Bleecker Street will release the Director James Ponsoldt’s new film ‘Summering’ in theaters nationwide this August 12. For four 11-year-old girls, the final days of summer are both wistful and thrilling, an unwelcome end and an exhilarating beginning. Scripted by Ponsoldt and author Benjamin Percy, the film captures that exquisite moment between childhood and what lies beyond, as its young protagonists take on a mystery unlike anything they have faced before.
“I like to think of this as a platonic love story between four friends,” says Ponsoldt. “They are in the final days before they start middle school, a moment when they are afraid they are saying goodbye to each other. They happen upon a dead body and have to decide what to do. Somehow, they start to believe that keeping this a secret will keep them together.”
Inspired by a desire to share his favorite stories with his young daughter, Ponsoldt realized that some of his most beloved books and movies featured only male protagonists — and sometimes no major female characters at all. “When I was younger there were endless stories about young men and boys, their friendships, their fears and anxieties,” says the director. “For my mother, my sister and now my daughter, there aren’t that many stories like that about young women. As a father, I want better stories for my own daughter, so I have tried to make a film in which she can see herself and explore her imagination and fears and hopes while she is on the cusp of adolescence.”
Ponsoldt discovered that Percy, an acclaimed writer of novels, short stories and comic books, was having a similar experience. “Like every dorky dad, I was excited to share the books and movies I love with my daughter,” says the writer, “from The Hobbit and The Outsiders to The Goonies and Stand By Me. She would enjoy the stories but her comment was always, ‘Where are the girls?’”
Percy recalls a day when his daughter came home from school and went straight to the family computer and started writing. “The title of the story was ‘The Girl Hobbit’ and the first line was something like, ‘This might remind you a lot of The Hobbit but it is very different. The hero is a girl with hairy feet.’ She was at precisely the same point in her life as the girls in Summering, transitioning to middle school and starting the journey into the strange borderlands of the teenage years. Her revisionary instinct inspired me to try and capture that from her point of view.”
Ponsoldt, whose 2013 romantic drama The Spectacular Now has become a classic coming-of-age movie, says he is fascinated by stories about childhood and the ways young people use imagination to process trauma. “As the parent of three young children, I find myself constantly in this gray space of both needing to protect my children and wanting them to live fearlessly. The girls in Summering still have the imaginative tools of childhood without the baggage of adolescence. We frame the story with some elements of fantasy and horror, because the ping-ponging emotional reality of starting middle school can occasionally feel like a horror film.”
Percy, who lives in Minnesota, and Los Angeles-based Ponsoldt collaborated remotely via email. “I would write five or six pages and pass them on to James,” says Percy. “Then he would write over the top of me and we’d edit away. Eventually it became a holistic vision.”
During that process Ponsoldt added one of the plot’s crucial elements, an unsolved mystery based on something that happened in his own Los Angeles neighborhood. “A lot of my neighbors are unhoused people living in tents,” he explains. “A number of years ago, there was a man found dead in his tent. He had died of natural causes and his body could not be identified. I became obsessed and saddened and angered that there was no social safety net for him. I felt a complicity in the death of someone in my community and I wanted to explore that.”
Jennifer Dana, president of the film division of 3311 Productions, was the first producer to sign on to the project. “Jen is responsible for several films that I really love, including Brigsby Bear and The Assistant,” says Ponsoldt. “I have such deep respect for her integrity, taste and sensibility. Best of all, she pushes you to get deeper into the story and the characters to find things that are a little left of center. She gave us invaluable feedback on the story and the characters.”
Ponsoldt knew that he and Percy would have blind spots when it came to telling a story in which all of the protagonists — and most of the supporting characters — are girls or women. “We both have strong, amazing women of different ages in our lives, so we made a pact that at every stage we would bring on female collaborators to scrutinize the story and tell us what we were missing, whether it was our producer or our cinematographer or the actors themselves.”
The idea of creating a story that allows a new generation of women to see themselves on screen as the leads was irresistible to Dana. “I already knew James could elicit great performances, in particular with young talent,” she says. “And he was so passionate about wanting to create a story about adolescence and the trials of growing up that was inspired by films he loved, but with young female protagonists that would appeal to the audience of today.”
Dana brought in producers Peter Block and Cory Neal of A Bigger Boat. A friend and colleague of Dana’s for many years, Block says that they try to provide support for each other’s projects whenever they can. “I was aware of both James as a director and Ben as a comic book writer and novelist, but this was the first screenplay of theirs that Cory and I had read. Like them, we are fathers of daughters, and we loved the idea of making a movie about and for them. My own daughter, Zoe, has a unique voice. She rarely gets to see characters like herself in films, and certainly not in any of the films I had made before Summering.”
Images provided by Falco Ink.
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