Ashley Judd started receiving the e-mails from Callie Khouri last January, while she was shooting the thriller High Crimes in Los Angeles. Khouri, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Thelma & Louise, was getting ready to direct her first movie, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, and she wanted—no, desperately needed—Judd to play the uninhibited character of Vivi as a young woman. But Judd hadn’t set foot in her Tennessee home for four months, and she had no intention of heading off to another movie set. Still, “she kept sending me these impassioned letters,” the actress recalls, laughing, “at the end of which she made me vow never to show anybody how sappy they were.” Finally, Judd relented.
 After waiting ten long years to direct, Khouri wasn’t going to take another no from anybody. She had wanted to do the honors on Thelma & Louise, but the studio insisted on veteran Ridley Scott. She then spent much of the next decade working on projects that never got made. Even when one did—the 1995 Julia Roberts vehicle Something to Talk About, which she penned—she was passed over again, in favor of Lasse Hallström. “It was crushing,” Khouri says. “I cried a river. I felt like I was being horribly wronged.”
And yet when the Ya-Ya opportunity arose, Khouri had to be talked into it. Producer Bonnie Bruckheimer (Beaches, For the Boys) first approached her back in 1996 to write the screenplay. “I thought, ‘This is such a woman’s movie; if I do this, I’m dead,’ ” Khouri recalls. “ ‘That’s all I’m ever going to get to do.’ ” When Bruckheimer came back to her two years later with an offer to direct, however, Khouri had a change of heart. “I started thinking, ‘So what if it’s all you ever get to do? Stop telling yourself why it’s wrong and start figuring out how you can make it right.’ ”
 So, in the summer of 2000, Khouri began revising the script, originally written by Mark Andrus (As Good as It Gets)—plucking key scenes from the book and giving them more of “an engine,” she says, “making everybody a lot more active.” In the story that emerged, playwright Siddalee Walker (Sandra Bullock) is so tired of the eccentric behavior displayed by her mother, Vivi (Ellen Burstyn), that she doesn’t invite her to her wedding. When Vivi’s lifelong friends—who call themselves the Ya-Yas—find out about this, they fly to New York and kidnap Siddalee, forcing her to go through an old scrapbook of memorabilia to learn the truth about her mother’s difficult but colorful past (shown in flashbacks featuring Judd).
Telling this tale on film was a complicated process, requiring three different actresses to play each of the four Ya-Yas—as children (all newcomers), young adults (Judd, Jacqueline McKenzie, Kiersten Warren, and Katy Selverstone), and older women (Ellen Burstyn, Fionnula Flanagan, Shirley Knight, and Maggie Smith). “The idea that on my first movie I would get to work with these people was just insane to me,” Khouri says. “I’d be talking to somebody and I’d go, ‘Hang on a minute, I just want to tell Maggie Smith to do that differently.’ ” She laughs. “I was just in absolute shock that I was getting to do this at all.”
“I remember watching dailies on the first day,” Bruckheimer says. “We got to the first take and we heard [Khouri’s] voice go, ‘Action!’ And then we heard this little voice in the room saying, ‘Oh my God! That’s me saying action!’ ”
 The shoot had its special challenges, of course—ranging from how best to protect the child actors during a brutal scene in which Vivi beats her kids with a belt, to a protracted battle with mosquitoes while on location in the North Carolina woods. “At first, everybody was using all this natural [repellent],” Khouri says, laughing, of the unexpected extras. “By the end of it, we were walking around saying, ‘Get away from me with that citronella! Can we get a DDT truck out here?’ ”
None of it shook her resolve for a second. “People would come up to me and say, ‘God, it must be so stressful to make a movie,’ ” says Khouri, who is now in postproduction, looking toward a 2002 release. “And I would always say, ‘It’s not half as stressful as not getting to make one.’ ” |
