Interview: Kelly O'Sullivan and Alex Thompson shine a 'Ghostlight'

Chicago filmmakers talk about art, healing, and not going full 'Guffman'

“Ghostlight” is, in every way, a family drama.

The new film (which opens Friday in theaters) by writer-director Kelly O’Sullivan and co-director Alex Thompson centers on a family - father Dan, mother Sharon, teenage daughter Daisy – living in a northern Chicago suburb. The family has suffered a terrible loss, but has submerged their feelings about it, especially Dan, a taciturn construction worker prone to fits of rage.

What finally cracks Dan open is the least likely thing – community theater. The blue-collar worker wanders into a storefront theater rehearsing a production of “Romeo & Juliet” and thanks to the cheerful persistence of the company members, ends up being cast in the lead role. As Dan slowly lets himself explore his own grief through performance, “Ghostlight” becomes a quiet, sometimes funny, and enormously affecting film about healing, and how art can nudge that process along.

The three actors playing the family members have an unforced, intimate chemistry together in the film. Which tracks, since they are a family themselves of Chicago actors – Keith Kupferer, Tara Mallen and Katherne Mallen Kupferer.

O’Sullivan and Thompson, partners themselves, also made the excellent comedy drama “Saint Frances.” They talked from their home in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood about casting an entire family for their film, avoiding going full “Guffman” in depicting the life of a small theater company, and the film’s surprising final scene:

(Photos courtesy of IFC Films)

I lived in Chicago in my 20s, including a year in Rogers Park, so I have a real affinity for the locations you make films in. What is it about that environment that you find so inspiring?

Alex Thompson: It is a bit of a sandbox here where you can really make it your own. The industry is like a fresh thing here. It’s not like “Oh, another movie’s shooting on my block, I’m not going to be able to park.” It’s “How exciting! How can we be involved?”
It’s not even a whisper network. It’s very loud. When you tell people you’re making a film, there’s this uproar of support and enthusiasm. It makes you feel like you can do anything. You can do car stunts like we did, and fight scenes in the street, and stuff that a movie of our size shouldn’t be able to accomplish. But the communities are excited for us to shoot.

Kelly, I know your background was in theater before you wrote “Saint Frances.” What about the experience of making life theater did you want to bring to a film set?

Kelly O’Sullivan: I think the sense of teamwork. I always say that theater is the team sport for people who aren't good at sports. So the connection, the working together to make something greater than the sum of its parts. And the silliness and the earnestness of it, both of it. It can be sort of like, “Oh, my God, who are we doing this for? Six people are going to show up and see this, and then it's going to disappear forever.” But also the impact of the relationships you have while making it.

There's no shortage of media that makes fun of community theater. How did you find the tone of having fun with the theater games and stuff, but also show that these people take it seriously? And are good? They're very good in the play at the end.

Kelly: Some of the best actors I have ever seen are non professionals, or people who do community theater, on nights and weekends. They'll never be famous for it, and they're never going to make money from it. But they are brilliant.

So I know firsthand that while there are some ridiculous aspects to it, there are also people who are so pure about their love for it, and their dedication to it, and their talent level is really high. And so wanting to make sure that these characters couldn't be laughed off, we can laugh with them, because I think the characters have a lot of self awareness, but we shouldn't discount them. That was on us as directors, and on me as a writer, to make sure that they can also be taken seriously.

The tone can be tricky in this because the lighter scenes have to have that sort of a real tension underneath them. And the heavier scenes still have to have some humanity and capacity for lightness as well. How do you keep all that balanced?

Alex: It really does start with the script, and the script really has that. Kelly talks about it in terms of the drama and the comedy masks sort of entwined. I think that that's just also true of life. When films try to fit into a certain box, they’re doing a disservice to what real life experience feels like. You really are vacillating between comedy and tragedy within a breath in your day to day life. 

On camera, a lot of it falls on the shoulders of the actors, and on us as filmmakers and our ability to know when to stay back and when to sort of double down. The actors all approach their characters with a great deal of empathy, and it means that we view them with that empathy. But it starts with the script. That’s our guiding force.

Do you agree with that, Kelly, as the person who wrote the script?

Kelly: (Laughs) I do. And a lot of it also is casting actors. I’ve been thinking about “Fleabag” and how “Fleabag” does this too, and why so many people responded to it. It contained both all the time, the comedy and the drama. The tone was so specific that it allowed for both, and the actors had to be adept at both. Andrew Scott is so good at being so funny, and then in the next second will break your heart.

Our actors that we cast in this were knowing that they’re not going to ever be playing for laughs. They’re not ever going to try to get you to cry. They’re just going to live through things in a very real way. And comedy and drama will come out of that.

I think that happens inside families in particular, that they find the lightness even inside the darkness.

Alex: Definitely. My grandmother passed away around Thanksgiving, and they have never joked as much or as hard as in those moments of tragedy. Pretty intense. Very necessary.

Speaking of actors and family, did you have these three actors in mind? Or was it like, “Hey, we’ve got a package deal for you?”

Kelly: I did write the character of Dan specifically with Keith in mind. He and I had done a play together 10 years before where he played my dad. I think in my head, he was this dad to a Daisy sort of character, and knowing that he would be a believable construction worker and knowing that he would be talented enough to take us through the entire journey of the film and end up where we ended up.

Then he approached us about Katherine, his daughter, auditioning. And we don't typically hold traditional auditions for most of the roles. So we invited her to come do a reading of it. We do these readings before, like we're workshopping a new play, and she was brilliant. And she was Keith’s daughter, which means like energetically they were such a good match, and had such amazing play together.

And then knowing how wonderful an actor Tara is. She’s this deeply respected Chicago theater stalwart. So the casting directors we worked with suggested that we cast her.

Alex: She was the third piece. I have never said this out loud before, but she was the only one who didn’t have to read for the part. She was last to be cast in the family but she didn’t have to audition at all.

Classic nepo baby, right? Did you work with the three actors as a family unit, as if the family was one character, or more with each actor individually on their character?

Kelly: The only thing that I would do is maybe add an opinion of what the family dynamic is like at home. There was a scene between Keith and Tara, and my only note was to keep the tension. Remember that things aren’t calm. Something has been terribly broken and things are not well. Something that went beyond (the actors’) family dynamic.

Alex: They were pretty willing to bring their own family dynamic in. When they were bickering, you would get the sense of, “And this is how we bicker.” We had to remind them that this is coming from a place of vulnerability. Don’t be so hard on yourself. This isn’t just “bickering,” this is you working through something. But for the most part, they showed up whole cloth, and we were just tinkering.

How did you decide how to shoot the play itself? The cameras are up on stage with the actors as much or more than they are out in the audience.

Alex: We shot every stage scene three ways. Once in a preset medium wide shot where you see the whole scene. And part of that was just the set was so beautiful and had so many details that are productive. Like the Romeo scene under the moonlight, I don’t know if anybody noticed this yet, but the tower is like construction scaffolding.

But I think we knew there were two perspectives that really mattered. One was Sharon’s in the audience. What does this look and feel like from Sharon’s perspective, watching Catherine run around with the knife. Kelly talks about the danger, the impulsiveness, the recklessness of youth.

And then what does it feel like to live it up on stage? And that’s when we actually jumped up with the actors? We knew all three of those storytelling elements would play at some point in every scene.

You could have ended the movie with this triumphant curtain call – arms raised, the audience cheering. But instead you have another scene after the play that the closing credits plays over, except that they look more like opening credits.

Kelly: It’s very important that it doesn’t end in a moment of triumph. It ends with them going home. This is a story of a family, and they’ve gone through a healing process, but they’re really, really at the beginning of starting to heal. It’s important that it ends on them coming home together quietly, and then seeing the half-completed garden. It’s not like they’re anywhere close to being healed. They’ll never be fully healed, but they’re at the beginning of moving forward.

“Ghostlight” opens Friday, June 14 in select theaters, and will expand to more cities after that. In Madison, it opens June 21 at AMC Fitchburg 18.