Having premiered at both the Sundance Film Festival and been featured as part of its London offshoot which took place back in June, acclaimed drama Tallulah is now available to stream on Netflix after the subscription service purchased the rights back in January. To celebrate the release of the film, Flickering Myth reporter Scott J. Davis sat down with the film’s writer-director Sian Heder and producer Hannah Rae to discuss the film, the Sundance experience and casting Ellen Page…
After years of trying to get the film made, it was this year’s Sundance Film Festival in Utah that provided the platform for Tallulah, which was snapped up by Netflix. About the experience and what it has done for her film, Heder said:
“It’s amazing – every indie filmmaker is making their film with the dream of going to sundance but it always feels like a long shot. Heather has a long history with Sundance, she worked for Sundance for many, many years but it feels like an incredible dream fulfilled when you get to go because it’s such an amazing launching platform for a filmmaker and their project and career.”
Tallulah sees Ellen Page star as a drifter living in a camper van when, after a chance meeting with a drunken, seemingly unfit mother (Tammy Blanchard), Tallulah snatches the baby away with her. The story actually comes from a real-life experience Heder had whilst working as a babysitter:
“Working as a babysitter and wanting to steal a baby! I had a lot of really weird experiences working as a babysitter in high-end hotels in LA and I had a strange night one night with this really off, bizarre character of a woman who had come to the hotel to have an affair and had never been alone with her toddler before but she couldn’t bring her nanny who would rat her out to her husband, so it was a writer’s dream of a character and I just desperately wanted to take her baby with me when left! She was the most incompetent mother and I wanted to steal her baby!”
In a strange piece of serendipity, Ellen Page was seemingly always right for the role of Tallulah. Her roles in Hard Candy and Juno had been semi-precursors to Tallulah and once the film eventually got off the ground, the actress had had enough experiences and grown to the right age to be able to take the part:
“I saw Ellen in Hard Candy and that was right after my short. I remember seeing her in that and thought ‘That’s Tallulah’ but she was too young, then seeing Juno and thinking that is her but she still needed to be older, she needed to be in her twenties and so it was sort of amazing that the movie took long enough that Ellen grew up and be that part. I’m such a fan of Allison Janney and she was the perfect Margo from the first moment she popped into my head… They are both very complex actresses – they are both very funny but they also have deep, deep emotional depth and get the pain of life and finding people who have both is rare”
You can listen to the full interview here…
Tallulah is now available to watch on Netflix
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL18yMRIfoszEaHYNDTy5C-cH9Oa2gN5ng&v=Ki3o_rmuMR8
Originally published August 2, 2016. Updated April 15, 2018.
