Death Warmed Up
Thunder road i Meet Jim Cummings, the man who puts the fun in funeral…
Boogie Nights, Half Nelson and Whiplash are just some of the acclaimed films to have started life as shorts. To their number we can now add Thunder Road, a tragi-comic depiction of a policeman’s meltdown that Jim Cummings, its writer-director-star, first conceived as a 15-minute monologue that was shot in one unbroken take.
“I had this idea for a public freak-out,” says Cummings of the original short, in which a grieving cop delivers a hilariously inappropriate funeral eulogy to his late mum that incorporates a dance routine to Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Thunder Road’. “So we shot it in a funeral home in California, with my friends and family dressed up in black suits and dresses.”
The Grand Jury Prize he won at Sundance in 2016 was all the
cue he needed to turn it into a feature. “I was making other single-take shorts for different platforms, but the whole time I was thinking, ‘I want to go back to this character,’” he reveals. “I thought this could be a fun, low-budget movie, so why not just do it?”
With help from Kickstarter, Cummings raised the $200,000 he needed to make what he calls “a living room comedy drama about a man trying to get his daughter to like him again”. Yet he wanted to tackle darker subjects as well, among them the opioid crisis rocking the US (“America is going through this crazy epidemic where people just die unexpectedly,” he explains).
Another Grand Jury award, this time from South By Southwest, was a welcome validation, though it was a blessing from The Boss himself that was the real icing on the cake. “Bruce’s wife said they watched it and found it beautiful and funny and human,” Jim tells Teasers. “I did it as a love letter and he understood it, so I feel very lucky.”
ETA | 3 MAY / ThundEr roAd opEns in ThE spring.