When a frantic call to rescue her grandson turns out to be a con, 93-year-old Thelma embarks on a revenge mission. June Squibb, armed with her stolen electric scooter fanny pack and life alert button, isn’t saving the world, but in her own ever-shrinking sphere, righting this wrong is a Herculean task.
Thelma’s stunt coordinator, Ryan Sturz, relished the opportunity to tackle authentic small-scale action, allowing him creative control and more involvement on set. The result is a collaborative experience Sturz adored, and a finished product he speaks of with great pride.
Thelma is now available on all VOD platforms. Read InSession Film’s complete interview with stunt coordinator Ryan Sturz below:
Shadan Larki: Ryan, welcome to InSession Film! Stunt coordinators and stunt workers are having a moment of long-overdue appreciation. There’s been much conversation about what you all do and how you contribute to cinema. Tell me about yourself and your journey to where you are today.
Ryan Sturz: I grew up in the Caribbean in South America and Germany on a steady diet of American movies. John Wayne Westerns, John Ford movies, you name it. And I think just growing up as a boy, I always wanted to break stuff, and the idea of getting paid to break things, crash cars, and all that seems really appealing.
I moved to the U. S. in the, in 1999. I went to film school at USC. I studied film. I learned about camera angles and editing and all that. I learned how to put an action scene together. And that’s been my genesis. I was road racing motorcycles right out of film school. And I thought that I was interested in motorsports. And so I got into the stunt driving aspect of it. I like cowboy work and horses. So, I worked on Westerns and did a lot of horse horseback stuff, but because I had that film school background. I got into the stunt coordinating thing early on.
Pretty early in my stunt career, producers and directors realized I could put a scene together, bringing me on to coordinate. So, other folks might have a performer career for 15 to 20 years before they start to choreograph. For me, it was kind of simultaneous. I started performing and then choreographing almost at the same time.
SL: How do you approach your role as a stunt coordinator and your collaboration with your director?
RS: I like to serve the story first. Somebody will send me a script, and I’ll read it. And I’ll have a pretty good idea of what the action should look like.
For example, a script might say there’s a car crash. But the car crash can be a big flaming ball of fire or just a car in neutral coasting down the road and hitting a tree. If the story calls for the one, I can’t start to set up the other. So, I start to do my stunt breakdown upon first reading. Then, I might even read the story a second time before I talk to the director. I take my notes and know how I would approach things.
When I come up with ideas for how to approach things, I look at them from a creative perspective and also from a financial perspective. How much would I spend on this if I had an unlimited budget, and how could I make this work creatively if we don’t have an unlimited budget? Then I talked to the director and said, ‘Okay, what is your vision for all this?’
The director might agree with me in some scenes and, in other scenes, might say, ‘No, I see this differently.’ And ultimately, he or she is the captain of the ship. So, I will defer to them. There may be a bit of back and forth and a little creative discussion, but typically, the director has an idea of what they want. So, I’ll try to give that to them. Then I have to talk to the assistant directors, and the ADs will give me a schedule. based on that schedule and the discussion I had with the director, I will create a budget, which will go to a producer who will say, ‘Okay, that’s approved.’ Or they’ll say, ‘You don’t have the money.’
Then I have to go back to the director and say, ‘Okay, we can’t do this because of such and such, but here’s an alternative solution. What do you think?’ So, how do I see my role as a stunt coordinator? I’m the liaison between the creatives and the money people, and I just try to make everything work the best possible. I tried to give the director what they wanted within our budget and make it safe at the same time.
SL: What I loved about Thelma is that this is her Mission Impossible, but it’s Mission Impossible without the explosions and hanging off of buildings. I think, unfortunately, many audiences, when they think of stunts, they think of big action, they think of those crazy sequences, but many times it’s not. Can you talk about doing stunt coordination in a way that’s still creative and interesting but on a smaller scale?
RS: I like the smaller-scale stuff. I’ve done quite a few of them. I did some Disney shows, and Rescue Rangers comes to mind. When you think of Rescue Rangers, you don’t think of action.
But if you look at it closely, there is quite a bit of action, but nobody dies, which I’ve come to like; I’m a little older now. I have children. I have young daughters, and I have to stop and think about how much time in my career I have spent thinking about killing people. It’s a little worrisome, and I want to escape that. I want to do fun action. I want to do the Smokey and the Bandit action of the 1970s, which is a more innocent action. Maybe you might have a car chase and even have a fistfight here and there, but it’s all innocent. Nobody gets hurt. It’s all good fun. I like that.
I told you I grew up in South America and Germany, and as a young boy, I remember watching these movies. I understood the concept of play-acting. I understood the concept that it’s theater on a screen. And the thing that intrigued me most was the magic of it all. The illusion. They were crashing cars for real, but nobody was dying. It was a sleight of hand, a magic trick. And that’s what I liked. And that’s what I like about something like Thelma.
I pitched a shot that Josh Margolin, the director, ended up using: We see Thelma (Squibb) go up the stairs.
And then she rounds the corner. She leaves the frame for just a second. We switch her out with a stunt double. When she enters the frame again, we see her feet walking up the stairs. We’re on a close-up of the feet, and it’s a stunt double, and the stunt double trips on the stairs, right? But it’s that sleight of hand, and we pulled it off to make it look like the actress June Squibb is walking up the stairs and tripping. That’s what I’m interested in. I take great joy in that. And so, it doesn’t matter how big the stunt is. I take joy in things like the little things. How can we make the audience think that we have a 94-year-old character falling down a flight of stairs? And make it look real.
SL: What other sort of movie magic tricks were you able to pull off that you’re excited about?
RS: Well, Thelma is riding her scooter through traffic. That’s more dangerous than you’d think, especially in Los Angeles, because people don’t pay attention. We put stunt drivers in cars around her to keep her safe, so the stunt drivers created a buffer between June, and live traffic.
In the retirement home we had a little bit of a scooter chase and crashes, and that was fun. And we could pull it off to where June got to crash a scooter a little bit, you know? So, the stunt double did a big crash, and then June did a little crash, but she was really into it.
She wanted to hit Richard. She was excited about it. I think Richard Roundtree was excited to return to his action roots. We all had a good time.
SL: One of my favorite sequences is when Thelma goes to visit her friend. She’s trying to get something from her house, and she’s having to climb on the bed to reach the thing, and then the gun goes off accidentally. Can you talk about how you make these scenes playful, yet grounded in reality?
RS: You know, that was all Josh. I was there, for sure. But I was there primarily because the bed was squishy, and we were worried about June having to stand on it and maybe falling off. The stunt double did quite a bit, having to jump on and off the bed and all that stuff. The gun was a non-firing replica, so we didn’t have to worry about that.
So, that was all Josh. That’s to his credit; that was his direction to June, and his selection of camera angles, and the feeling for that sequence came off from him. I was simply there. We call that babysitting in the stunt world. I was there simply to babysit and ensure that June didn’t bump her head or get too tired from jumping up and off the bed. That was the extent of what I did on that. Josh did everything else. So, if you liked that scene, that’s for Josh’s credit.
SL: You mentioned the back and forth with a director and the discussions of how things work. Can you discuss a scene where you and Josh worked together to reach a consensus and how that impacted what we ended up seeing?
RS: A scene did not end up making the movie. It was for cost reasons, but there was a big car sequence where Ben (Roundtree) gets into a car and peels out, and skids turn into traffic. That was supposed to be a big drift, a peel-out, and tire smoke. At an intersection, cars were supposed to skid to a halt and maybe even crash into each other. You can see how, on our budget scale, that was just not conceivable. When I first read that, I went to Josh and said, ‘So, how do you see this particular sequence?’
You could play it for comedy, or you could play it straight. And I think we should play it straight because I like straight action comedies. I think it’s funnier. And Josh and I agreed on that. And then we just had to talk about the logistics of how we would do that inside our budget scope.
Producers Chris Kaye and Zoë Worth got involved. And they were all very, very supportive. And we, we tried for a couple of weeks, I think, to make this work. And I kept coming back with different solutions, different combinations of stunt drivers and background drivers and actors. And in the end, it just wasn’t feasible. But that scene was, even though it never made the movie, a great example of a collaboration between the creative Josh and the technician, myself and the producers and trying to make something work that ultimately didn’t work.
But I had good fun working with all of them: Josh, Zoë, and Chris. It was a super collaborative effort.
SL: The film ends with a big climactic sequence with Thelma and the villain of the film, a surprise of sorts. How did you coordinate that?
RS: We cast a stunt double to double the actor. The double ended up being a really good match. I talked a lot to the art department. It was a conversation between [production designer] Brielle Hubert, Josh, and me about how the location should look. Brielle and I recommended where we should hang lights that we could break into. Brielle had an idea of how many she could provide and how many lights we could break.
I recommended where we should place him and the camera to have the biggest impact. Then, we just walked the path with the stunt double a few times. Josh had some ideas for making it a bit more dynamic, and I had some ideas for cutting it. We rehearsed it for half a day and then shot it. And then, if I remember correctly, we had a stunt double for Richard, but in the end, I believe Richard did the hip check part. He wanted to do that himself, and it worked out well. And that’s why having a good stunt double is important: one can play off another actor and keep the actor safe. Sometimes, suppose two actors are fighting or bumping into each other. In that case, they get into character and get a little bit too aggressive with each other, inadvertently, and they’ll end up hurting each other. So, it’s nice to have a stunt guy who will keep the actor safe.
SL: What’s struck me in our conversation is the level of creativity that’s involved in stunt coordination, not just in obviously the planning, but then having to think on the fly and having to come up with multiple options to fit the budget or how things change day to day. Can you talk a little bit more about that? The average moviegoer might not grasp all of those intricacies because you do your job so well, right?
RS: Yeah, you’re exactly right. I think it’s really interesting that you picked up on that. We try to plan, right? But a lot of times, we don’t have the money to plan. Thelma ran very, very well. Chris and Zoë were very supportive from the beginning. They brought me on early. They said, what do you need? I told them what I needed, and they did their best to give it to me. Sometimes, unfortunately, stunts are brought in too late. We are looked at as the technicians, the guy that crashed cars, you know, they think, ‘Oh, some guy’s going to come in and crash a car and walk away.’
Well, if you bring us in early. We can get creatively involved. If you give us the leeway, we can tell you a better way to do it. We can have creative input. We can say that if you put the camera over here, you get this result, and we can help—if we’re asked or brought in early enough. I cannot stress the importance of rehearsals, even for little things and small scenes, because, as you observed, once you get on set, everything changes—time constraints, the actor has a different idea, or the director has changed their mind, or there’s a camera limitation, light, or whatever the case may be. Something will change every time, and the better prepared you are, the more easily you can roll with the punches and come up with a solution on the fly. So yeah, you’re exactly right. I think a lot of creativity goes into making a movie, and it’s not just on my part. It’s a collaborative effort, which is another reason why I like to work on these smaller films: because you create that family atmosphere.
You know, sometimes, if you work on these 200-300 million dollar superhero movies, you’re just a cog in the corporate machine. They just look at you as a number. But if you work on a smaller movie, you’re part of a family. You’re all pulling towards this common goal, and then you can go to your buddy, the art director, and say, ‘Hey, I messed up; I forgot something. Can you help me out?’ Or you can tell the lighting technician, ‘Hey, I have an idea here for a lighting gag. What do you think? Should we pitch that to Josh?’ You know, so that’s why I want to be in this business. I like that collaborative and creative environment. I like to be able to solve problems on the fly, on the day. There’s nothing better, especially when it all comes together.
And you wind up with a movie like Thelma, where you feel, ‘Okay, this was worth it. This is something that I can show to my kids and be proud of.’
SL: The big reason why I wanted to do this interview is because I love this movie, and also, I just want more movies like this. I want more movies that are just delightful and on a smaller scale and show somebody’s life. I don’t think we get enough of those, and I think that’s a shame.
RS: I feel the same way. I’m a stuntman, so people think I’m going to want to watch action movies, but I’m so tired of action for action’s sake, you know, I’d much rather see action that comes out of a real character moment. Like Thelma jumping on or off the bed or riding her scooter through town. That’s what I’d like to see.
SL: Did you get an opportunity to meet the real Thelma?
RS: I have not. I’ve been to her house. We filmed in Thelma Post’s house. But I never got to meet her in person. I, I regret that. I will talk to Josh about it and maybe meet her for coffee someday.
SL: We have to figure that out! Ryan, as I let you go, is there anything we haven’t talked about that we should touch on briefly?
RS: I had a blast working on this. I enjoyed the process. Josh, Chris, and Zoë were amazing to work with. Those are the kinds of people that you want on your team. I hope to do it again soon. I hope to work with them again, and I can’t wait to see what the future holds for all of them. I think we made something cool here. This is special. As you said, we want to see more movies like this.
