In the current film industry landscape, Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson are two of the highest-profile, Chicago-based filmmakers working today. That's due in large part to their latest work, Ghostlight, which debuted at Sundance earlier this year and enjoyed a celebrated festival run that included an Audience Award-winning stop at the Chicago Critics Film Festival in May to a packed house.
With a background on the stages of Chicago, O’Sullivan wrote and co-directed Ghostlight with Thompson. She also wrote and starred in the couple’s previous collaboration, Saint Frances, which Thompson directed and which won the 2019 SXSW Special Jury Prize for Breakthrough Voice (that film served as the Opening Night film during that year’s Chicago Critics Film Festival). And her latest screenplay, Mouse, was recently included on the Blacklist. Before co-directing Ghostlight, Thompson directed his second feature, Rounding, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival
Ghostlight is a touching work that finds room for tears and laughs as it examines the power of the arts to make sense of our personal dramas and heartache. The film focuses on a construction worker named Dan (Keith Kupferer) who has not found the means to work through a family tragedy, distancing himself from his wife Sharon (Tara Mallen) and troubled daughter Daisy (Katherine Mallen Kupferer). In case you hadn’t figured it out from the context clues, the fictional family at the heart of this story is a real-life family of Chicago-area actors. Dan finds comfort and connection in a community theater production of Romeo and Juliet, which gives him the opportunity to explore his buried emotions and eventually open up to his family. Dolly de Leon (Triangle of Sadness) plays Dan’s improbable Juliet to his age-inappropriate Romeo, and through live theater, the family is forced to confront what has happened to them and begin to seek ways of repairing together. It’s a quietly devastating work that is currently enjoying a 100% Fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes and is still playing at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago.
I had the chance to sit down with O’Sullivan and Thompson recently to uncover their thoughts on why live theater is such a useful conduit for raw emotions, how they ended up casting an actual family as their leads, and why Shakespeare’s lessons never go out of style for actors and audiences. Please enjoy our conversation…
Editor's Note: please be aware this interview includes mention of suicide. If you or someone you know are struggling, call 988 for resources and help.
Let’s talk about the germ of this idea. Specifically, how did you land on Shakespeare as your playwright.
Kelly O’Sullivan: I actually did see the National Theatre in London’s trailer for their production of Romeo & Juliet, with Jessie Buckley and Josh O’Connor, and I think that was on my mind. But also, during the pandemic, we started seeing all of these films referencing Shakespeare like Sing Sing and Grand Theft Hamlet, and I think in those moments of real confusion there’s something comforting about going back to classics. It feels very grounding, and it’s a very easy cultural touchstone, because everybody knows Romeo & Juliet, and you can reference it in ways that a lot of people are going to get. Then, of course, of the double suicide and almost everybody knows about that event in the story, that was the thing that made me realize I couldn’t think of a better play to go with our story.
It might be the most famous play with suicide in it.
KO: Exactly.
Alex Thompson: It’s funny, before this movie, I didn’t think of it as a double suicide. It seemed like an accident. It’s a pact to live at first, and then it turns into a suicide.
KO: But they both intentionally kill themselves. It’s just not pre-meditated.
Shakespeare has always been a great equalizer for actors and directors. His plays were written for the common people, but now his works are seen as highfalutin. But it truly is meant for the masses, which is why it is constantly referenced and redone for stage and screen. Was that part of the function for you and your story, that this working-class guy would eventually find his way into this story.
KO: Exactly, but it has to be something he finds intimidating at first. Like you said, it’s meant for people like Dan, who doesn’t necessarily grasp all of the language but can get on the emotional journey. In high school, I certainly didn’t like Shakespeare because it was treated as something highfalutin, but it wasn’t until I saw the Baz Luhrmann's Romeo & Juliet that I was like “Oh, I get it. This is the way it’s supposed to feel”—guttural and primal, like young love, rather than esoteric and intellectual.
There always seems to be that ah-ha moment for everyone who takes a shot at Shakespeare, that breakthrough. I’m seeing it a lot now with Eddie Izzard’s Hamlet, which just played at Chicago Shakespeare. A lot of people I know who went to that told me it was their first time truly understanding Hamlet.
KO: Andrew Scott just did a one-person version of Vanya too.
I saw that through National Theatre Live recently.
KO: How was it?
It was phenomenal.
AT: My breakthrough was what is like a stereotype of Shakespeare. I did a very touchy feely, everybody sitting around wearing white version of Twelfth Night in college, and the cast were so in it with each other. I still talk to those people, and that was when I understood that Shakespeare could lock in, not just the audience, but the ensemble. And I got it for the first time. And I look back at that experience now, having been a part of professional theater and watching professional theater, and realized that that is also a type of Shakespeare.
KO: In the trailer for the Romeo & Juliet I saw, all the actors are just sitting around in regular clothes, and one guy stands up and starts to deliver the first monologue, but there’s this shot of Jessie Buckley and Josh O’Connor as themselves, and they share this look that has so much meaning that is mischievous and flirtatious, before they get up and go, and it’s the bleeding over of real feelings versus the characters’ feelings. That’s in Ghostlight too, the fun of getting to play with each other and romantic feelings.
AT: When your ensemble is also your audience, that’s a part of Ghostlight too. You have all of these actors watching each other act.
In casting this, Keith has to act like he can’t act. And even his final performance can’t be perfect. Was that a tough needle to thread, telling him you can’t be as good as you’re capable of?
KO: We didn’t give him a lot of notes on that. He was so good at being unskilled, which takes an incredible amount of skill to do. I remember the only time we talked about it was when they were lying in bed together, and she says “Tell me some of your lines.” And he starts to go, and Tara gave him the note “Don’t be so good right away.” And I had to say “Be as good as you can,” because we don’t want to see him be bad in that moment. But I can’t take credit for that; he’s just such a good actor.
AT: Something we did talk about, we sort of get to cheat because the final sequence on stage is not a theatrical performance. It was directed to be a scene between him and his son. The one direction was “Nobody needs to hear this but you.” So the camera is three inches from his face, and it’s more moving than any of the Shakespeare he’s done prior because of that, and we get to make that leap because it transcends the stage craft of how good he is, for example, creeping up amongst the vines to see Juliet in the window. He’s got this little puckish bounce to his step, and he’s getting more comfortable. But I think it’s quite a leap when he gets to that place, but it happens because it’s not actual theatrical acting. He doesn’t have to be Andrew Scott, and Keith will tell you, he’s not a Shakespeare guy. That’s not his cup of tea.
KO: Which I think helped. It would not work if all of a sudden you see this guy who’s done his Shakespeare, like five Shakespeare shows.
AT: This is a guy I’d want to see do Shakespeare. He’s someone I’d want to see do A View from the Bridge and who I’d want to see doing King Lear. He grounds everything.
It’s done at first to be funny, the age-blind casting. Again, they have to sell it to a certain degree as both humorous and sincere. What was the intention there?
KO: The ultimate intention was to have Dan step into his son’s shoes. Everything is building to that point. But also, there’s something very moving about…in the script, it says Dolly and Dan stand up together as Romeo and Juliet for the first time and present themselves for the ensemble, we get to see Romeo and Juliet grown up and grown old. To me, there’s this alternate version where they get to grow old together, and we never see that. And in this same alternate version, in the screen directions after the lights come down, we get to watch them wake up. So it’s the idea of, yes, we have the death scene, but they get to continue on as these older people, and we get to watch them wake up in a way that his son didn’t get to wake up.
The writing of this came out of the pandemic. How much of this is a product of that time, and when you start to make this, how much was that experience your emerging from isolation?
KO: It was definitely the first time that…like, I’d stopped doing theater, and it was a way to get to revisit theater without having to be in a play. So it was very much a re-emergence to the ensemble feel of it all, just getting to hang out in the same room as the cast and crew.
AT: After that first week, I remember, it became really comfortable working with just Keith, Tara, and Katherine, which was the first five days of shooting. But it was also all of the grimmest stuff in the show, so by the end of that five days, I wasn’t really directing. We were working with camera and thinking a lot about production assignments, but in terms of the actors, it was the tiniest bit of directing, very little. Then suddenly, new people come in and I get nervous, and I realize I have to give notes and think about how to block them walking across the gym. Then Kelly got COVID, so I’m doing some of that on my own.
But then for the rest of the shoot, once the feeling of “Is this even good?” was gone, it was all about focusing on the work and we started to have a critical mass of material under our belts that we felt excited about and performances we were excited about. Then it was like showing up to rehearsal every day, and you’re like “How do we do it? What are we going to pull out of the garage for this?” There’s a random scene. We got through all the staged stuff in a sprint, so for the wedding scene, it was like “What if we pulled a sheet across the lens?” and there weren’t enough sheets, so we did it two ways. There was something that felt like being home again, back in that creative place. It was like being in middle school again, and you were excited to go to school to see your friends, no matter what’s on the syllabus. Or like summer camp.
Stage acting versus all the other types of acting, how much more cathartic is it? You actually get to live in the moment for long, unbroken stretches, that must feel more like reality.
KO: Yeah, you get to live the full arc, and it’s sequential. Knowing that Dan would have to build to the final scene. If it were a movie, you might shoot that on Day 2. There’s also something—and I know it sounds so cheesy—experiencing it in front of the audience. He needed to experience that in front of Sharon; she needed to be able to witness that, and that’s something that can only happen with live theater. Also, that’s where I come from. Film is actually very new to me, but I really know the ins and outs of the theater world very well. Also knowing it was Romeo & Juliet made it feel like it had to be live too.
Co-directing: how does that look? Are you each focusing on different things, or is it 100 percent collaboration on everything? Are you of one mind?
AT: I think you get 200 percent of director . What’s cool about it is, if you have an idea, you work with your DP or actors to execute it, and they’re all working together to find a way to make it work, to make that vision sing and feel real and right. In this case, we have two directors. Sometimes, I would have an idea, and Kelly would be right there with me, trying to make it work, tweaking, adjusting. And sometimes, it was the other way around; Kelly would have this really deep intuition about something, and I would be like “I don’t get it, but let’s chase it down and find a way.” It was really nice to have that.
KO: It’s strikingly similar to parenting.
AT: Which we didn’t know at the time.
KO: But now experiencing , you have to get on the same page about all of your core values, about your intention for this child and the way you want to raise and parent together, so that you aren’t having regular arguments in front of your kid. So it’s about getting on the same page, and it’s not like one of us ever said “Alright, now I’ve stopped parenting.” We may be drawn to different things, and there may be a moment when you feel adept to take on this and this moment, but we’re always in conversation all the time.
AT: There would be a lot of moments where I would see something that didn’t work, and I don’t know why, and Kelly would keep going and I’m sitting in the back. I remember the dance scene when Dan finally dances, and I could not hook into it. It took me ignoring the actual stuff that was happening for me to go “Okay, I think I have a way into this.” Each of us gets caught up in different things, and not in a good way but more of a distracted way. The thing that I think makes our sets different is that we would have those conversations in front of everybody, so they were required to be civil. Everybody hears that and thinks that they can bring themselves into it. “I could bring an idea to the table. I know when Alex or Kelly is frustrated; I know they’re not bullshitting when they tell me it’s time to move on.” Or “I know the look in their eyes when we’re going to reshoot this tomorrow.” Which happened five or six times.
Had you always intended on using a real family at the center of this? I can see why you might have wanted a real husband and wife acting team, and maybe you just lucked out that Katherine was so good as well.
KO: I can’t believe it happened the way it happened. We lucked out. We wouldn’t have cast them if they weren’t all individually amazing, but having written it for Keith, he was the only person who was for sure in this movie from the beginning. And then when he said yes, that was great and he brought Katherine to the table, and then our casting director told us that this was their family dynamic and brought Tara into it. I didn’t know them as a family.
AT: You were the one that mentioned that Tara was an actor.
KO: And a good one, but a long time out of theater.
AT: We joke about it, but I did watch her reel and watched her scenes in Contagion, where she’s being shitty to Kate Winslet, but she’s so good. Even in the description of how everybody came on board, she’s the last piece. She is the only one who didn’t have to read for the part; she was a straight offer, in her garage when we were taking props from them. And she was like “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Keith hasn’t showed me anything.”
I didn’t know they were a family until the end credits at Sundance.
KO: It wasn’t one of the reasons we held credits until the end, but I’m glad that several people have had that experience. If it had been right at the top, you maybe would have been taken out of it, but I love that people have had that experience at the very end.
AT: It’s really cool to have the audience piece it together after seeing these incredible performances and feel the enthusiasm grow. Seeing those names at the beginning wouldn’t be as exciting like that. And once you know their influences, it’s so crazy. Keith literally has a pencil drawing of Peter Falk in his house, and Katherine has a three-foot-tall poster of River Phoenix in her bedroom. And Keith loves Cassavetes. And I wish Katherine could work with River.
Talk about getting the screenplay to Dolly. Most people only know her from Triangle of Sadness, but she makes such an impact here. How did you get it to her and that whole process?
KO: We share a manager with her, so as soon as he signed her, we were like “We want.” And she has done so much theater in the Philippines, I think that was her way into the script. She liked Saint Frances, but I think she was really drawn to this character in this story, and we lucked out that she wanted to do it.
Didn’t you also mention about how she liked the idea of doing her own hair and makeup?
KO: We were really worried about that because we didn’t know her personality after seeing her be so fierce in Triangle of Sadness; she’d been nominated for a Golden Globe for a director that shoots like a scene a day. We’re going to have to tell her she has to do her own hair and makeup, and she was really excited about it. She brought her own costumes and was like “I think Rita would wear beads,” and in the movie, she’s wearing these beaded bracelets the whole time. It felt like she came from theater, from a scrappy background, and it’s about the ensemble and work rather than the bells and whistles.
AT: Everybody knew about the hair and makeup thing except for her until the week before she was set to arrive, so it was this thing that our manager and her manager realized they should tell her that and see how she responds. And we’re not going to have a hair and makeup person just for Dolly, and she was so enthusiastic about it.
KO: And she showed up with this blonde pixie cut, and it was a choice.
AT: When she Zoomed with Keith for the first time, it was so funny because it was the dynamic in the movie. Dolly had ideas and was thinking, and was like “Keith, what do you think?” And he’s like “Correct. Yes”—one-word answers. And she’s trying to pull something out of him, but they saved it for the movie.
The staging of the actual play; it’s a community theater with little to no money. How sophisticated did you want it to look or not look? I think it still looks really beautiful, but you don’t want it to look too polished either.
KO: Linda Lee, our production designer, is amazing, and she talked about the beauty in ordinary things. And we always knew we wanted it to be hodgepodge and pulled together; it should not all of a sudden be this incredible set design. It should be something that all of these cast members can pull together organically. But she also did an incredible job of making it look gorgeous, like buying 100 Amazon electric candles. She and I looked at imagery from Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo & Juliet, and at the end, they’re surrounded in that cathedral by candles, and we were like “Well they couldn’t use actual fire, but let’s make them electric.” But it is meant to be, and a lot of it was, blankets from our house, random things we got from Amazon and then returned.
AT: She was like Keith to me. We gave her very little direction; she just understood the brief. Those flats that are painted in the background, those were sourced from the rehearsal space in the theater we borrowed. Juliet’s balcony is a construction scaffolding. There are all these little things that she just got when it came to executing it. We were in awe of every new set; there was never the discussion of something being too beautiful or unbelievable.
It feels like one of those things where if you turn up the lights just a little too much, you can see all of the individual pieces, but when you turn them down just enough, it all looks like something real.
KO: So much about this movie is about age and the return to joy and childhood for these characters, especially Dan. It’s the first time we see him experience joy when he’s dancing, and that’s what theater feels like to me, stripping away all the jadedness that age has brought. “Let’s wear costumes and build sets”—the childhood nature of that.
For Dan, the theater experience is the therapy he’s not responding to in any other way. He’s able to process emotions that he can’t with his family or anyone. That’s what this movie showed me was that theater acting allows that to come out.
KO: It does. An important difference is that this is one night only for him. I don’t think Dan could sustain eight shows a week. I don’t think he could have that cathartic experience over and over again or return to re-traumatize having to take that journey in real time. Once is the perfect therapy for him.
Thank you both so much.
KO: Thanks for everything.
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