Writer and director Megan Park named her new film ‘My Old Ass’ for a reason

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I got a bit choked up talking to Canadian filmmaker Megan Park about the new comic drama she wrote and directed, My Old Ass, which opens Sept. 20. (We’ll get to that title in a minute.) For the long-ass life of this column, I have been asking, “Where are the women?” Listening to her made me feel they’re finally here.

Park, 38, was born far from Hollywood, in rural Lindsay, Ont. Her dad was a dentist, her mom a teacher. But she went to theatre camp, took dance and music classes, began acting in plays at the age of 6. During her high-school summers – her parents were strict about not missing school – she did small roles in film and television. At 18, she deferred university, moved to Los Angeles and landed a starring role on the ABC Family show The Secret Life of the American Teenager. It ran for seven years, scored her a green card, opened doors.

That’s a typical actor’s trajectory. Here’s where the new stuff comes in. Though successful, Park noticed in her peers a passion and drive she didn’t feel. Then, on the Canadian film The F Word (2013), she worked with an actor she admired, Zoe Kazan, who’d done some writing and directing. Kazan introduced Park to Sarah Treem, who was writing The Affair. Park also talked to Lena Dunham, who was riding high with Girls.

“I didn’t go to film school, I didn’t know lenses, I didn’t know how to use Final Draft,” the screenwriting program, Park said in a recent video interview, sitting cross-legged on a bed in Los Angeles (she has a home there and in Toronto). “I didn’t have the confidence in myself.” But talking to those young women – finding inspiring peers – convinced her to try.

She wrote and directed two shorts (while acting in numerous Christmas telefilms). She directed a few music videos, including Watch, off the first album of a precocious 16-year-old called Billie Eilish. “I went to her house and sat in her living room,” Park says, grinning. “Her mom brought us cookies, and she was like, ‘Mom, leave us alone!’ She was really fun and obviously a genius.”

Around 2000, distraught over U.S. school shootings, Park sat down and wrote a script in two weeks, The Fallout, about the aftermath of an attack. “I was afraid to send it to my agents and managers – afraid to be the idiot actor who wrote something bad,” Park says. “They called its structure ‘untraditional,’ and I thought, ‘Yeah, because I don’t know structure!’ But people liked it. I’d gotten more experience reading scripts and being on set than I realized.”

Here’s the next miracle: Her reps just assumed she would direct it. Park was nervous – “I think a lot of people, women especially, struggle with voicing their opinion and being afraid it’s wrong,” she says. But she hired savvy collaborators, many of them women, and learned from them. (Finneas O’Connell, Eilish’s brother, did the score. It stars Jenna Ortega, pre-Wednesday, and is available on HBO Max and Crave.)

Along the way, Park married the actor and musician Tyler Hilton and had two children. During a family visit in Toronto, she started thinking about last times – the last day your entire family lives together before someone moves away; the last time you play pretend with your friends. “A big thing for me growing up was putting on Spice Girls and making up a dance, and recording it on our big – I’m dating myself, I’m old-ass – VHS,” she says. “One of those times was the last time.” She started to wonder, if she could counsel her younger self to pay attention to that last time, would that take the joy out of it? Or cement it better in memory?

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So she wrote My Old Ass: It’s Elliott’s (Maisy Stella, Nashville) last summer at her family’s cranberry operation in Muskoka, Ont., before going to university. During a magic-mushroom trip, she’s visited by her older self (Aubrey Plaza), who mysteriously warns her not to fall in love with Chad (Percy Hynes White). The film is funny and assured, with unforced, naturalistic performances – and then it takes a deeply emotional turn that’s entirely earned. (Parents, prepare to be shredded by Elliott’s mother’s [Maria Dizzia] monologue about wishing she could recall the last time she rocked Elliott to sleep.)

“I love Boyhood, Eighth Grade, any scripted movie that makes you feel you’re in a slice of life,” Park says. To achieve that, “you have to collaborate with people who understand that’s what you’re trying to do, and set that vibe when you shoot. There’s so much ego and hierarchy on film sets that doesn’t create an artistic environment. I was on so many sets like that as an actor, and I hated it. It’s my personal nightmare to ever be on a set like that again, let alone create one.”

Park speaks so much about relying on her collaborators, in fact, that I feel compelled to point out her modesty, and urge her to own her talent. “For me, it’s all about why I’m doing it,” she replies. “I’m not making movies to put my artistry all over something and show the world. If a movie of mine speaks to someone, that’s a beautiful thing, but it’s not the ultimate reason I’m doing it. These stories come to me, and I love the process, working out things in my head and heart and life. If things go well, you won’t see me in front of the camera again – maybe one day, if I get to do it with friends. I feel I found my true love in writing and directing. I feel like it’s exactly what I was meant to do.” I’m not crying, you’re crying.

Now, about that title. As Park wrote her early drafts, the title served as a tongue-in-cheek reminder to be “a little rebellious, to push myself. It was a north star. But I thought there was no way it would stay.”

But like everything else Park is doing these days, people liked it: her agents and managers, her producers, financers and cast, and ultimately, the buyers at Amazon MGM Studios. “It snuck past all the gates, which I truly cannot believe,” she says. She could be describing herself, and all the women writer/directors who’ve waited so long. “But they just printed the poster, so I think we’re good.”

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