Thelma: Josh Margolin’s love letter to his kick-arse grandmother

The talky, family-anxiety movies of Noah Baumbach such as The Meyerowitz Stories and The Squid and the Whale are universes apart from the slick action of Mission Impossible.

But there is a middle point, and that’s the delightfully tender and energetic Thelma, a film that tells the story of a 93-year-old grandmother who decides to get back at the scammers who dudded her out of $10,000.

The title role is played by June Squibb, the nonagenarian actor who in 2013 at the age of 83 scored her breakout role and an Oscar nomination for Alexander Payne’s film Nebraska.

Thelma’s writer and director Josh Margolin said Squipp, who never drops a line of dialogue, has a certain “let’s get on with it” approach, which his own grandmother has. It was his nan, now 104 years old, who inspired Thelma the film, which is named after her.

The real-life Thelma was almost a victim of the scam perpetrated against the fictional Thelma in the movie, and the resulting film is Margolin’s love letter to her.

“It was cathartic on some level to be able to express how much I love her and appreciate her by making this time capsule of a thing,” Margolin told The Nightly. “For me, it was being able to reckon with some of the ideas in the movie, also to be able to communicate to her how much she means to me and to put that on film.

“Sometimes you have to go and spend years and years making a movie, and then you can be like, ‘This is what I was trying to say’.”

The screen Thelma draws a lot from Margolin’s grandmother, even filming scenes in her actual apartment before it was sold, and the fictional Thelma’s grandson, Daniel (Fred Hechinger), is something of an avatar for Margolin.

“I wanted the character to feel as true to her as it could within the confines of the needs of a movie, which is a little more focused and streamlined than her life. But there are real phrases and real exchanges or even things that just felt very true to me,” he expanded.

The process of making the film has allowed Margolin to reconsider his feelings about his grandmother’s ageing, which is transferred onto the Daniel character who searches for Thelma as she takes off on her mission with friend Ben (Richard Roundtree).

The film sometimes centres Daniel’s perspective and in those moments, Margolin’s anxieties surface, “about how we feel about her being out there and wishing we could be helping but also knowing and worrying about her inevitable death essentially, and being unable to prevent it, which is obviously something (Daniel) is grappling with”.

His grandmother has seen the film and finds it both exciting and surreal.

The sight of Squibb and Roundtree, who died in October last year after production, on a scooter tracking down the scammers is a comical one, but it’s not played for laughs at them.

The tone of the film is such a difficult balance because it’s a caper and it’s a family drama – and throughout it all, Thelma is not a character to be ridiculed, as strange as it might seem for an older woman who can’t touch to be confronting scammers.

Margolin can reel off a ton of influences, including the aforementioned Baumbach movies, Mission Impossible, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love and Payne’s films including Nebraska.

But he never wanted to be too referential, and definitely not too cutesy or twee.

“Those are all filmmakers and films I really love. I watched them in the lead-up and pulled stills for my look-book, all of that. But there was a degree of soft-focus in terms of what was taken directly,” he said.

That meant being inspired by something more abstract, like the feel of how lived-in Baumbach’s movies are, such as the life-like textures of his characters’ conversations, or looking at how Anderson created the simmering anxiety and tension in Punch-Drunk Love.

In the end, the character was king. The choices had to be driven not by filmmaking style but by whether a character’s emotions would lead them to that moment.

“The tone was really important to me because when you hear ‘Grandma mixed with action mixed with revenge movie’ or whatever other genre trappings might be in there, often our brain goes to a really broad, silly comedy,” Margolin explained.

“I wanted it to be funny but I also wanted to retain the stakes of the mission and have it be character-forward, born of her spirit and tenacity, and to stay with her from a subjective place.

“It’s also very much about her fight for autonomy and acceptance of limitations – and the family dealing with some of those similar questions – so it had to feel resonant. If we went too broad or silly or too parody, we would lose some of the heart and some of the stakes.”

Since Thelma’s premiere at Sundance, Margolin has had many conversations with filmgoers who have seen their own families in his story.

He added, “There are people who have told me it has made them think about things in a different way about their relatives, it’s made them think twice about how they consider that person or where that person sits in their life.”

Thelma is in cinemas on September 5