Thus far in my career, it’s rare that I have interviewed the same person twice. It’s happened a handful of times with a composer here and there, but I was fortunate enough to speak with James Ponsoldt twice in as many days. My friend happened to ask me to guest co-host this past weekend when James was his guest, and we spoke about The Spectacular Now (one of my favorite high school dramas). Now, I got to speak with him one-on-one over Zoom about his new middle school film, Summering. He was such a pleasant guy and it was amazing to speak with this brilliant mind once again. This interview closes out our week of Summering but read on if you want to read Ponsoldt discuss the steps he and co-writer Ben Percy — whom I also interviewed for this film — took to make sure this was an authentic representation of 11-year-old girls, the horrors of middle school, casting the adult actors, and so much more.

Coastal House Media: Hi again, James, it’s great to see you. How’s everything going? Heat 2 just came out today, did you get a copy?

James Ponsoldt: Man, no, I haven’t yet. I need to — that’s a good point. I’m thinking about the bookstore that I’ll swing by and grab it at.

CHM: It’s great to talk to you again, congratulations again on Summering! I didn’t get to say this on Sunday, but I wanted to thank you for your work. After we spoke on Sunday, I was talking about your films and I realized how much The Spectacular Now and Summering meant to me; they’re such personal films. The former really hit me at the right age and I saw it for the first time a few years back while I was transitioning from the colleges I was transferring between. So thank you and I really appreciate your work.

Ponsoldt: Oh, thank you very much.

CHM: So I know you’ve talked about this ad nauseam, but I have to ask you for the sake of this being for a different audience: What made you want to write and direct Summering?

Ponsoldt: Yeah, it started for me [with] being a parent of three kids; finding myself in conversation with my kids about both the films that they were watching and sort of how they were being represented and [that] made me think deeply about stories that are rooted in a child’s perspective and how that’s fundamentally different than my perspective as an adult. Also, as we were kind of trying to navigate, traumas, as a family, both small and large scale the way every family does [and] things that were affecting my kids: The death of a cat, the death of a grandparent, COVID, all of those things, I was trying to support my kids and be honest with them and listen to them while recognizing that they have a different way of interpreting the world and perceiving it, creating language and meaning in it, and different tools that maybe I don’t have access to their imaginations. I think all kids have wonderful imaginations and that distance, that gap between parent and child and the way that we process and make meaning out of change about loss, about trauma, all those things, was something that I really wanted to explore; that conversation between parent and child.

CHM: And you co-wrote the script with Ben Percy, who I spoke to the other day and he really spoke so highly of you. I know you guys are good friends and I want to spread the love back to him a little bit. I asked him what about you as a director made him trust you to take this material that you guys wrote together and then go and direct it. So for you, what was it about Ben that made you trust him to write a feature-length film with you?

Ponsoldt: A long time ago, we were roommates at a writer’s conference and he’s a remarkable writer. When I first met him, he was writing mostly short stories and then novels, and now comic books and podcasts and all kinds of things; he’s a force of nature. But he had written a short story called Refresh, Refresh that I really loved that was about young men and violence, toxic masculinity, young men in the Pacific Northwest whose dads are Marine reservists that are activated and deployed and about these sort of primitive violence rituals; these kids creating fight clubs and videotaping them and sending videos to their dads in green zones, Iraq and Afghanistan, to let them know that everything’s just fine. I really connected to the story [and] I adapted it to a screenplay and went to the Sundance Screenwriters Lab with it and that script was ultimately adapted by an amazing graphic novelist named Danica Novgorodoff.

At the time I thought I would make a movie and then her graphic novel would come out; I’ve never made the movie, but she made a remarkable graphic novel about young men in violence and that was selected for Best American Comics by Alison Bechdel and that whole process of an adaptation of an adaptation of an adaptation began a long conversation that Ben and I have been having about family dynamics and gender politics and structural violence and stories containing multiple subjectivities and why we need stories that have multiple subjectivities.

We need women trying to interpret men and men trying to interpret women if we’re going to understand our culture, the culture that we’ve created for better or worse — oftentimes worse. Part of it also involves acknowledging our blind spots. We all have blind spots as viewers [and] creators of stories, and it’s worth trying to examine and lift up and expose sunlight on these things. Ben is someone that I’ve collaborated with on quite a few things over the years, and he’s just a remarkably thoughtful, sensitive person and he brings that in his own life with his own children, with his own daughter — who is like the age of the characters in this film — and in his art [and] writing.

CHM: And this is just a coincidence I spotted with Summering and The Spectacular Now, but both of their settings are suburban neighborhoods. I remember you saying that you based The Spectacular Now around your hometown in Georgia last time we spoke, but was that the case with Summering?

Ponsoldt: The Spectacular Now was [set] in the exact place I grew up. It was in Athens, Georgia in the exact houses and streets where I grew up [and] the memories were like one-to-one. It was like, “Oh, that’s where I would drive”, “That’s where we would buy beer”, and “That’s where we would party.”

Summering was initially written in the area near where I live now in California. [It’s] an area that sort of has an “every town” quality and where there are tracks of land, like dry river beds and things where young kids could go and make-believe and where their older teenage siblings could go to smoke pot and get in trouble or whatever they want to do [smiles]. In some cases, that can be like five minutes from their house. [It’s] not in downtown LA, it’s not in downtown New York, nor is it in the utter middle of nowhere. We ultimately filmed Summering in the suburbs around Salt Lake City, which had very similar qualities that I had experienced spending time in Utah and that I’d seen in other films like the film Brigsby Bear that my producing partner, Jennifer Dana, produced.

CHM: And you guys wrote some horror elements in the film, I noticed an homage to Psycho — which Ben confirmed — and he also mentioned Halloween as a reference point and I’m just curious why you guys infused that into a coming-of-age movie?

Ponsoldt: I mean, coming of age can feel like a horror film, you know [laughs]? I mean it is. We think of the sun-kissed stuff of childhood innocence, all of those clichés that we have. I don’t think anyone romanticizes middle school. These are characters that are going into middle school, no one romanticizes middle school — it becomes Welcome to the Doll House [and] it can become a horror film. And I think this is a film about real specific kids who are growing up in a culture where they’ve been inundated with images of violence, chiefly towards women whether it’s in horror films like Psycho or Halloween, or just in film noir, or in cop shows [like] Law & Order.

This is a film that yeah, the opening frames of the film are reference to Psycho, and then turns it on its head because it’s about a female friendship and a female experience and not about violence being inflicted on one of these four girls. But they [also] live in a world where there are cop shows playing in the background that are chiefly about male subjectivity that perhaps treats the dead female body as a prop or object and aren’t really interested in exploring that subjectivity whether or not these kids are conscious of it, whether or not they’ve seen Psycho or Halloween yet. Both of which are amazing movies [and are] the shoulders on which much of modern horror is built but there are a lot of things that I think are worth unpacking and looking at in those stories (and all stories). I think we all benefit from stories that have multiple subjectivities, especially if we’re going to look at the way structural violence sort of passes on from generation to generation.

CHM: And you do have four lovely young actors at the forefront of the film. I found that each character had bits about them that I could recognize in my own family and people I know, but they’re all so distinctly different. Did you write these based on anybody you know or bits of people that you knew or is it just as it came about?

Ponsoldt: Yeah, everyone in it’s based on people we know [laughs]. They’re all bits and pieces of our own kids, our wives, our friends, their kids, whatever. As I might have mentioned, my wife works in a middle school-high school. I’ve been there from the very beginning of that, so every year starting next week, there’ll be a whole new group of 11 and 12 year old’s coming in and their parents coming in excited, hopeful, and a little anxious. There are so many people that both offered their feedback and healthy criticism on how it [the script] reflected their own experiences and what it was like for them then as children and what it’s like for them as parents.

CHM: Last time we spoke, we talked a little bit about the casting process for the kids, but what about for the moms? Did that take place before that or after it was after you had cast the kids?

Ponsoldt: We knew it would be hard to find four young actors that we thought were amazing, inspiring and captured our imagination and that just seemed like they will grow up to be really interesting adults and that could serve the characters and just play and make-believe. Then it was kind of step-by-step [process] and it was finding them, creating a friend group and [then] trying to cast actors that believably would be their mothers. And because those actors are older, there are more reference points to go with.

If someone’s an actor who’s in their 30s or 40s, you’ve probably seen some things they’ve been in as opposed to an 11-year-old. In the case of Megan Mullally, I was lucky enough to have worked with her on Smashed with her husband, Nick Offerman. She’s amazing and one of the funniest people on earth. I’ve always been a huge fan of Lake Bell’s both as an actor and as a filmmaker; she’s just a real collaborator and a deep thinker and had so many thoughts in her own life [about] this relationship between this mother and daughter as a mother [herself].

My wife and I got through the first year of COVID through the videos Sarah Cooper was making that were everywhere online. They just made us laugh when everything else in the world was not making us want to laugh. Ashley Madekwe is so remarkable and Avy Kaufman, my great casting director, really was just a [fan] of hers [Madekwe] and introduced us and I was blown away by her as an actor.

OTN: Last time we spoke, you also spoke about how you put the four kids on Zoom together and they just clicked instantly. Were you at all concerned that once you got on set that it may disappear?

Ponsoldt: I wasn’t as concerned with the adult actors because I think one of the things that becomes interesting [is] that before I had kids, it’s just one of the things that wouldn’t have occurred to me, but it does now, which is my kids’ best friends — the kids that they think are going to be their best friends for their whole lives — are a product of geographic proximity. They’ve been zoned into the same school and they wound up in each other’s classes and they may have only known each other for a few years, but that’s a huge part of their lives.

And because they’re friends, I’m acquaintances — or friends, in some cases — with their friends’ parents. They might not have been the friends that I would’ve chosen, or they might not have chosen me, but we happen to know each other. So in some ways, there’s very little commonality other than our young children [between us and] our friends, and that’s a specific dynamic that’s fascinating.

As adults, we bring the awareness that our kids think they’re going to be friends forever. Some of them might be, some of them might not be talking in a year [laughs] —  that just might be the case, and [then] will we [the parents] still be friends? Do we have anything in common? Maybe we don’t have anything in common except for our kids, but it’s nice to make a new friend, and that sort of interplay between generations is something that I find fascinating and lovely, and that I wanted the film [Summering] to contain.

OTN: I’m running out of time with you, but I have to ask because I love your work: Do you have anything coming up that I can look forward to?

Ponsoldt: I’ll be on set tomorrow and Thursday. I’m finishing a new Apple TV+ series called Shrinking from the Ted Lasso folks [and] with Jason Segel, Jessica Williams, Harrison Ford, and Michael Urie, and a lot of really amazing people. It sort of has that Ted Lasso “laughter in tears”-vibe to it but [is] about psychiatrists in Pasadena. That will probably come out sometime early next year.

I also worked on a show before that, that I also produced and directed a lot of called Daisy Jones & The Six, based on the Taylor Jenkins Reid novel which is about the biggest male-female band of the late 1970s and how/why they broke up. [They’re] a fictional band, they look a lot like Fleetwood Mac at their core. [It stars] Riley Keough and Sam Claflin, but the whole cast is amazing. It’s rock-and-roll in the 1970s, so if you like things like Almost Famous, I think you might like it. It was amazing to make — it has really amazing music and real scope — and it was amazing to recreate the 1970s in the Sunset Strip and actually film in the places like the Whisky a Go Go and the Troubadour and Sunset Sound and all these amazing places where a lot of that music in the late 1970s was actually created.

Summering is in theaters now.