‘My Old Ass’ Director Megan Park on Capturing the ‘Sadness’ and ‘Sweetness’ of Adolescence in Her Trippy Sophom*ore Feature (2024)

As summer slowly slips away, director Megan Park is stoking the fires of nostalgia with her sophom*ore feature “My Old Ass,” a coming-of-age story set in those sweet final weeks before her 18-year-old protagonist leaves her lakeside hometown for college in the big city. Maisy Stella (“Nashville,” “Flowervale Street”) stars as Elliott, a free-spirited teen whose birthday mushroom trip brings her face-to-face with her “old ass” 39-year-old self (Aubrey Plaza), who delivers some choice advice and words of warning that transform her relationships with her family and friends.

“There’s such a sadness, but a sweetness to that change and the passing of time,” Park tells Variety, thinking back on that transitional period between childhood and adulthood when you know life is about to shift, but you can’t quite pinpoint how.

“Sweet” is a word Park uses generously (and fondly) when discussing her work. In fact, the writer-director has made it a bit of a mission to make heartfelt and “sweet” movies, even though some people in the industry, which tends to prioritize edginess, don’t think that’s particularly “cool.”

“There were so many iconic movies, like ‘Stepmom,’ ‘Now and Then’ and My Girl,’ that are so emotional and heartfelt and sweet, but had these gut punches, that defined me and moved me. It would be an honor to make a movie that was considered a movie like that. I think those movies are very cool,” she says, adding a dash of sass to her tone for emphasis.

Despite the fact that Elliott is a teenage girl coming-of-age in Canada, Park (who grew up in the small town of Lindsay, Ontario) insists that the story isn’t autobiographical. “I relate to each character in this movie in such a different way,” she says. “I’m part of Elliott, I’m parts of the mom, there’s me throughout it. The movie has meant different things to me as I’ve made it, as my own life has changed: I had another kid. I recently lost my dad.”

“What’s so exciting and such an honor is seeing people from all different places in the world and all different backgrounds and ages respond to the film in different ways. I hoped this film would speak to like anyone with a heart, but it’s really exciting to see that it’s reaching the old dudes,” she continues.

When Park began work on “My Old Ass,” she was “in her feels,” as the youths say. She’d just come off directing her first feature, 2021’s “The Fallout” — a drama unpacking the emotional aftermath of a school shooting starring Jenna Ortega and Maddie Ziegler — and she was spending time in her hometown.

“I was sleeping in my childhood bedroom and thinking about the last time I made up dances with my friends from school,” she recalls. “I was like, ‘Wow, imagine if I’d known that this was the last time. Would that have ruined it?’ I didn’t know, but I was just feeling really nostalgic and all the mixed emotions you get when you go home.”

Park wasn’t a particularly nostalgic person in her twenties — “I was a bit more blissfully and just kind of selfishly in my own headspace a lot,” she says. — but as she’s gotten older, she’s become decidedly more so.

“The more of the world that you see, and the more sh*t that you go through, you also appreciate that bubble of childhood, and the gift that my parents gave me of having that blissfully peaceful, unaware of most of the sh*t of the world,” Park, 38, explains. “Then, you want to try to recreate that the best that you can for your own kids and protect them. Becoming a parent has made me much more sentimental. How can it not?”

When we meet on the rooftop of her West Hollywood hotel in early August, Park is in town for a quick trip to the city for a special screening of “My Old Ass” – only the second time she’s seen the film with an audience following its buzzy Sundance debut in January. Ahead of the movie’s Sept. 13 theatrical release, Amazon MGM Studios leaned into the late summer vibes by hosting cozy campfire-esque advance screenings in N.Y. and L.A., including a sold-out outdoor Cinespia screening.

“We talked to a lot of people who loved the film and saw it at Sundance, but there was just something about the team of people there that really understood what the movie was right away, that was just so clear,” Park says of working with the studio. “We felt confident about their ability to get it to the right audience in a way that was true to the film. They’re tapping into that campfire summer feel of the movie and marketing it in a way that’s really unique and exciting and different — which I hope the movie is too.”

This is all new for Park, who’d already built a successful career as an actor (“The Secret Life of the American Teenager,” “Charlie Bartlett,” Hallmark’s “A Christmas Wish”) before transitioning to directing movies. But “The Fallout” was made and debuted amid the COVID-19 pandemic, so everything was virtual, including winning SXSW’s audience award.

“This whole movie, from start to finish has been filled with so much joy,” Park says of shooting “My Old Ass” on location in the lakefront territory of Muskoka, Canada (where she’d spent summers growing up) and now turning it over to audiences. “I don’t know if it was the experience of all of us being up there together and it really feeling like a summer camp and bonding in that way, everyone involved feels so close and like family.”

Part of Park’s film family are the team at LuckyChap — the company behind Greta Gerwig’s billion dollar-grossing “Barbie” and Emerald Fennell’s pulpy drama “Saltburn,” co-founded by Margot Robbie. Earlier this year, Robbie acknowledged that the company has a “penchant for actress-turned-writer-directors”: Fennell, Gerwig, Olivia Wilde and now Park.

“Hearing you say the company that I’m in in working with them is mind-boggling to me,” she says when I mention Robbie’s quote.

“The Fallout” not only landed her a spot on Variety’s 10 Directors to Watch list for 2022, but it also caught the attention of Bronte Payne, LuckyChap’s VP of film, who reached out to schedule a Zoom meeting. They clicked immediately, so Park threw out an idea she’d been considering.

“I had this one-line logline in my head: ‘This girl who does mushrooms and has a trip where she meets her older self’ and they were like, ‘Honestly, we love that,’” Park recalls.

From there, things moved quickly: Payne introduced her to LuckyChap co-founder Tom Ackerley, then Robbie and Josey McNamara, and less than a year later, they were on set. The high-concept indie film (also produced by Indian Paintbrush’s Steven Rales, with LuckyChap’s Payne as an executive producer) made its world premiere with a sold-out screening at the Eccles Theatre.

“I was so scared. I was like, ‘I don’t know if I’m gonna be able to sit through,’” Park recalls. “But after the first laugh — when the boat crashes in the beginning — a part of me relaxed. It was amazing that there was such a wonderful response to it, but it’s scary every time.”

She hadn’t been thinking about the audience when she sat down to write the script; she was simply working through her own feelings about the highs and lows of life, so the way has resonated with viewers of all backgrounds and age ranges has been a welcome surprise. “People have had these such strong, visceral emotional reactions, which I did not expect,” she says. “The dream is to elicit any kind of feeling from people — which is hard to do now when people are jaded and there’s so much content out there.”

The test screenings have proven particularly fascinating in terms of the generational divide. “What people in their twenties – the ‘younger asses’ — took away was so different, yet the same, but just felt in different ways from the ‘older asses,’” Park says. The younger audiences recognized the nostalgia, but mostly felt represented by the film’s Gen-Z cast. “It felt so fun, like I was hanging out with my friends,” and “There was a lesson that I took away from it about time and how quickly it goes by,” they’d say, according to Park. For the older audiences, “there was definitely more of like a sadness, like, ‘Oh f*ck, yeah, I’ve been there,’ ‘I’ve experienced that loss,’ or ‘I have those regrets,’” she says. “A lot of times in your twenties, you don’t have regrets yet.”

Park’s relationship to the material changed over time, too. It’s been two years since she wrote the movie and, even in the seven months since Sundance — and since Amazon MGM Studios snatched up the comedy in a rich $15 million deal — so much has changed in her life. She recently celebrated her 38th birthday and she’s now a mom of two (she and her husband Tyler Hilton welcomed their second child, son Benny in July; their daughter Winnie is four) and, in June, her father, Richard, died after a sudden illness.

“I didn’t really understand grief in the way I’m even just beginning to understand it now,” she shares solemnly. “I feel like everything I’m experiencing right now is like 50% joy and 50% sadness at the same time, and that’s something that you learn the older you get. And sometimes, unfortunately, when you’re young.”

Park’s parents (her mother Debbie is credited in the special thanks for “My Old Ass”) were never particularly invested in the Hollywood scene. “Their gauge of success was, ‘Are you happy? Are you enjoying yourself? Which I definitely am now that I’m behind the camera and writing and have found, for sure, my path and purpose,” Park says.

When I mention “The Secret Life of the American Teenager,” the ABC Family teen drama, where she starred as strait-laced teenager Grace Bowman for 121 episodes, Park laughs. “How embarrassing,” she says, encouraging me to finish the question. What continues to draw her to stories about teenagers? And what has it been like to create a new version of how these types of stories are told?

“Although we had a great experience working on that show, what’s hard sometimes about writing stuff for young people is it’s hard to make it feel like it’s authentic in that given moment to that generation,” she says. “I wanted to make sure I do that justice if I’m going to tell stories in that space, because as an actor, I didn’t always feel like that was the case. I didn’t always feel like I had any sort of say or voice as a young actor in the industry. So, I like to create a set atmosphere that’s different, that I would have liked to be on when I was younger and give some validity to how smart and powerful and talented all these young people are.”

So, on the topic of her younger self, what would she tell “young ass Megan” about this ride of making “My Old Ass”? “Soak up every second and enjoy it,” Park replies. “As cheesy as it sounds, it goes by so fast. It’s a summer you’ll never f*cking forget. And it feels like so exciting that we have it now on camera. It’s like a time capsule for us to look back on.”