Susan Sarandon on how Ridley Scott elevated ‘Thelma & Louise’: “He put us in a John Wayne backdrop”
Even though she made her feature film debut way back in 1970 to light the touchpaper on an extensive career that’s won her an Academy Award and a Bafta, among countless other accolades, Thelma & Louise is in with a strong shout at being named the single most popular movie of Susan Sarandon‘s career.
It’s nowhere near being the most lucrative, and neither is it the most unanimously acclaimed, but in terms of its sheer enduring appeal, legacy, and impact across multiple generations, it’s hard to look beyond Ridley Scott’s classic genre-bending road trip movie as the one to have made the biggest mark.
Incorporating elements of the crime, comedy, and buddy genres with a welcome feminist spin, even people who haven’t seen Thelma & Louise are aware of its most memorable moments, especially the ending. That’s a barometer of a cultural staple if ever there was one, but Sarandon revealed that John Wayne ended up serving as an unlikely touchstone.
On paper, a housewife and a waitress heading off on a fishing trip before killing a man, fleeing the authorities, and going on the run doesn’t have a great deal in common with the filmography of ‘The Duke’, and not just because Wayne’s attitude towards women in cinema were far from being progressive.
The iconic face of the Western did track down a few outlaws during his time wielding a six-shooter as the genre’s stoic face of heroism, though, with Sarandon admitting to Vanity Fair that “being outlaws is always fun”. In the early 1990s, putting two women in the lead roles of a genre thriller that intentionally subverts the norm of a male-dominated form of filmmaking was a breath of fresh air, and the star knew it.
“It was this tiny little film, and by putting us in a John Wayne backdrop, he made it into this iconic, bigger-than-life story,” Sarandon said of Scott’s approach to the material. The vistas often felt like they were ripped straight out of one of Wayne’s many westerns with John Ford, too, something that wasn’t lost on Sarandon either.
The star admitted that there were “all these great shots of everything” being captured by Scott and “his guys all bare-chested with their shirts on their heads and smoking cigars,” to the point she and Geena Davis joked that they might not even be in the movie at all. It was a production dripping with projected machismo from the sounds of things, which does sound right up Wayne’s street.
Of course, he’d have probably been left furious by the mere suggestion of Thelma & Louise, given his own belief system, but in Scott’s hands, he transformed it into a cross-country adventure for the ages with more than its fair share of iconic moments.