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‘I have a world-class case of beginner’s luck,” says Callie Khouri, who won an Oscar for her very first screenplay, Thelma & Louise. She also scored a hit with her first TV series, Nashville, which lasted six seasons. And at 68, she is taking on another first by penning a musical theatre version of Thelma & Louise, hoping her luck hasn’t run out. “I hope that this is not the end of that streak,” she laughs. “That I don’t hit a wall here and slide down it like Wile E Coyote.”
Thelma & Louise isn’t an obvious bet for a musical. A story that features an abusive marriage, attempted rape, murder and double suicide doesn’t scream “jazz hands”, and Khouri had turned down offers before. “My agent said, ‘There’s a guy who wants to meet you to talk about doing Thelma as a stage musical,’” says Khouri. “And I just thought, ‘Well, that’s nuts!’” But the iconic 90s film – starring Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis (and a young Brad Pitt) – is an ultimately triumphant piece of cinema: a feminist road movie driven by the power of female friendship, which still captures imaginations. Khouri was eventually convinced. It’s been a decade in the pipeline, but things took off when uber-producer Sonia Friedman came on board, and now it has premiered at London’s Young Vic, starring Rachel Tucker and Amy Lennox.
I meet Khouri at a south London studio during one of the summer’s heatwaves. She is dressed in airy, white cotton, looking like an elegant lady who might be tending her garden in the American south – which is what she spends a lot of her time doing these days at home in Nashville, Tennessee, with husband T-Bone Burnett. When Khouri floated the idea for the musical at home, it was record producer Burnett who immediately suggested a composer, the American singer-songwriter Neko Case.
“As soon as he said it, I heard this giant click,” says Khouri. “I love her music so much and it’s such a different approach to a musical. She is truly a poet, but her songs are very tactile – I don’t know exactly the right word – and she’s got this voice that’s like a clarion call.” Choreography is by Bobbi Jene Smith with her husband Or Schraiber, whose dance you could also describe as tactile – and sensuous, mercurial, deeply feeling. “I’m on my knees with gratitude that Bobbi’s part of our team,” says Khouri. The director is Trip Cullman, whose Becky Shaw played on Broadway earlier this year.
The musical version of Thelma & Louise is being tweaked to suit the 21st-century stage, but it’s not set in the modern day: no mobile phones, Khouri tells me. “It’s a completely different telling of this same story,” is how she puts it. There are scenes that are from the movie and new ones that aren’t, but Khouri is reluctant to give much more away. “I don’t want to reveal magic tricks,” she says. “One of the things I really enjoyed about the movie was that people walked in having no idea what to expect, and I think that’s still really important for this story.”
It’s true that back in 1991, when the film was released, nobody had any expectations of Khouri, a complete unknown who was living in Santa Monica working in production on music videos for big-haired rock bands. She had studied theatre at university but didn’t want an actor’s life, as “I didn’t like being looked at”, she says. “I just kept thinking, ‘There’s something I’m supposed to be doing and this is not it.’” It was the beginning of the MTV era and there was “a lot of really intense talent” making music videos, including Hollywood-bound directors such as David Fincher. “There was also a lot of not really intense talent,” she says – guys who were writing scripts and getting jobs who didn’t seem much smarter than she was, which is what gave Khouri the confidence to have a go.
At 29, she began the script for Thelma & Louise in secret between freelance jobs. “You know, while I was writing it, scenes would wake me up in the middle of the night. It was the easiest job I ever did,” she says. “Nothing’s ever come as easily.” She showed it to a friend, and via a chain of friends and colleagues the script eventually got into the hands of Ridley Scott, who decided to direct it himself. “It was really such an improbable journey every step of the way,” says Khouri.
Khouri never would have thought she’d still be talking about this story 35 years later. In the film, a girls’ weekend spirals out of control when Louise shoots Thelma’s would-be rapist and the pair end up on the run. Inspiration came in part from Khouri’s own experiences, having twice been mugged in LA, once at gunpoint. “When you feel your life being threatened …” she starts. “It’s not a good feeling to walk through the world as a prey animal, which is how you start to feel. I had friends who had really bad experiences – I feel like I was one of the lucky ones.”
There is sadness in her voice that the elements of the film, from casual sexism to serious assault, seem just as prevalent all this time later. “I wish so much that it wasn’t,” she says. “Honestly, I wish the world had made that shift to be a more hospitable place for women, and especially for young women. I think our expectations got really high, and they rolled the clock back. We’ve lost rights in the States, and it’s dangerous.” She calls the rollback of abortion rights in the US “barbaric”.
She does think her own industry is more welcoming to women than it used to be. “But then you look at the backlash from #MeToo and that’s real,” she says. “The Epstein files have not been fully released. Bill Cosby’s out of jail.” Did she think #MeToo was going to make a genuine change in Hollywood? “I never feel like anything’s going to make a tectonic shift. I know how slow change is,” she says. “To me, equality is the obvious goal for all of society, but there are a lot of people that don’t think that, and they don’t want to let go of it, and they’ll fight. And so will we.” She is as incensed by the deaths of young men in “wars that are fought over money” as she is about the assault on women’s rights. “It seems like the world keeps giving way too much power to psychopaths.”
Khouri may rage at the state of the world, but in her own little horticultural corner of it she has “a beautiful life”. She got into Gardeners’ World during the pandemic. “That’s my crack,” she says with relish. And she has nothing to prove these days. “I still have to work,” she says, “but I like to work.” And she is finding this foray into theatre “so much fun”, especially compared with her usual beat. “The film and television business has gotten really hard,” she says. “Everybody feels like we’re working for an algorithm. It’s not about original ideas as much as it once was. It’s a lot about IP and sequels and tent-poles [the blockbuster franchises that prop up the studios], and those aren’t really the kind of movies I’m interested in, especially at this age.”
Of course, you could say Thelma & Louise is a powerful piece of IP, on which Khouri is still trading. She has written other films, and directed too (Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood; Mad Money), but never topped her first time. “It’s always lucky when you get called to something, and I feel very much like that’s what happened,” she says. “I was called to tell this story and I didn’t really have a great desire to tell it again. But once we started the musical, I could see a whole new way. Everybody – Neko, myself, Trip – we are all finding ways to elevate it to being worthy of being on a stage.”
