Life is, so often, not at all like the movies. It’s not even like TV. There was no lightbulb moment, no ah-ha! that made actress Megan Park decide to move behind the camera for the next creative and professional chapter of her life. In fact, during her early days acting on shows like “The Secret Life of the American Teenager” and “Life with Derek,” Park said she remembered thinking, “I would never want to be a director.”
But while one part of Park might’ve thought “no, never,” what she was really doing was filing away the things she didn’t want to do when it came time to direct. During a recent interview with IndieWire in lower Manhattan in the weeks before the release of her second directorial effort, the Sundance hit “My Old Ass,” Park reflected on some of the earlier lessons that shaped her into such a wonderful chronicler of young, cinematic angst.
“I don’t like that the director is the end-all, be-all, [where] everything has to go through them, and everyone’s scared to piss off the director,” Park said. “I hate that energy. Film sets are always this weird place where it’s like, everyone’s acting like we’re doing something that saves lives, and I’m like, ‘Everyone needs to calm down.’ Yes, there’s a lot of money, and time, and we care, but we’re not saving lives right now. We’re making a movie.”
Mixed into that energy was something else: the sense that Park wasn’t being authentic or true to herself in some way. She never wants that for her actors, including “My Old Ass” standout Maisy Stella, who stars in Park’s latest as a teenager readying to move into adulthood, only to be thrown for a loop when her sardonic older self (Aubrey Plaza) appears to warn her of some of the growing-pain pitfalls to come.
“Unfortunately, there was not a lot of experiences in front of the camera that were really positive ones [for me], and that’s part of the reason why I feel like I wanted to work really hard to create a different situation,” she said. “Especially as a young actor, it’s not always the best vibe. I played a teenager for 20 years, far beyond when I actually wasn’t a teenager anymore. I rarely felt like anything I was doing or saying or wearing was anything that I would actually do. It felt really inauthentic. Not always, but a lot of the time, and it was frustrating.”
Five years after “The Secret Life of the American Teenager” ended its run — Park had a starring role on the ABC Family series for its full five seasons, which also starred a rising Shailene Woodley — she started to explore writing and directing. In early 2020, she began production on her first feature, a deep-feeling drama called “The Fallout,” which explores the aftermath of a school shooting on a group of teens, starring Jenna Ortega and Maddie Ziegler (Woodley took a supporting role).
For a first feature, it was a risky endeavor. It paid off: The film debuted at SXSW in 2021, where it won the Narrative Feature awards (the festival’s highest honors) in both the audience and jury categories. Park also picked up the Brightcove Illumination Award, given to a director on the rise (full disclosure: I was on that jury, and it was a pleasure to see that our rising winner was already a major hit with festival audiences). HBO Max picked up the film after the festival, releasing it on its streaming platform in January 2022.
Park wasn’t just a director on the rise; she was one uniquely suited to telling stories about Generation Z. The secret? She remembers what it was like to feel inauthentic on the screen. “[When I’m directing now], everything is like, ‘Would you do that? Do you feel comfortable with that? Do you feel like the character?’ I remember being an actor and wearing an outfit that I felt like shit in and insecurity throwing my whole performance, the whole day,” Park said. “Those things really do matter, especially for young actors who often don’t have a say, and it’s like a 60-year-old dude dressing them, telling them it’s cool. It’s nice to try to get to do my best to do the coming-of-age thing in the most authentic way possible.”
Park’s own coming-of-age was pretty authentic, at least away from the cameras. She grew up in the towns of Lindsay and London in Canada’s Ontario providence. Her father, who passed away earlier this year, was a dentist. Her sister wasn’t interested in acting at all.
“I didn’t grow up in an industry family or industry town. When you’re into the arts, and you’re from a small town, [and] it’s like, go to theater camps, go to the after-school kid’s acting group,” Park said. “That’s what I did, and I enjoyed it, but that was really the only arts thing. There wasn’t a writing and directing for film program for kids in the town I was from. I didn’t even know that was a job. My parents didn’t have a TV until I was much older.”
The directors she enjoyed working with as a young actor also, funnily enough, hailed from an acting background. One that still stands out: fellow Canadian and former teen star Jason Priestley, who directed five episodes of “Secret Life of the American Teenager.” “He was always very kind and very encouraging of the young actors: ‘Maybe you want to sit on the dolly while the camera is running? Do you want to try these different things?’” she recalled. “He was such a positive influence, just good energy.”
Also good energy? Her family, who helped put things into serious perspective. “My sister would always joke with me when I’d come home from set. She’d be like, ‘How was your pretending contest?’ She was saying it in a funny way, not in a mean way, but I was like, that’s a good reality check,” Park said. “My biggest thing is going in, being open-minded, and trying to create an environment where everybody is equal and everybody has a say.”
While there was no single moment that pushed Park into filmmaking, there were some flickers. Park recalls a conversation that helped crystallize that her ideas could have tremendous value on the big screen. She was shooting Michael Dowse’s charming 2013 rom-com “What If” (originally titled “The F Word”), in which she played star Zoe Kazan’s sister. Kazan had just finished shooting “Ruby Sparks,” which Kazan not only starred in (alongside long-time partner Paul Dano) but also wrote.
Park loved working with Kazan — someone she still says she “idolizes” — and felt comfortable mentioning an idea she had to the newly minted screenwriter. “I don’t know what it was. I think it was telling her an idea I had, and she was encouraging me,” Park said. “Then I wrote something and sent it to her, and she wrote back, like, ‘This is really good.’ I just thought [the idea] was a joke, but she’s such a genius. So I wrote a pilot. All the sudden, it was like everything clicked for me in a way that nothing ever had.”
Suddenly, Park said, she knew what she wanted to do. (CBS bought the pilot, but it never went ahead. Park was undeterred.) “I remember, truthfully, I was always on set, like, ‘When’s my wrap time?’” she said of her earlier acting jobs. “I was just like, ‘It’s fun, it’s not fulfilling me, it’s not something I can’t wait to do every day,’ and now, it’s like the opposite. I will always want to direct.”
Park doesn’t rule out a return to acting, but said she “doesn’t really miss it at all.” The one thing she won’t do? “My true nightmare would be ever acting in something I wrote and directed,” she said with a laugh. “That sounds like a hellscape to me. So that, I can say with certainty, will probably never happen. Will never happen. Not a probably!”
“The Fallout” sprang from an emotional place for Park. While she said her childhood in Canada was without the threat of school shootings, once she moved to America, she couldn’t escape the barrage of stories about them.
“I started, obviously, seeing all this shit in the news, and I couldn’t believe that kids were just facing this reality every single day and that everybody was seemingly doing nothing about it,” the filmmaker said. “I was so sickened. I started thinking about what if my kids, one day, had to go to school here? How am I going to get through the day? It really just was something that I couldn’t stop thinking about.”
Only later did Park realize that her young stars, Jenna Ortega and Maddie Ziegler (who also stars in “My Old Ass“), were the same age as many of the Sandy Hook victims at the time of the shooting. From the start, it was essential for Park to get the details and the emotions of the film right. She had to — for her stars and her audience.
Her SXSW experience was untraditional: Because of COVID-19, the festival was held virtually for the first time ever. Park still hasn’t seen “The Fallout” in a theater with a full audience, but that the SXSW crowd responded to it so well remains “amazing” to her. She still beams when talking about it.
“That whole thing was such a trip, because that was my first movie and, even on the acting side, I hadn’t really ever experienced that,” Park said. “The people from SXSW were calling me and being like, ‘You won this’ and ‘you won this’ and ‘you won this.’ I didn’t really process what a big deal that was, and [because of COVID] they just sent the trophies in the mail.”
The film helped further propel not just Park, but star Ortega, offering her one of her first dramatic leading roles. “When I started working with her, I was like, ‘Holy fuck, this girl is incredible and down to do anything, is so amazing to work with, and such an incredible human being,’” she said. “She can do anything. Every frame of that movie, of her, was usable. There was never like, ‘Oh, Jenna didn’t pull through in this moment.’ If anything wasn’t usable it was from, like, technical error. I’m thrilled for her and I take zero credit for her, it’s been all just her genuine genius. I hope we get to work together again someday.”
She has similar hopes for Stella and her career. “They’re so, so different and so special in their own way; they’re such polar opposites,” she said. “I’ve said to Maisy, like, ‘See what Jenna’s doing? That’s definitely going to be you when this thing comes out.’”
Park’s sophomore film debuted at Sundance earlier this year, where it proved to be a crowd-pleasing favorite and commercial to boot. Produced by Indian Paintbrush, Scythia Films, and Lucky Chap Entertainment (producers Margot Robbie and Tom Ackerley were big “Fallout” fans), Amazon MGM picked it up in a competitive deal at the festival. A platform release is now afoot: Last week, the film hit New York and Los Angeles (big audiences turned out for screenings that promised post-screening Q&As with Park and her stars). Next week, it heads to wide release. “My Old Ass” will stream on Prime Video later this year — perfect sleepover fodder.
Park stayed nimble during the film’s summer 2022 shoot in her native Ontario. Consider this: The film was already in production by the time they nabbed Plaza. “We got down to the wire, and we still didn’t know who we were going to have, and finally we all sat down in one of the trailers on set, and we were like, ‘Who do we want to see on camera? Who do we love?’” she said. “And her name came up, and I was like, immediately, yes.”
Initially, Park had written the older Elliott as being more than a decade older than Plaza, but that proved difficult to cast. “It was down to finding the right younger Elliott, and then to cast around Maisy,” Park said. “It was really hard. It was more about matching the energy, and not like, ‘Who has the exact same hair color? Who has the eye color?’ Their chemistry is so amazing. They’re obviously not the same person, but together they’re so magical that I’d rather watch them together, versus somebody who’s just a clone of Maisy that’s not really a match energetically.”
Also, as Park said with a laugh, if you’re willing to go along with the fact that this is “actually happening” by way of a magical mushroom trip, you can get over the fact that they don’t have the same exact hair color. The vibe, as the kids would say, is right.
Despite not growing up in an “industry family,” Park is part of one now: She met her husband, Tyler Hilton, while they were shooting Jon Poll’s coming-of-age (of course!) comedy “Charlie Bartlett” in 2006. Like his wife, Hilton is a multi-talented creator who has, in recent years, turned away from acting to focus more on his music. Alongside Jaco Caraco, Hilton scored “My Old Ass,” which marks his first composing credit.
“We’ve always been able to do work really well together,” Park said. “I feel like the score in this is so exactly what I wanted it to be: Iconic. I was very specific. I was like, ‘I want it to be the “Casper” score, like John Williams-esque but hopefully a bit more modern.’ He’s always my first reader. Always. He’s a great reader. He’s very emotional and open. He’s my sounding board.”
When Park gave birth to her and Hilton’s first child in 2019, she said, her “entire life changed. Everything. Including the priorities of stories I wanted to tell, the perspective, everything. Every project that I’m taking on now, I’m really looking at how much time is this taking away? Is it worth it for the story I’ve got to tell? How can I create it around what my family’s doing? My parents always put me and my sister first. Everything else comes second.” (The pair welcomed their second child this summer, just a few months after Park took “My Old Ass” to Sundance.)
Things are busy on the professional front, too, though Park is keen to stay true to her instincts. “People are sending me a lot of books to adapt and film remakes and things like that,” she said. “But I’ve got so many original ideas and stories that I want to tell, and I want to try to get those out. Because I feel like there will probably be a time when I might not have an original idea, or maybe there won’t be! I wish there was more producers out there, taking the chance on people like Lucky Chap. It’s not that there’s a lack of ideas out there; it’s just a lack of people trusting them and funding them.”
She’s got plenty in the works — including a new feature and a TV show with the folks at Lucky Chap — and while they neither are explicitly coming-of-age stories, teenagers are involved. “I’m not one of those people who’s like, ‘And now I’m done with telling coming-of-age stories. I reject that genre!’ I love that genre,” Park said. “This younger generation is so fascinating to me, because they’ve been through so much and they deserve to be taken seriously.”
She added with a smile, “It’s really fun to try to get it right and do that coming-of-age story that I wish I had, that I wish I’d gotten to be in.”
An Amazon MGM Studios release, “My Old Ass” is now in limited release with a full rollout to follow on Friday, September 27. It will stream on Prime Video at a later date.
