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“Grandma” is an incredible film about a 70-year-old lesbian poet and her pregnant teen grandaughter

Lily Tomlin has been a working actor for close to 50 years and within that time, has played hundreds of different characters. In the new film Grandma, opening this Friday, she’s finally playing one that is the most like her.

Grandma centers on Lily as Elle, a poet who is still mourning the loss of her long-term partner, Violet. It’s been a few years and she’s moved on with a not-serious but younger girlfriend, Olivia, (Judy Greer). The opening scene has Elle kicking Olivia out, telling her, cruelly, she was just a “footnote” in her life.

“Looking at it from the outside, I wouldn’t say that I was like Elle but I must be a great deal like Elle because it was so easy; it was so fluid, it was so natural,” Lily said. “I mean, there are things you have to transpose yourself from something or some experience or some memory or some other person you know, but it was terribly natural to me and that was a blessing.”

Writer/director Paul Weitz (American Pie, About a Boy) specifically penned the part (and the entire film) for Lily after working with her too briefly on Admission. (Lily played a small role as Tina Fey‘s mother in the 2013 comedy.)

“Basically, I wrote the script with Lily’s voice in it and I didn’t tell her I was writing it, and so then I asked her to lunch and kind of sprung it on her. I said, ‘I’ve written this thing for you-here, will you read it?'” Paul said. “It was going to be extremely important to Lily that everything feel understandable and right, and I also knew that Lily had so much to tell me about the character-which is the case with every excellent actor-but in this case, there’s so much of the character’s experience that I was just guessing at.”

After Olivia leaves, Elle’s day takes a turn when her teenage granddaughter Sage (the enjoyable Julia Garner) comes over with a request: She’s pregnant and she needs the money to not be. Sage has made an appointment for later that day to have an abortion, and she’s hoping her grandma can give her the cash. Unfortunately, Elle has cut up her credit cards and paid off all of her debts, so she doesn’t have the $600 on hand. Together, they set off to try and find someone who does. Their first stop: Sage’s baby daddy, who is a pothead truant with no interest in Sage’s predicament. He also takes no responsibility, so Lily hits him in the balls with his own hockey stick.

Paul Weitz (a self-identified feminist) understands that people have questions about why a white straight male wrote a film about women and these inherently female topics. He says Grandma is not an issue film; that when the plot came to him, he didn’t take want to make light of anything, including the topic of abortion.

“Obviously there are movies like Juno, etc. where decisions are made and I know the audience might be thinking along certain lines,” Paul said. “For me, it was very important to not make light of anything. So early on, Lily’s character says [to Sage], ‘Have you thought about this because it’s something you’ll think about at some point every day for the rest of your life?’ And I think it’s very easy to lose track of the human beings in stories that bear upon social issues and turn people into statistics. It’s really tricky to talk about but I do think that I’m interested in films about our society that are personal films-Kramer Vs. Kramer or The Graduate or something where there’s a societal issue or shift taking place but you can see it played out, but it’s really just the people involved.”

While the film is not “about” lesbians or abortion, it’s important to note that the way Grandma depicts the central relationship and each character’s motivations so well that it bodes talking about how Paul was able to do so. He credits the input he received from Lily early on and throughout the process, especially when it comes to a plotline where she visits an old ex (played by Sam Elliott).

“One of the big themes of the movie is being okay with who you are and standing up for yourself. And my perspective is, Sage is shocked because [she finds out Elle] had a relationship with a man and she’s known her grandmother as a woman who, they weren’t married because they didn’t have the opportunity because it’s a recent thing in this country, but she calls Lily’s partner Grandma Vai, so they were a couple,” Paul said. “She point blank afterwards says, ‘So, you didn’t always like women?’ And Lily’s character says, ‘I always liked women, I just didn’t like myself.’ You can see in her she’s brought back to the point where she was like Julia’s character, where she didn’t know how to stand up for herself, didn’t think it was okay to be herself. And you see sort of the ramifications of that for somebody who was in love with her. Sam’s character was in love with her. She was a lesbian then, too, she wasn’t okay with it.”

“I think it’s extraordinarily wonderful that a big deal isn’t made out of her sexuality. She’s just another person,” Lily said. “It’s nice. It’s good. There will be more of it in this life.”

Elle’s late partner is still very much a part of the film and Elle’s life. Elle talks about her with Sage and her daughter (played by Marcia Gay Harden), and reminisces often. Vai was inspired by out young adult writer Jacqueline Woodson, a friend of Paul’s, who leant her photos to the film and has a “spirit” Paul admires.

“When I first wrote that relationship, it was very idealized-it was only talking about positive, lovely stuff,” Paul said. “And Lily said, ‘Well if this is a real relationship, they would have fought-they would have had periods when they were on the outs.’ So Lily helped me put spin on everything, essentially.”

From the moment Paul thought of the idea for Grandma, he knew Elle was going to be a lesbian. He never considered otherwise.

“It’s just, the character was gay,” he said with a laugh. “If there was a thing in this movie that Lily said, ‘I don’t believe in this’ or ‘I think this is wrong’ or ‘This is fake,’ I would have changed it. I only wanted her help and that primary audience for this movie was Lily Tomlin. She was the star she was also the audience. So the idea that she had this when she was 21 or whatever lived on a boat with Sam Elliot’s character, if she would have said ‘I don’t believe in that,’ then I would have been hard-pressed to keep that in the movie. But instead, I think we both liked the idea that this is someone who is gaining momentum in terms of their sense of self and that’s why it’s so important she spend this time with her granddaughter, who knows what will happen with that character. I think it’s a big time in real life-just this one day with her grandmother and learning to stand up for herself.”

Elle and Sage’s journey around town to try and collect as much money as they can has them meeting some other fun characters, including Laverne Cox as an old friend and tattoo artist and Elizabeth Pena (in one of her last roles) as a butch feminist coffee shop owner who was interested in buying Elle’s first edition copy of The Feminine Mystique, among other titles. It’s at the cafe that Elle runs into Olivia, and Sage meets her grandmother’s now ex-girlfriend for the first time.

Paul said that the Elle/Olivia relationship was inspired by a story Lily told him about a friend of hers who was once dating a much younger fan, and warned her not to ever do the same.

“She’d say, ‘She’s young, isn’t she?’ about her girlfriend because she was real young,” Lily said. “And I’d say ‘She’s pretty young.’ She’d say ‘She wouldn’t leave me alone! What could I do?'”

The May/December relationship was important, though, to illustrate Elle’s ability to be sexy at 70.

“I mean, one doesn’t question it when it’s a male actor in their 70s when it’s a younger actress, so I thought why question it in this case,” Paul said. “I liked the idea that Lily had been in this extremely long-decades long-loving deeply important relationship but that her partner had died and she’s not looking for that again. She’s actually looking to not be in a situation where she’s as emotionally involved. I think she fell into this. I like the specificity of it actually and I like the specificity of it being Judy, because she’s so quirky and so smart. I liked the idea they could kind of play tennis intellectually.”

Grandma is successful in many ways, and one of them is the treatment of Elle’s relationships. They are depicted with depth while not pandering nor feeling the need to explain. Sage has grown up with two grandmothers, and she loves them, unwaveringly. And even though Elle has a strained relationship with her daughter (Sage’s mother), it’s not because she’s gay-it’s because she is holding onto pain and letting it manifest into anger.

“Sage, Julia’s character, is learning so much from Lily’s character in the movie-learning how to stand up for herself, learning not to shy away from a fight, and it’s not clear to me what Lily’s character has gained from this until the end, this sort of fierce love that she’s had for her dead partner. She’s able to let go of it without guilt because she’s exhibited so much protectiveness and kindness to her granddaughter,” Paul said. “The most emotional thing in the movie, to me, is not a moment where Lily is crying, it’s actually a moment where she’s laughing. She’s thinking about some old joke that her partner said. She says, ‘You really made me laugh.’ It’s a private moment and I liked that. And I like that it’s about letting go of stuff and moving on to something with a degree of optimism despite all the crap that one sees in human nature.”

Even at 70, Elle is still learning about life, and the end of the film has her making amends with Olivia, so she knows why they can’t be together but that she also was more than a “footnote.”

“Elle has lived long enough to know that, in terms of this relationship, she could selfishly take the girl into her life but she knows that it’s not really a relationship of equals and that it probably will end badly at another time and she’d take precious time away from that girl,” Lily said.

“[I wanted to have] Lily make this generous sort of statement about ‘I want you to have what I had,’ which is an opportunity to have, if she wants, a decades long relationship,” Paul said.

Another tidbit queer women will enjoy is the use of lesbian poet Eileen Myles. Grandma opens with a quote from her memoir-novel hybrid Inferno and later has Elle making mention of her work. Paul said he reached out to writer Nick Flynn for some writing from women poets Elle might be a fan in, and when he started to read his suggestions, Eileen “jumped out.”

“I loved her sensibility. How entertaining she is, how raw. She’s a fantastic writer,” Paul said. He contacted her to ask if he could use her in the film, and was thrilled she agreed.

“I was quite nervous. She saw the film when it screened at Tribeca. Happily, she liked it,” Paul said. “She liked [part of it] being about an intergenerational lesbian relationship. I think the main thing for her was not to be in a film where the grandma was some old fuddy duddy. “

And Elle is anything but a typical grandma. She’s an ass kicking, shit talking and all-around full-of-life woman who hopes to instill that same kind of confidence in her granddaughter.

“This character is very much like me. Physically, every way in terms of her youthfulness in her body, she’s not stunted in anyway from the years she’s lived,” Lily said. “I drove my own car and I wore my own clothes and so it was quite a bit close. It was great.”

“I liked the idea of calling it Grandma because that comes with various associations of sort of a sweet, you know, maybe ineffectual person and that’s such hogwash now when you look at sort of what people of a certain generation-the amount of history they have lived through, and the amount of social turmoil,” Paul said. “What I was most interested in was this idea of different generations of women and how, at this point, so much has potentially been forgotten by this 18-year-old. It’s natural to her to have her friends jokingly call herself bitch, hoe and slut. I was really interested in how much Lily’s character had seen and also the idea that this is not a movie where the characters were in their 70s, like they have a lot of life to live and they’re still learning stuff and they’re still extremely vital. I was very keen not to have any implication that this was any sort of swan song for the character. I wanted it to be somebody hardcore.”

Lily Tomlin (who is already getting deserved Oscar buzz) and her character are definitely hardcore, but there’s also a tenderness we find through her love of Violet, Sage and even her daughter, who Elle and Sage desperately do not want to have to ask for the money. Even in the tough moments where Elle’s anger gets the best of her, Grandma employs enough of a sense of humor about itself and its characters that it never becomes reliant on any kind of “angry lesbian” trope. Paul said that he saw humor as the tool to “universalize things.”

“For me, it’s really about just not making any judgments about the character, basically,” Paul said. “It’s funny because I don’t think the movie shies away from pretty much anything in terms of being issues that are supposed to be third rail issues, but I just feel like we’re at this point as a culture where we’re actually okay with understanding how mundane it is to be gay. [laughs] I do think it’s funny because [Lily] and her character have the trappings of outlaw status, just because she’s a bad ass. You can also see the remnants of how much she’s gone through to arrive at this point, how much crap she’s gone through and witnessed. And there’s still bull shit out there in terms of prejudices.”

But even someone like Elle, who is angry at the world for having taken away the love of her life and left her to find a new way for herself at 70-can find a renewed sense of purpose and love in a day spent unselfishly dedicated to helping her granddaughter.

“You need to keep wind in your sails when you’re dealing with something that’s bigger than you are,” Paul said. “I think that Lily’s character is driven by this anger because she has this sorrow beneath her and at the end it takes sort of her generosity of spirit with her granddaughter to be alone. It was really important to me that Elle be alone at the end of the movie and have to deal with the rest of it. It’s funny, because very much at the surface of it, there’s an issue in this movie, a cultural issue. But to me, the issue was a pure human one of how do you move on from sorrow and take steps forward and how hard that is. I think that there are tools we use to avoid that, one of those is humor and one of those is anger.”

It’s the humor of the film that makes Grandma a balanced story, and one where both grandmother and granddaughter are sexual beings.

“I love that little scene in the car with Lily and Julia where [Elle] says, ‘[Olivia] sent me this thing about my work, and out of ego, I met with her’ and then she says the thing about she’s written more in the last four months than she has in the five years prior to that and ‘that’s what good sex will do to you,'” Paul said. “I love how the granddaughter is seeing her grandmother without expecting that to happen.”

Oh, Grandma.

Grandma is in theaters in New York and LA on August 21.

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