Q&A: Writer-Director Ol Parker Breaks Down Three of His Films That I Love
The filmmaker and I get personal about THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL, MAMMA MIA! HERE WE GO AGAIN, and TICKET TO PARADISE
It’s summer 2018 and my wife and I are jubilant to be sitting in London’s air-conditioned Picturehouse Central as MAMMA MIA! HERE WE GO AGAIN begins to play across the screen. The first film, based on the 1999 stage musical, has become for us one of those near-yearly viewings that temporarily fight back the dark reality known as the world outside our windows. Oh no, we quickly discover, Meryl Streep’s character Donna has died. Something inside me twists at this revelation, and my wife, maybe sensing this, takes me by the wrist.
But the feeling abates, only periodically returning as ABBA songs are brought to dramatic life by a collection of characters we know and love so much — except this time across two time periods, the present and the past when Donna, now played by Lily James, meets and falls for the three men who may or may not be her eventual daughter Sophie’s father (the plot of the original stage musical and film adaptation).
Then, we get to the climactic song, “My Love, My Life”. Past Donna and Present Sophie, played by Amanda Seyfried, prepare to baptize their newborn daughters. Mother and daughter enter the same church, duetting across time. As Donna reaches the font, she peers down into it - and there’s Streep’s face.
My wife clenches my arm, hearing what’s happening beside her.
On the screen, Donna and Sophie begin to sing directly to each other despite the limitations of life and death, and for the first time in a year, despite how much it has hurt, I am bawling over my own dead mother…but by the time the credits start to roll, I’m somehow laughing through them.
This is the remarkable balancing act writer-director Ol Parker pulls off in MAMMA MIA! HERE WE GO AGAIN, a film that, by its nature as a jukebox musical, could strike you as a piece of fun fluff, but is, at its heart, a meditation on the relationships between mothers and daughters — parents and children, really — and the way the past and present co-exist in our every day lives in unexpected, often unforeseen ways. I find this to be true of much of Ol’s work, including THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL (2011) (which he wrote) and his most recent film TICKET TO PARADISE (2022) (which he wrote and directed).
I was delighted when the filmmaker agreed to discuss this trio of films with me - one that I shared with my mother, one that helped me grieve her, and one I’m confident we would’ve had a blast watching together. The result is a conversation about parents and children, the unique, often fortuitous ways stories are developed and make it to our screens, and the parts of ourselves that find their way into our art whether we’re conscious of it or not.
COLE HADDON: When I suggested this interview to you, I told you about what it meant to share THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL with my mother. You responded by saying you had basically written the film for your own parents and it was an ongoing miracle to you that it meant anything to anyone else’s. It feels like the right place to start this conversation. Who are these remarkable people who inspired such a beautiful act from their son? Are they both still with us?
OL PARKER: Well, first off, can I say that it’s a privilege to be part of this series of conversations, which I’ve been reading and enjoying for a while. It’s a good thing that you do, Cole, and I’m grateful for it. And ludicrously flattered, both by the attention you’ve clearly paid to my work and by the questions themselves. So, thank you for that and this.
CH: Thank you, my friend, I truly appreciate that.
OP: I love the idea of you going to see MARIGOLD HOTEL with your mom. Obviously, anyone going to see anything I’ve done for any reason is great, but that it helped you guys have a moment together, share an experience, is just the best. I don’t know who said it, but I read somewhere that the true purpose of all art is to reduce shame. To make us feel less alone, give us the sense that others feel as we feel. So, to be watching something with your parent, sharing something with them, and maybe understanding each other better afterward…that’s high cotton.
None of which answers your question. My parents are both still with us, yes. My dad’s long retired now, but he was a very senior judge in his time. Actually, the character of Graham in MARIGOLD HOTEL – the guy Tom Wilkinson plays – was pretty much a homage to him. He’s kind, fair, gentle, very funny, and piercingly intelligent, all of which I grew up respecting enormously. And my mum is beautiful, passionate and compassionate, endlessly generous with her time and love. So, I’m as fortunate as I am proud to be their son.
CH: When you decided to pursue a life in the arts, were they at all surprised by it?
OP: Not as surprised as I was. I never had any aspiration to write as a kid, and I went to college without a clue as to what my future would be. I wrote a short play while I was there and put it in a drawer with absolutely no plan or ambition for it. But very luckily, a friend of mine read it, put it on, and it went okay. Agents came, commissioning people came, and my parents came. And they all seemed to like it. So, I started to think, maybe this could be a thing. My point is, it’s really lucky it worked out because I had nothing else in my locker.
Thinking that it’s going to be Maggie Smith delivering your gag totally raises the bar, partly because she’s fucking terrifying, but mainly because she’s a genius, so if you’re not giving her something worthwhile then you’re wasting a gigantic gift.
CH: MARIGOLD HOTEL is a film predicated on a bunch of British pensioners deciding to spend the rest of their lives in a retirement hotel in India. The moment I hear that pitch, I begin to assemble a dream cast in my mind. I bring this up because many of your films are populated by what most screenwriters and/or directors would consider dream casts. To what degree do you write with an actor’s voice in mind and have you ever reflected on why so many obscenely talented people are so willing to utter your words onscreen?
OP: I think of the eventual cast of MARIGOLD HOTEL, I had five of them in my head before I started writing. And then I wrote very deliberately for those guys. But I was still stunned to get them. I loved doing that, though, and I found that it was a big help to me writing. Thinking that it’s going to be Maggie Smith delivering your gag totally raises the bar, partly because she’s fucking terrifying, but mainly because she’s a genius, so if you’re not giving her something worthwhile then you’re wasting a gigantic gift.
OP (cont’d): With MAMMA MIA! HERE WE GO AGAIN, obviously I inherited most of the cast, which was an insane privilege, but when the new character of Ruby enters near the end, I did write in the script, “Whoever directs this, this part is to be played by Cher”.
CH: But then you got her – how?!
OP: When we offered it to her, she made us wait for ages, which is only right and proper because she owns time. Then she turned us down, at least twice, I think. I kept writing back, sending her the script again, saying, “I don’t think you quite understand, we start soon, so you really need to say yes quickly? And eventually, she gave in. George [Clooney] and Julia [Roberts], as well [with TICKET TO PARADISE]. My co-writer Daniel Pipski and I totally wrote for them. So much so that in the first draft the characters were called Georgia and Julius. But that seemed just a little too desperate on our part, so we switched Julius to David. As to why they say yes, I don’t really reflect on it, no. I’m not sure it would help me to analyze it and then start second-guessing myself. I’m just really grateful that they do.
CH: So, we can’t cover your whole oeuvre, but there are three films I’d like to tackle in some detail here. The second is one that also connects me deeply to my mother, but in this case, it’s about dealing with the raw grief that followed her death. Tell me, how did MAMMA MIA! HERE WE GO AGAIN happen? And let’s just call it MAMMA MIA 2 from here on, for brevity’s sake.
OP: Again, while I’m really sorry for your loss, it means the world that MAMMA MIA 2 gave you a joyful and cathartic experience. I’m sure the catharsis part wasn’t part of the studio’s plans for the movie. It certainly wasn’t a part of mine.
I got the gig because a friend of mine, Richard Curtis, suggested me to the producer since I was both cheaper and more available than he was.
CH: Now I certainly need to know more.
OP: I got the gig because a friend of mine, Richard Curtis [writer-director NOTTING HILL], suggested me to Judy Craymer the producer since I was both cheaper and more available than he was. I met her, she’s fantastic, and we talked about why the sequel hadn’t happened in all that time despite the fact that the first movie had done so great and ABBA still had a huge and wonderful back catalog to explore.
CH: I would’ve had the same question.
OP: The main reason was that Meryl and everyone else, to their enormous credit, didn’t want to tell a story that didn’t need to be told, just so they could get paid. So, my initial task was to come up with enough of an emotionally impactful reason to be back with these guys, bearing in mind in particular Meryl’s mistrust of sequels. So, I had the idea of [her character] Donna dying. Births, marriages, and deaths, I guess - and if the first movie had the marriage, maybe I could do one of the others.
Then my brilliant friend Scarlett suggested that the movie mimic the prequel/sequel structure of GODFATHER II, and I realized that if I did that, I could get a birth in there as well. Without Scarlett’s inspiration, my initial conceit would never have worked. You couldn’t do a whole movie about mourning - it wouldn’t be what people had every right to expect after the first MAMMA MIA. But the uproarious joy of the origin story seemed to allow for some more emotional beats set against it. So that’s what I pitched, and bless them, they bought it – so that’s what I wrote.
That might sound like a ballsy move, asking for one of the more famous songs in the world to be rewritten, but it was more born of desperation.
CH: It’s a remarkable balance you strike because you see-saw between sadness and joy more and more as the film progresses.
OP: It was always a tightrope, and until the first screening I wasn’t at all sure that we’d got it right. The shift from the tearful Amanda and Meryl in the chapel to the giddy joy of all the cast dancing together in the end credits is a big old jolt, which is why to smooth it out even slightly I asked [ABBA’s] Benny Andersson to write a new intro to “Super Trouper”, the song they all perform at the end. That might sound like a ballsy move, asking for one of the more famous songs in the world to be rewritten, but it was more born of desperation. And it’s a testament to not just his genius but his generosity that he got it – and nailed it.
OP (cont’): But I also think life vacillates like that. People think of MARIGOLD HOTEL as a feel-good comedy, or whatever, but Tom Wilkinson dies pretty close to the end and the characters are all devastated by it. It has a dramatic purpose — beyond just being dramatic — in that it raises the emotional stakes for all the characters and leads them to some big decisions. But it’s also just the way things go. My way of getting through pretty much any shit I’m going through is to imagine myself with a couple of friends in a month’s time, a year’s time, whatever, having a cup of tea and just pissing ourselves laughing at what I went through. It’s the darkness that gets you to the light.
CH: I don’t know how many people who know me would understand this, but every time I watch a MAMMA MIA film, the original or yours, I say some version of “God, I would kill to work on something this joyous” to my wife as the credits roll. Maybe it’s the appeal of the light you describe. What was it like for you?
OP: The whole thing was a gift. The gig itself, that I got because of someone else. The structure, that I was given by someone else. The characters that someone else had already created. And the music, not just divinely written but actually lodged deep in the DNA of everyone who’s ever heard it, loaded with their memories both happy and sad. And I just got to play with it all.
Some [songs] you have to slightly crowbar in, and some you invent a whole character for – which was Andy Garcia, who exists for ninety-three minutes solely so that Cher can then reveal his first name, and sing “Fernando” to him.
CH: Tell me more about the songs.
OP: I went to stay with Richard for a couple of days, with a rough idea of the two storylines, and we pinned up our favorite songs on the wall. Then we just talked through the movie, trying to crowbar in songs where we could. Some came very easy – “Mamma Mia” itself is when Lily has just had her heart broken, so that was a natural fit. Some you have to slightly crowbar in, and some you invent a whole character for – which was Andy Garcia, who exists for ninety-three minutes solely so that Cher can then reveal his first name, and sing “Fernando” to him.
CH: In a film filled with details and decisions I love, pulling off “Fernando” was one of the high points. The other, at least for me, was making “Waterloo” work as part of the narrative rather than as a distinct coda as it was in the original.
OP: That’s a relief. When I first went to Stockholm to meet ABBA, they were lovely and respectful - just encouraged me to crack on however I wanted. But the one thing they did say was that they would like the songs to be more part of the narrative, as they are in a musical, rather than the action just stopping for a song, which is the hallmark of a jukebox musical. So that was always my goal because what’s better than making ABBA happy.
CH: It does feel like a good life goal.
OP: To that end, I did ask if they’d be up for rewriting the lyrics of some songs, and Björn [Ulvaeus] was incredibly generous in doing that. Clearly, you can’t mess with the most famous bangers, as people want to sing along, but others changed a fair bit. “My Love, My Life” was one. And “I’ve Been Waiting For You”, which was originally a love song, became a love song from a mother to a child. Bless Björn, he’s such a good guy.
CH: What happened after your stay with Richard Curtis? For example, how the hell did you get to direct a sequel to biggest British film of all time?
OP: Richard and I laughed a lot in those two days, and then I wrote it very fast. It just flew out. I had the first meeting in September, delivered a draft on Christmas Eve, and it was greenlit on January 2nd. Then maybe a month later, to my enormous surprise, they offered it to me to direct. I’ll never know what happened in that time, if a bunch of other people turned it down, but if so, I’m grateful to them, too - although I should say that I wasn’t originally. I’d directed two movies before, the combined budget of which wouldn’t have paid for one day’s lunch on the set of MAMMA MIA 2, so I had no idea if having cheerfully written a dance sequence on fourteen boats, I could get even close to pulling it off. But most of our regrets are the things we didn’t do, so I said yes, and got lucky.
That dichotomy, between reflection and action, has always fascinated me, and MAMMA MIA 2 was just another chance to play with it.
CH: One of the most elegant aspects of the film is how it explores how moments in time connect us in ways we recognize, but far more often in ways that we will never understand.
OP: It might have been - but probably wasn’t — Kierkegaard who said that life can only be understood backward but must be lived forwards. I think if I had any part in the success of MARIGOLD HOTEL — which I attribute almost entirely to the brilliance of the original concept (not mine), the beauty of the setting, the genius of the deservedly beloved cast, and the wit and style of John Madden – then it was writing a bunch of characters who even though they were a lot nearer the end than the beginning of their lives, were still living them forward. That dichotomy, between reflection and action, has always fascinated me, and MAMMA MIA 2 was just another chance to play with it.
There’s something about a prequel, as well, where the audience knows more about the future than the characters in the story do. Which is why most prequels suck, incidentally. Or at least are dramatically inert. But in this case, with it only being half the story, and watching how one moment influences another much later, that all just felt like fun and fertile stuff to me.
CH: Memory, especially related to grief, is so complicated and confusing. The past can slam into you. Music is certainly one of the great conveyors of this – it transports us to moments in our lives just like smells do – but as often as you used music to transition between time periods in MAMMA MIA 2, you also used movement and objects, tricks of editing, to move seamlessly between time periods and locations. Was this decision just practical, to keep the audience firmly grounded in where they were in the experience, or were you attempting to accomplish something more?
OP: I was trying to give you a good time. That’s all I’m ever trying to do, really. But I’m always disappointed in movies that jump more or less arbitrarily into flashbacks, without any link, whether it’s visual, aural, or whatever, to what we were just seeing. It’s like they shot two different movies, and just stitched them together fairly randomly in the edit. So yes, I thought about it a lot, both in the writing, during prep, and even during shooting. Sometimes you don’t know till you actually see the set what’s going to work. Lily’s transition into Meryl in the chapel is one of those - which was a little scary, not having that, since it was going to be a biggie. But a couple of days before we shot there, they’d finished building the set, so I went in with Bob [Yeoman] the DP, and we just wandered around, suggesting things. And then I saw the font, and that was that.
CH: Your most recent film, TICKET TO PARADISE, was another huge hit. On its surface, it appears to promise more of what you’ve built much of your career on – character-driven, but feel-good stories. Maybe that’s because of the iconic stars out front and the label romantic comedy we give it. But I detected a degree of cynicism absent from much of your earlier work. There’s a palpable — albeit hilarious — bitterness in both leads, divorced parents trying to sabotage their daughter’s wedding before they finally rediscover what they loved about each other. I’m curious if you noticed this sharper-edged approach as you worked on the story both on the page and on set.
I just didn’t think [TICKET TO PARADISE] was…I’m hesitating to say “in my wheelhouse” because we shouldn’t pigeonhole ourselves, the industry does quite enough of that already. It just wasn’t a good fit for me.
OP: Thank you again for thinking about my stuff to such a degree, and for noticing something like that. Because you’re totally right about the cynicism. I actually wasn’t going to write the movie - I originally turned it down for precisely that reason.
My friend Sarah [Harvey], who went on to produce it with Working Title, told me the original story, about two friends of hers who weren’t divorced, and it wasn’t Bali – but they had gone somewhere exotic to try and break up their daughter’s marriage. I got it immediately, and right there in the café told Sarah exactly how the film should go. It should be a divorced couple, they should be played by George and Julia, the guy should be a Balinese seaweed farmer, it should end with them jumping off the boat, and have really good luck with it because I wasn’t going to write it. I just didn’t think it was…I’m hesitating to say “in my wheelhouse” because we shouldn’t pigeonhole ourselves, the industry does quite enough of that already. It just wasn’t a good fit for me. But then I thought of my friend Dan Pipski, who’d worked with me as an exec many times and is way smarter and funnier than I am.
CH: I’m a big fan of Dan’s. I think I’ve known him for about a decade now.
OP: He’s a big fan of yours, too. We’ve been friends for twenty years, I think, and the pleasure and privilege of collaborating with him made writing the film not just more attractive, but actually possible. He’s an enormously kind and affable soul, but there’s a bite to his wit that I don’t have, and there’s no question we wouldn’t have got the cast we did – particularly George, who hugely appreciated the sharper edges – if I’d written it alone.
CH: What I found myself most grateful for by the end of the film is how you and your collaborators resurrected a style of screwball comedy that helped define cinema for its first fifty or so years because everything I just said about TICKET TO PARADISE could be said about, say, IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT or THE PHILADELPHIA STORY.
OP: Yet again, thanks for that. You’ve completely articulated our goal in both writing and making the movie. Those were two of the three films I watched regularly during the process — the last was HIS GIRL FRIDAY — and I referenced them with the actors too.
CH: I could’ve easily referenced HIS GIRL FRIDAY, too, which is a personal favorite of mine with THE PHILADELPHIA STORY.
OP: THE PHILADELPHIA STORY is actually Julia’s favorite movie. She knows the entire thing by heart. George probably does, too, since he knows almost every film ever made by heart, extraordinary man that he is. The biggest compliment he used to pay me was when he looked at the monitor as we set up a shot, or after we’d finished a scene or whatever, he’d grin and say, “Old school!” Obviously, there’s nothing nicer than pleasing Clooney – it’s like a golf shot. So that became our watchword.
CH: Clooney is such a fascinating actor to me because in some ways he seems to be evolving backward through leading man history. Early on, he was the eighties/nineties action hero, then the thoughtful character actor of the American New Wave, then the suave and witty Rat Pack lead when humor was something to make look casual and unintentional, and now he’s doing screwball comedy complete with wacky faces and physical gags. I half expect him to star in a silent film next.
OP: Well, if he does, it’ll be great. He’s up there with the most extraordinary people I’ve ever met, a genuine polymath. He comes on set, charms the bollocks off everyone there, works really hard, doesn’t go back to his trailer in between set-ups, just hangs out with the crew, knows everyone’s job better than they do but never makes them feel bad about it, then goes home, preps another eight movies and TV shows, runs his excellent charity, writes some speeches for Democratic politicians, and organizes the March for Peace. All while looking like that. It’s preposterous, really.
I’d hope that in my life I’m always trying to do better, be better. Or what’s the point?
CH: Sickening, more like it! Following up on your Kierkegaard quote — which is the first time someone has referenced German philosophy in these conversations, so thank you for that — I want to suggest something. Your characters often seem to exist in multiple time periods, either literally in the case of MAMMA MIA! or emotionally in the case of, say, BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL. The past is always present, in other words, and the present is always in deep conversation with the past – this includes TICKET TO PARADISE, in which a divorced couple are stuck in a moment of their marriage neither have been able to evolve beyond even while separated. Every character has to constantly react to the trauma of that moment, whether they realize it or not. Have you noticed this at all?
OP: Good lord, I hadn’t noticed that, no! And will do my best to forget it in case I start trying to imitate myself. But to your point, there’s another quote - those that can’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it. I’d hope that in my life I’m always trying to do better, be better. Or what’s the point? So, maybe my characters are like me, trying to use whatever they’ve been through as a springboard to move forward, tell a new story. And if that story can be hopeful and even helpful…well then, as you say, that’s just joyous.
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