And I knew that in her scenes with Monk, you had to have a formidable woman. Monk is somebody who steamrolls a lot of people in his life. When we were casting for that role, you know, people send names from agencies for actors that they think would be good for the parts. And it being Hollywood, there were 20-year-old actors on the list and 30-year-old actors on the list. This happens a lot, and it’s not as if a woman in her 30s can’t be formidable, but I wanted somebody more around Monk’s age. I wanted somebody who had her own strength, had her own life, and had her own interests to play off of and still be warm so that it felt like Monk was up against an actual person and an actual woman who had her own strength and derived her own power from her own life. And so, to me, that was just incredibly important when I was casting for that part. Erika, just as you said, played it beautifully. She’s amazing.
I thought her line, “Nobody is as bad as on their worst day,” underscored everything else that happened in the movie.
My father was a public defender when he first started his law career. That was taken from my life. I remember one day, we were watching the local news, and there was a mug shot on TV; I must have been about eight or nine, and I called the guy a “bad guy.” And my dad said, “There are no such thing as bad guys. Disabuse yourself of that belief that there are bad people and good people.” He said, “Frequently, there are people to whom bad things have happened.” And that was a foundational lesson for me. So, that was basically taken from my real life with my father.
It seems that your efforts to get the financing for the movie parallel the movie’s plot, trying to sell a story about characters who are not stereotypes.
Yes and no. I found the book that I adapted in December 2020, and the movie is going to be in theaters in December of 2023. So, it’s three years from the kernel of the idea to when the movie’s out. And a lot of people have told me that’s the fastest they’ve ever heard of a movie coming together. And so, on the one hand, it was very speedy and easy. That being said, when I had this script, I shopped it around to a bunch of different producers. We had a lot of producers interested. And fortunately, we found T-Street, greenlit it in the room. That’s why I went with T-Street: they had funding from MRC, and they said, “As long as it comes in under a certain budget, we will make the movie.”