their necks to deflect the 100-plus-degree heat, an eccentric collection of hats to shield their heads. Ridley seemed impervious. In long sleeves and a cap with flaps, the freckled redhead said he’d never felt so fit in his life in the dry, magnificent air. Geena and Susan won respect by toughing it out. They often had to forgo head coverings or sunglasses so the camera could see their expressions, and every night they had to rinse the grit out of their eyes to stave off infections from desert fungus that festered in the ever-present dust.

  This was the most action-oriented portion of the screenplay, but Callie had provided grace notes along the way. Thoughtful moments appeared amid the mayhem so the characters could reflect on what they had done and become. One such moment that was scripted near the end had already been filmed in LA. During the women’s final scramble to escape as the police zeroed in, Callie wrote a short, wordless scene for Darryl, staring dully into space back home. Chris McDonald welcomed the opportunity to show that Thelma’s husband realized the enormity of what had happened. “This gave him some humanity,” says Chris. He let a stream of thoughts flow through his mind as he played the scene next to the horrible lamp with the goldfish trapped inside. “How he’d lost this thing he’d taken for granted, his girl, who he really did love and also saw as his property. How he was going to be alone now. How this was all so far outside his parameters. It was a beautiful thing that Ridley left it in.”

  Other moments allowed Geena and Susan to show their own nuanced emotions, an anomaly for most action films. Elation at escaping their pasts ran parallel with premonitions of the end.

  I don’t remember ever feelin’ this awake, Geena said in a conversation in the car. You know what I mean? Everything looks new. Do you feel like that? Like you’ve got something to look forward to?

  We’ll be drinking margaritas by the sea, Mamacita, Susan replied with false enthusiasm. Their expressions conveyed simultaneous layers of optimism and hopelessness.

  The script gave Susan another actorly opportunity when she waited in the car outside while Thelma held up a convenience store. Susan began to apply lipstick, but thought better of it. Ridley added a touch: two weary-looking older women who looked like subjects in a Dorothea Lange photo watching Susan through a window. It seemed to spook Louise. Is this what life holds in store for me? she seemed to wonder before she tossed the makeup away.

  Later, in an effort to take her character beyond time, Susan suggested that she trade away her jewelry and watch for a hat. “I knew I was not going back,” she says. “I was cutting off my links with everything.” Ridley had spotted just the person to play her trading partner, an elderly man pushing one hundred. He was a prospector who lived with a pet chicken—an attack chicken, the crew called it—in a ghost town an hour out of Moab. “You gotta get me that guy,” Ridley said to Ken Haber, the location manager. “I want him in the movie.” The man refused, embarrassed that he was missing teeth, but he relented after Geena and Susan made a fuss over him and invited him to join them for lunch. He didn’t have to act in the scene. He merely looked at Susan, and the rest—the isolation and melancholy—was all in his expression.

  Susan craved one more moment of stillness for Louise that wasn’t present in the script. “We’ve been in the car forever,” Susan said to Ridley. “Can’t she just get out and experience a little note of quiet, where you don’t know what she’s thinking, she’s just looking out?” She was surprised when Ridley agreed and set up the shot at night in Arches National Park. It meant bringing in a Musco light, a huge multidirectional fixture on a flatbed truck, usually used to light up football stadiums, to penetrate the darkness and illuminate the mountains and monuments. The effect was unreal, like silvery sideways moonlight, reminiscent of the time Callie drove through Monument Valley at night and rethought her own life. Susan appreciated the effort. “Actors offer suggestions all the time, but lighting something in the desert that takes seven hours was a huge thing,” she says. “Ridley could be a great collaborator.”

  Meanwhile, Thelma, the formerly insecure flake, now owned the road. She held herself with new authority, vaulting into the car over the side, too cool to open the door. When Louise seemed to waver while talking to Harvey Keitel on a pay phone, Thelma hovered silently in the background, summoning all her stature to boost her friend’s resolve. Yet Geena still conjured up a soft, melting delivery to imbue one of Thelma’s signature lines with heartbreak: Something’s crossed over in me and I can’t go back, she said, her eyes searching toward the sky. I mean . . . I just couldn’t live.

  Ridley framed her face with dreamy late-day light, and her tangled hair formed a shimmery crown around her head. A second camera captured Susan’s reaction in real time.

  I know, she said gently. I know what you mean.

  Years later, Thom Noble, who edited the film, still chokes up when he remembers seeing that footage. “I actually cried when I cut that,” he says. “Tears streaming down. It cuts to your heart.”

  —

  THE PERFORMANCES OF THE TWO STARS gave the story weight, but Ridley never forgot that this was to be popular entertainment, so he lavished attention on the action sequences, always with an eye for sparks of comedy. He was stoked when the cast and crew met on the side of a road two miles outside Moab for the scene when a New Mexico state trooper stopped Thelma and Louise for speeding, and Thelma’s transformation to badass would be complete. She would pull a gun on the cop to stop him from calling them in, order Louise to shoot out his radio and lock him in his trunk, taking his gun to shoot airholes in the lid. The light was harsh and flat that day, but Ridley looked forward to the scene regardless. He liked that Thelma would become the authoritative Louise, and Louise would become the hapless Thelma, shooting out the wrong radio. The police radio, Louise! Thelma would admonish her. He liked the idea that the audience would feel torn and anxious, unsure whether Thelma would really shoot the cop. And Ridley had been talking up an actor he loved for the one-day trooper role.

  Jason Beghe wasn’t a typical bit player. A native New Yorker who’d grown up as a private-school buddy of John F. Kennedy Jr.’s, he’d taken a serendipitous approach to his career, becoming a model almost by chance when he posed for the photographer Bruce Weber. That took him to Europe, where he spent a couple years as the Armani man, his dark looks and square jaw turning heads. When he decided to act, his second audition la
nded him the role of a boy toy in Compromising Positions.

  A standout audition sealed his casting as the trooper. Ridley thought the actor had the perfect look for the part—fit, fascistic in demeanor, threatening without being too threatening. Ridley arranged chairs like the seats of the car in the audition room and asked Beghe to act out the scene. “I have a different take on this, do you mind?” the actor offered. Ridley nodded assent, and when the gun got turned on him, Beghe burst into tears. “Underneath, he’s just a little kitten,” he reasons. “It’s endearing, but it’s also funny.” Ridley couldn’t stop giggling. He didn’t look further.

  Beghe turned up on the roadside looking even better than Ridley had hoped, a bit like Batman, in a tight black uniform, his hat pulled low over his mirrored sunglasses. Ridley had asked the actor to shave again and again and put oil on his skin, so he’d look smooth and shiny. “I looked rigid and vain,” Beghe says. “The more you set that up, the better the fall will be.”

  The scene clicked. Geena stepped up, Susan fumbled comically and Beghe delivered an arc from intimidating to cowering. Ma’am, please, he begged. I’ve got kids . . . a wife.

  You do? Well. You’re lucky, Geena said. You be sweet to ’em. Especially your wife. My husband wasn’t sweet to me, and look how I turned out.

  The women tore away on a high note. I know it’s crazy, Louise, Thelma said, but I just feel like I’ve got a knack for this shit.

  Ridley had one more comic flourish in mind: on the way to one of the locations during scouting, he’d spotted a Rastafarian on a bike. A mile later, Ridley had his driver turn the car around so they could photograph the guy. Callie had written that an older Mexican man in a pickup truck would stop to free the cop from his trunk, but Ridley told her when she visited the set that he wanted to substitute a Rastafarian mountain biker in Day-Glo gear. She argued against the change, found it distracting and irrelevant, but Ridley went ahead, and the encounter capped the trooper sequence with added absurdity. Beghe poked his finger through the airhole in the trunk, trying to point out where the women had thrown his keys. The biker took a long pull of ganja and blew the smoke through the hole.

  Beghe cut his finger on the metal, but he didn’t mention it. “I suppose today we’d have a stunt finger,” he says. And he couldn’t reach the level of all-out bawling he’d managed in the audition, but he didn’t ask for another take. He figured he was there to do his job without making a fuss. “Ridley is a consummate gentleman, but I think that stuff is irritating to him,” Beghe says. “He wants you to shut up, plant your feet and talk.” After working together that one day, Ridley told him he’d hire him again. He did, six years later, to play Demi Moore’s boyfriend in G.I. Jane.

  —

  RIDLEY WAS HAVING A BLAST, but he still didn’t like friction that slowed him down. Once the production left LA, he granted Callie just one opportunity to visit the set. The limitation galled her, but her presence, when she showed up, galled him. He figured their prep work together more than sufficed to school him on her point of view, and now he needed the freedom to add improvisation as he saw fit and to get the film in the can. He didn’t want to hear more of her strong opinions or resistance to anything that messed with the text, like her objection to the Rastafarian character. Ridley shot down a suggestion from the studio that she give press interviews during the shooting, citing concern that there might be changes that displeased her.

  “Once I’ve chosen a script, I always spend quite a lot of time with the writer,” Ridley says. “I spent a lot of time with Callie initially, because I read it, I liked it and there was nothing to be done except talk to her about women generally. Once I’ve got that, I go out and make it.”

  Writers at that time were rarely welcome on movie sets, but Callie didn’t see why that should be. Directors valued the expertise of costume designers and hairdressers on location, she reasoned. If there were changes to be made in the dialogue, why shouldn’t the writer be consulted? “There were a lot of people who wanted to be the final authority on this movie, and I make that really difficult for people,” Callie says. “I don’t think you can look at Ridley and say this is definitely his movie if I’m in the picture. Or Susan, or anybody else. It’s so much mine.”

  She did make a few minor alterations in the script—when asked. “I think she proved a certain mettle that she could write on the fly,” says her agent, Diane Cairns. “But it wasn’t a lovefest.”

  —

  BACK IN THE OFFICES OF PATHÉ, the staff could hear Laddie laughing his head off when he screened the dailies every day after lunch. Given his largely nonspeaking role around the studio, this was the best available measure that he liked what he was seeing. The beauty of it, the humor—it was a relief to find it there in the rushes, especially given that there wasn’t money in the budget for reshoots. He and Becky could see that Ridley’s vision was clear, and he was sticking to it. When Becky visited the set, she mostly held her tongue and let Ridley stay in the groove. But there were jitters, mostly emanating from the studio marketing department, about how it was supposed to sell this thing. Was it an action picture or a women’s relationship picture? There was no category out there for a hybrid of women and action, comedy and drama.

  And that ending. Laddie never told Ridley to change it, but the two of them held conversations about whether to shoot an alternative that they could test with audiences. “I think it’s the perfect ending,” Ridley said, despite his own concerns.

  “Yeah, but they’ll hate it,” Laddie said, thinking of the paying customers.

  They circled the options for the characters—ten to fifteen years in jail? The chair? An implausible escape? They all seemed even more depressing. But that wouldn’t stop the director and the studio head from hashing out the same dilemma every time they spoke, right up until the last day of shooting, when the last scene had to wrap.

  Thelma & Louise dominated most of the discussion among everyone else at the studio, too. One of the atmospheric charms at Pathé was that a private chef prepared Italian family-style lunches in the conference room, where the executives engaged in family-style debates. “We spent a couple hours, all of us, talking about movies and sports and arts and culture and laughing and fighting, all around that table,” says Greg Foster, the young vice president who handled market research. “We must have had fifteen movies that year. Half the time we talked about the other fourteen, and half the time we talked about Thelma & Louise.”

  Foster and the higher-level marketing managers fretted constantly about how they were going to entice what they called mainstream commercial guys to see this movie. “Your traditional young male moviegoer was not going to watch a couple of women in their mid- to late thirties kick ass and shake it up,” Foster says. “And a huge amount of the movie takes place in a car with two ladies talking. I remember a fairly intense argument about how this was really designed more as a play than a movie, and how it was up to the director to give it scope.” The marketers were disappointed that there wasn’t more traditional action so far, and no sexy scene for Susan Sarandon in the dailies mix. Ridley, they thought, had to deliver enough kinetic action sequences to flesh out the movie trailers and ads. They wanted the illusion of a huge buildup of cops chasing the heroines, Foster says, “because that’s what guys are attracted to when they go to the movies—they want to see activity.” Not to mention explosions—big, loud, fiery explosions. More than anything, the marketing department pinned its hopes on Ridley bringing his A game to blowing up that truck.

  Ridley was on the same page. He decided to make the truck driver as broadly funny as possible and to make the explosion of his truck as big and loud and fiery as possible. Overblown humor and overblown action. The studio would love that. Callie and Susan would not.

  CHAPTER 24

  READY, STEADY, BLOW

  The only dailies that didn’t please Ridley were of the attempted rape, the film’s most grueling scene. On
the night of August 11, he reshot five takes, all close-ups. The production cut off access for all but essential crew to the parking lot of the production office in Moab and dressed it up like the exterior of the Silver Bullet. The setting wouldn’t match up perfectly, but once again Ridley figured no one in the audience would notice the details.

  Neither Geena Davis as Thelma nor Timothy Carhart as Harlan looked forward to revisiting the painful encounter, especially because it was likely to be nastier this time. Most everyone was told that the reason for the retakes was trouble with the focus on Harlan in the original footage. But Ridley felt that it hadn’t been violent enough to justify the rest of Thelma’s and Louise’s actions through the rest of the movie. Carhart steeled himself to tap deeper into the character’s darkest impulses for the five takes:

  Harlan’s hands hike up dress, he slams her on trunk, pulling panties down.

  Tight shot of same.

  Thelma slammed on trunk.

  Medium close-up and close-up of Harlan, just face.

  Carhart had to wait it out for a week in his Moab motel room, sometimes venturing into the parkland on a rented mountain bike during the day, until a night opened up for the reshoot. It was another bleary four a.m. kind of affair. “They didn’t tell me to be rougher in so many words,” Carhart says. “Ridley gave me a certain allowance to go for it. He did it with a wink and a nod. It went beyond the action to a realm that was a really ugly part of humanity.” He saw how it affected Geena. “Geena is really brilliant at the kinesthetic part of acting. She’s really emotionally vulnerable to suggestion. I guess it was pretty rough for her.”