The lasting legacy of writer-director Paul Weitz’s 2013 “Admission” may be as the film that introduced Weitz to Lily Tomlin and ultimately led to the duo’s latest collaboration, “Grandma.”
“I wrote this for her and I didn’t tell her because I was worried that if she displayed any natural hesitation it might deter me from finishing it,” Weitz says. “A few weeks after ‘Admission,’ I asked her to lunch and said, ‘Hey, I’ve written something for you.’ And she said, ‘Well, that’s exciting,’ but in her eyes was a degree of trepidation. The really lucky thing was I had a number of months to go over the script with her and to make her feel that every beat in there was something she understood.”
Brash, insulting, and prickly, the woman at the center of “Grandma” is a Tomlin unlike the one audiences are used to these days—and her first leading role in a movie since 1988’s “Big Business.” The film begins with Tomlin’s Ellie Reid brutally breaking up with her latest girlfriend (a heartbreaking, open-faced Judy Greer) before Ellie’s teenage granddaughter, Sage, shows up on her doorstep needing money for an abortion. The film follows the unlikely twosome as Sage gets a glimpse into Ellie’s past and Ellie comes to terms with her present.
Though Nat Wolff and Sam Elliott make appearances during Sage and Ellie’s odyssey, one of the joys of “Grandma” is the mostly female cast Weitz assembled to surround Tomlin and Julia Garner as Sage. In addition to Greer, Laverne Cox, Elizabeth Peña, and Marcia Gay Harden all make appearances—the latter playing Ellie’s intimidating, successful daughter.
“Marcia Gay Harden, man,” Weitz says, laughing, when asked about casting her. “I think there are very few people who could plausibly intimidate Lily onscreen. I brought up Marcia and Lily said, ‘Oh gosh, do you think she’d consider doing it?’ I think a lot of people said yes to work with Lily on this kind of film, done out of artistic necessity as opposed to anything else. And when I told Lily that Marcia was going to do it, she said, ‘Ohhh, that’s peachy.’ ”
Garner was cast for similar reasons. Onscreen with Tomlin for much of the film’s running time, Sage needed to be believably young and yet still able to hold her own opposite Tomlin on an abbreviated shooting schedule of 19 days. “I saw a movie called ‘Electrick Children,’ with Julia playing a girl who is pregnant by immaculate conception, and I found her very grounded and realistic,” Weitz says. “And Lily had an instinctive affection for her. That’s the great experience of offering things to people and not reading. I personally like to audition people, but at the same time there’s something nice about just calling someone.”
The process of making “Grandma” and the critical reaction to its premiere at Sundance earlier this year has in some ways reassured Weitz about his chosen profession. “When ‘Admission’ came out I felt such a loss of control,” he says. “The part when a movie comes out can be so disorienting for a filmmaker because it’s so detached from what you do on the set. And in this case, I just wanted to make this movie with these people. So I was really thrilled when we got into Sundance, but I was certainly anxious because I’ve had all kinds of experiences in terms of reactions to my films. But in this case, I think Lily’s performance is fairly undeniable. And on my part, I was just trying to be as simple as possible.”
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