It’s been about five years since the release of The Circle, but James Ponsoldt is finally back with a brand new film. (But to be fair, keeping himself busy by directing episodes of Sorry for Your Loss was still an excellent way to spend that time outside of the feature film realm.)
Summering is written by Ponsoldt and Benjamin Percy. It stars Lia Barnett, Sanai Victoria, Eden Grace Redfield, and Madalen Mills as four friends enjoying the last days of summer before middle school begins. However, when their regular day-to-day turns into a bit of a misadventure, the girls are forced to face a number of coming-of-age challenges, including their first experience with mortality.
With Summering celebrating its World Premiere at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, I got the chance to chat with Ponsoldt and with Lake Bell, Sarah Cooper, and Ashley Madekwe who play the girls’ mothers in the film. At the start of our chat, we put the focus on Ponsoldt’s return to the feature film format, and why he chose to do so with this particular story.
“I love and I’ve always loved films about childhood and friendship and our first brushes with death and mortality and that sort of awakening that you have, and the way that children use imagination to process trauma in a way that’s different than adults do. But for me, I think there were just so many conversations that I began having once I became a parent with my three kids, and especially my daughter as we were watching movies, reading books and my daughter would ask me, ‘Where are the girls in these stories? Where are the girls in these movies?’ Where is a version of me and my friends that, in her own way of saying it, that is about our emotional inner lives and our hopes and dreams and doesn’t just feel like the main character’s sister or something like that. That’s where it all sort of came from.”
As for his cast, Bell and Madekwe both have lengthy filmographies. If you’re looking for recommendations, Bell’s first feature as director, In a World …, is a must-watch and Madekwe pops big as Eudora Patch in the Netflix smash hit, The Umbrella Academy. For Cooper, however, Summering marks her very first experience acting in a feature film. If you’ve seen Cooper’s Netflix comedy special or her TikTok videos, clearly she knows a thing or two about performing, but during our interview, I had to ask her if she was actively seeking opportunities to apply those performance skills to acting.
“I was definitely actively seeking it out, but at the time I was three months into my divorce and I got this amazing letter from James and I didn’t know. There was so much going on. I was displaced from my house, but then I got this opportunity and I just felt a connection right away to Karna because she seemed like the type of person, not married, just wanted to explore being a mother somehow. And so the closeness she had with Lola, I just really connected to that. I don’t have children. I did lose my dog in the divorce, so I’m probably the least maternal person on this call right now, but I just really connected to the idea of this woman who just wanted to be a mother, and she just did it. And she said, ‘You know what? I’m going to have Lola and I’m gonna have this relationship with this little girl.’”
What was it about Cooper that made Ponsoldt so eager for her to be in his movie?
“I feel like Sarah helped me and my wife and our family survive 2020, COVID year one. Watching her embody our former president and explode him out from the inside, everything that felt like a collective mental health traumatic cultural gaslighting that was the past several years, and certainly 2020, there was so much catharsis that I felt through Sarah. She made me laugh and feel everything, and I felt like this person who I do not know, I’m in an endless debt of gratitude towards and I want to watch her in everything and I would kill to work with her.”
Looking for more from the Summering team? You can catch our full conversation in the video at the top of this article! (There’s an especially delightful cat cameo you won’t want to miss.)