Get comfortable with being uncomfortable, because it’s not about you… this is not only a line in the movie but also a theme of Ordinary Angels. The Lionsgate film is inspired by a true story of a hairdresser, played by Hilary Swank, who single-handedly rallies an entire community to help a widowed father, played by Alan Ritchson, save the life of his critically ill young daughter.
We sat down with director Jon Gunn to talk about finding purpose, the film set in a historic blizzard, shooting in Winnipeg, and how the fingerprints of his own family are all over this movie. Plus Swank’s personal connection to the organ transplant aspect of the story.
Interviewed for Family Entourage
Family Entourage: Ordinary Angels is inspired by true events. I was not aware, what about you? When was this story brought on your radar?
Jon Gunn: Yeah, it’s very true to the true events by the way. It’s one of those miraculous, true stories that you can hardly believe really happened. But this came into my life through Lionsgate. Jon and Andy Irwin and I had partnered up with Lionsgate back in 2018 and had a whole slate of films that we made together. And those ended up being American Underdog, I Still Believe, and Jesus Revolution and this project was one that Lionsgate actually brought to us. And they had said, we don’t want to just finance your movies, we want to be creative partners and bring you things.
And this was a project that had been a passion project of theirs that had been in development for more than 15 years. I mean, I think almost 20 years. It’s a true story that took place in Louisville, Kentucky in 1994 against the backdrop of the worst blizzard in the history of Louisville, Kentucky. And it was one of those beautiful human stories. A lot of people from Louisville know about where a father had lost his wife and had two daughters and was struggling financially with just drowning in medical bills. And his youngest daughter, who is five years old, was dying and needed a liver transplant.
And so the story of this family, which was known by the people who knew them, sort of got magnified by this woman who did not know them, but heard about them. And this is played by Hilary Swank. Her name is Sharon Stevens. She’s a hairdresser struggling with alcoholism, broken in her own way and was like, I’m going to help that family. Her heart just broke for this little girl and for this family. And she’s like, I’m going to help them whether they like it or not. And she just kind of crashed into their life with all this enthusiasm and unstoppable energy and started to help raise awareness, raise money, erase their medical bills, and then arrange for the very complicated necessary elements for her transplant. And on the day when a liver became available, it was the worst snowstorm in Louisville history.
It was impossible to even get out the front door, let alone make it in the six hour window you have for the viability of an organ, and get to Omaha, which was hours and hours away and a flight away. So she helped to carve a path through a snowstorm and mobilize a community. And the thing that’s beautiful about this film is that it is a reminder of when a moment in time or a period of time where if you think back to when communities supported each other and would rush out their door to help someone they didn’t know because a thing to do. And for Sharon, she was one person who made a massive difference in this life. And so the reason it’s called Ordinary Angels is because it doesn’t take impressive people to change lives. You don’t have to be a CEO of the company or an inventor or a celebrity.
FE: The story itself is so inspiring just for all those reasons that you mentioned. And one of the lines that stood out to me was when Hilary’s character says, she’s speaking to the dad, and she’s like, well, you get comfortable with being uncomfortable because it’s not about you. And there’s so much that we can glean from that just on every aspect of things that we do in life. Maybe unpack that theme a little bit.
JG: That was true that I loved, Ed (Alan [Ritchson]’s character) is not a man who wants to accept help from other people. He’s a blue collar working man who wants to get it done himself. And Sharon is not a woman that knows how to take no for an answer. So she saw the need. She’s going to fill it. Like it or not, we call her Sharon Brockovich a lot.
She is that type of woman. She’s going to move mountains, but that doesn’t always come neat and tidy. And so it’s very uncomfortable for Ed. And I actually wrote that line into the movie where he says, I’m not comfortable with this. And she says, what you said, better get comfortable being uncomfortable because not about you, it’s about your little girl. And it is true. It is hard to be uncomfortable in life, but often that’s where we need to be for change to happen. And I say a lot that for me, my way into this movie as I was doing a draft of a pass of the draft and also directing it, was that this is a film about how helping other people often helps us heal ourselves. And that’s sort of a beautiful byproduct of taking the tension off of yourself and helping another person. It’s healing for everyone. And so I love that message and I love the journey of that. And it’s a true story and an amazing true story.
FE: I think Hilary Swank is perfectly cast as Sharon. One of the things that I’m interested in knowing in any of the conversations that you had with her when it came for prep… I know she was open about her father having a lung transplant, and then with this little five-year-old in the film needing one, what conversations come up between the two of you. If she drew off of that, what did that kind of look like?
JG: Yeah, for sure. I mean, it was one of those great gifts where you can connect with the material in a very personal way. When her name came up, I was just hoping and praying we would get her, I’m such a fan of hers. Along the way I knew about her father. She had been very vocal about her father. Some people had questioned why they hadn’t seen her in the last few years and more things, and it’s because she was with her father in his final years. And so that was a really beautiful personal connection for her. And we had a lot of fun right out of the gate with just like, Sharon is a real woman and she’s a firecracker of a woman, and getting her voice and her hair and her wardrobe was really fun, but getting the heart and the brokenness and the struggles as well, I think Hilary just knows how to do all that stuff. The joy of this is rooted in the pain, and the pain of this film is lifted by the joy. And so that balance is really critical, and she and Alan both know how to do that really well, to bring levity and unexpected comedy to out of their very painful moments.
FE: We already know how hard it is to make a film and how long it can take, but then you take that film and you set it in a historic blizzard. What parts were practical? What did that look like? Talk to me a little bit about snow.
JG: Well, every project we take on as a filmmaker, you always hope or I do that there’s going to be a challenge or something I haven’t done before. So when I read the script initially, I was like, okay, that’s exciting. How are we going to pull that off in a way that feels authentic and grounded? I wanted this true story set in the nineties to feel like a movie that was lived in the nineties. I didn’t want it to feel like a modern day visual effects spectacle thing, right? It needed to be really grounded and you needed to feel the cold, and feel the snow, and have that be real. So I was very adamant about we need to go to the snow for this film. I think we all sort of agreed. And so we shot in Winnipeg. We scouted this movie in January, which is 30 degrees below zero. It’s the coldest thing I’ve ever experienced. And it’s hard to describe for those people who haven’t felt the bone chilling cold where no matter how many layers you have on — I mean in broad daylight, took my gloves off for a second to use my iPhone, and my fingers are burning within seconds — your tears just freeze on your eyelashes. We really wanted it to be real snow, and I felt very strongly about it being practical. So meaning that we went to where the snow was when we needed snow. When it wasn’t there we moved it — real snow — from where it was. We have a traffic jam in the snowstorm in the third act of movie that’s like a half a mile stretch of freeway, and over three or four days, I think they brought 150 truckloads of snow to fill that, with real snow. We shot sometimes when it was actually snowing, and then we have snow machines that real snow is falling in the scenes.
So it was always very practical one way or the other, and it was very cold. And the challenge of it was that we needed the third act to be a snowstorm, but the first two acts of the movie needed to be Summer, Fall, you know sunny. So what we did is we started in March, we waited out, we had to try and guess where is the sweet spot where we’re going to have the snow for a week, and then all of it needs to melt and go away. And by the way, it did not cooperate. It did not melt and go away, and then it rained and then it snowed again and it dumped a record snowstorm in Winnipeg. We had to shut down production for a couple days because it snowed so hard and so many feet when we needed it to be gone. So we just took advantage of shooting as much as we could of that and then, thank God, we literally had two to three days at the end of the shoot of, and we shot everything we needed to shoot in the sunshine during those days. But along the way, it meant that we had crews of people shoveling, snows out of a yard, putting plants and flowers and trees just to make it look like one house in a neighborhood covered in snow wasn’t. There’s a lot of work, but man, it pays off. So it is a very, very practical movie in that we’re not using visual effects to create those elements.
FE: I loved true to the time too, because the whole time I kept being like, I want to have a cell phone in the car so bad!
JG: I know, by the way, it’s so funny I said that right away when I read the third act initially, I was like, well, here’s a movie that wouldn’t have any tension at all if it happened today because a cell phone would solve everybody’s problem. But yeah, back then it was like the phones are mounted to the wall and then maybe every couple miles there’s an emergency phone. I know. But then we use, use the radio and the television and the news to communicate with the community, and that was kind of cool. The third act of the movie is about unifying and uniting a community around saving a girl. But the way they all heard about it, and this was true, was through the radio and then through the news on the television. So that was a fun way for everyone to tune into the same channel and be hearing the moment to moment updates or whether this journey was going to succeed.
FE: And one of the things that the movie hinges on are these two little girls, and they’re so darling and so good, and children might not be as challenging as snow, but talk to me about being able to draw these performances out of them because you do need to feel for them and root for them and laugh along in some of that pain and sorrow.
JG: I’ll tell you, I have done a lot of movies with kids, and in this case, yet again, this little girl who’s sick is pivotal to the film. You have to love her feel for her. She’s got to be adorable, but human and it’s a lot of lines and a lot of dialogue and a lot of real emotional scenes. And then her older sister who’s just a few years older. So we went on a hunt. That was my biggest concern, right beyond the snow, was like, how do we find these kids? So we spent months as you do hundreds and hundreds of auditions and whittling it down, and little Emily Mitchell, I mean, she is just a doll. You can hardly believe it. She’s like an old soul in the little kid’s body. And then her older sister is played by Skywalker Hughes, which her name is Skywalker, which is so cool.
And they’re both just astonishing. But then you have to find kids that can live in the moment. They have to be able to do the basics, memorize the lines, and take direction. And then for me, it’s about creating an environment on set where we’re not thinking about cameras and lights and we’re just living in moments. And so a lot of times when I work with kids, we do a lot of bonding beforehand. I took ’em out on a roller skating adventure to make sure they knew how to roller skate because there was a scene. It turns out that little Emily did not know how to roller skate. Thank God we did that. We spent two months getting her up to speed just to be able to do what she did. But those are really bonding experiences. We go to movies, we’d hang out. Alan and Hilary are both wonderful, just connecting with the kids.
And then a lot of times then I will on set roll cameras very quietly without calling action and without letting anyone know we’re shooting. And then we’ll, for two or three minutes just be living in a moment together and then all of a sudden I’ll just give a nod to Alan or Hilary and the scene starts and then the kids kind of realize, oh, we’re doing that thing that I know we’re supposed to do. And so a lot of it for me is about figuring out how to shake off the artifice of the filmmaking process and just find ways to live comfortably and let kids figure out their own blocking. How would you do this thing? They do weird stuff, kids, if you let them be weird, it’s wonderful.
FE: It was definitely authentic because my youngest is a daughter and she is five. So very much what’s in my front of my mind as I’m watching this film, what if that were happening to our family? And the playful side of her was what I thought you captured so well too, and then the sisters back and forth because that seemed very real and natural and genuine for that age.
JG: Well, I’ll tell you what, my daughter is 17 now, but I will admit there’s a few things in this movie that came right out of my daughter’s mouth when she was five, and I have this document that I’ve been saving her whole life every time my daughter said some funny, amazing thing as kids do. It’s amazing how quickly you can forget those things. I know my wife and I keep this document where we write down the whole story of what the funny thing was and how old she was when she said it. So I went back to my document and found a few really wonderful little exchanges from when my daughter was five. And in fact, the belly song in this movie, there’s a moment where Alan Ritchson has to sing this little belly song to his daughter when she’s in the hospital. And my wife made that song up for my daughter when she was a toddler, and so we were trying to figure out something for him to sing to her, and we were trying to get the rights to Sweet Child of Mine or something kind of funny and unexpected to sing to a kid, but we didn’t know what we’d be able to afford at the time. So I was like, well, my wife used to sing this thing, and so everyone loved it. Alan was like, are you kidding me? This is adorable. So now my wife is a published songwriter.
FE: I love that it was real and came from that moment too, because that even adds to the whole authenticity of the family…
JG: The specialness of big movies is that we get to create these time capsules. And so I always try to ask my actors to infuse as much of their life as possible into it. And I do that as well. It’s like, let’s pull some of the things we know are real. It feels less manufactured that way, and the weirdness of real stuff, if you can embrace it, is so much more unexpected and authentic. So I was thrilled that there’s a couple of things from my daughter and my wife that made it into this.
Ordinary Angels in theatres February 23
