James L. Brooks is finally back directing, exactly 15 years after his last film.
Brooks returns with “Ella McCay” after 2010’s “How Do You Know.” The Academy Award-winning writer/director helms the original film, which stars Emma Mackey as a lawyer spanning years of her life. Jamie Lee Curtis plays her supportive aunt, while Woody Harrelson is Ella’s (Mackey) wayward father, and Rebecca Hall is her late mother.
Jack Lowden, Kumail Nanjiani, Ayo Edebiri, Spike Fearn, Julie Kavner, Becky Ann Baker, Joey Brooks, and Albert Brooks also star.
The logline for “Ella McCay” reads: “An idealistic young woman juggles her family and work life in a comedy about the people you love and how to survive them.” The film is also set in 2008.
Brooks told The Hollywood Reporter that he wanted “Ella McCay” to capture the excitement of politics in the early 2000s. “The film is set in 2008, before we had this enormous division,” he said. “There’s a reason for that, and it’s because it’s not about that. The picture is about how to not make government service and political office something any sane person would flee from. In a movie like this, you’ve got to figure out what the heroism is, and chase that. What is it really that makes you a fine person? Is it a character that’s worth supporting for an entire movie? That’s what you aim for.”
Brooks added that he cast Mackey as the lead after watching her “brilliant” performance in the series “Sex Education.”
“I was in an audition process for a long time. I went to London, and very late in the game she turned up, and that was it,” Brooks said. “In my mind, I pictured the kind of heroines that we had in the ’50s and ’60s, early Katharine Hepburn and Rosalind Russell. There’s a certain kind of great movie star we used to have, and Emma has a lot of those same qualities.”
He continued that Mackey’s co-star Curtis has an “infectious” spirit and grounded the ensemble. “She brings a humanity, moment to moment. When the making of a picture can become snarky, Jamie is just a wall against that,” he said. “Also, it helps that she has the best hug in town.”
“Ella McCay” is produced by Brooks, Richard Sakai, Julie Ansell, and Jennifer Brooks.
20th Century Studios will premiere “Ella McCay” in theaters December 12. Check out the trailer below.