Presents A New Original Film TALLULAH Premiering on Netflix and in select theaters Friday, July 29 Press Contacts: Netflix: Strategy PR (NY): Ginsberg Libby (LA): Clarissa Colmenero Chanelle James Chris Libby 424-332-2935 646-918-8736 323-645-6800 [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Teresa DiMartino Ryan Collins 917-475-9176 323-645-6801 [email protected] [email protected] TALLULAH We all face life-altering turns every day: Do we stay where we are, or strike out on our own? Do we live in anger, or try and forgive? Are we the results of our own — or other people’s — bad decisions, or are we the sum total of our own judgment calls? Tallulah (Ellen Page), or, as she prefers to be called, Lu, is the center of writer-director Sian Heder’s thought-provoking, deeply felt drama Tallulah, and she’s a young woman who finds herself at the intersection of choices. Tallulah lives life on her own terms, caring for only herself. She lives out of a van around New York City, and when we first meet her, she’s ending a just-for-now relationship with Nico (Evan Jonigkeit). After spending some time drifting, Nico wants to move on from his and Tallulah’s life of dumpster-diving and stealing food from convenience stores. That goes against the freedom Tallulah craves, and so she and Nico part ways. Soon after, roaming a swanky hotel to eat whatever leftover meals she finds in the hallways, Tallulah is mistaken for an employee by an inebriated, affluent woman, Carolyn (Tammy Blanchard). Carolyn, railing loudly against what motherhood has done to her marriage, her body, and her life, is preparing to meet her lover, but first she needs someone to watch her one-year-old daughter, Madison. Accepting $100, Tallulah takes on the role of caregiver for a few hours. But when Carolyn returns and passes out on the bed, Tallulah judges Carolyn as someone who can’t (or won’t) care for her child. So Tallulah makes a split-second decision to take Madison. Tallulah then seeks out Margo (Allison Janney), Nico’s estranged mother. An edgy academic ensconced in a Manhattan apartment, the quietly seething Margo hasn’t gotten over her husband (John Benjamin Hickey) leaving her years ago for another man. Margo assumes the baby girl Tallulah is holding is also Nico’s. Tallulah, cagily, doesn’t correct the miscommunication. Initially hesitant, Margo is later appalled to see Tallulah selling lemonade out of the back of the van, and brings Tallulah — and the child she believes is her granddaughter — into her home. As Margo takes tentative steps towards mending the rifts within herself and her family, and Carolyn goes to the police for help, Tallulah discovers a connection she wasn’t anticipating. And all three women find themselves coming to grips with the choices they’ve made. THE BIRTH OF TALLULAH “Tallulah is the story of three very different women whose lives intersect through the impulsive and well- intentioned kidnapping of a child,” says Heder. “It’s a story about motherhood, about looking for a mother and becoming a mother. But mostly it’s a story about humanity, about the blurry lines of morality, and about deeply flawed human behavior.” The story began in real life, in two different situations. Heder, a veteran writer on Netflix’s hit series Orange is the New Black, had a friend in New York many years ago who was, Heder says, “living a very hand-to-mouth existence. She also felt very liberated and free. She didn’t seem to need anyone and didn’t seem to be needed. But there was incredible pain involved with that.” “I thought the idea of a person who was living a consequence-free existence, who was living truly in the moment, was fascinating,” continues Heder. “This friend of mine could act from a sense of pure instinct, as opposed to living by societal rules and norms. And there was something I found kind of inspiring – and also very terrifying — about that.” With her main character in mind, Heder needed a situation that would serve her themes. She discovered that when she found herself in a very alien situation. “When I first moved to Los Angeles, I worked as a nanny at several high-end hotels,” recalls Heder, who grew up in Massachusetts. “At the time, I was broke, driving an old Buick. When I would pull up to the Four Seasons or the Beverly Hills Hotel, the valet would be forced to crawl through the passenger side door, since the driver’s side door didn’t open.” “While most of the parents I dealt with were great, I had a couple of truly strange experiences,” the filmmaker says. “One of the mothers I worked for had come to the hotel to have an affair. She had brought her toddler with her, but not the nanny, as she was afraid the nanny would tattle to the husband. This woman had never been alone with her child before. Over the course of the night, I became just as much her confidante as the child’s caregiver. She confided in me that she blamed the loss of her sexuality and freedom on her child. She was desperate to get out of the life she had found herself in. She ended the night passed out drunk. I wanted to take the baby before this woman could screw her up any further. “I was convinced that I could do a better job of raising that child,” says Heder. “Of course, I didn’t steal the baby. But it raised the question for me … Who would?” And with that, the strands of a movie began to merge. A FACE-TO-FACE CONFRONTATION In 2006, Heder made a short film, Mother, from the idea. It consisted of the character of Tallulah meeting with an unstable woman in a hotel room, and ends with Tallulah taking the woman’s baby. “Everybody who saw it asked, ‘What happens next?’” Heder says. Mother won a Cinéfondation award for emerging filmmakers at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. Heder then began to expand the story. And as she grew as a person, the script grew as well. “Sometimes, when a project takes a long time to get made, it can be frustrating. But then you look back and see that it was actually helpful it took that long, because I had to evolve as a person and an artist,” says Heder. “When I first wrote the script for Tallulah, I was judgmental toward a certain kind of woman who I thought shouldn’t have kids. But by the time I made the feature, I became more like her, and in fact more like the other characters, too. Your perspective changes.” Part of that perspective shift came with the filmmaker becoming a mother herself. “At about the same time I found out the movie was green-lit, I found out I was pregnant with my second child,” says Heder. As the film started shooting in summer 2015, Heder had even more experience to draw from. “When the movie was being shot, I was six months pregnant and also had a 16-month old daughter,” she says. “So there’s a lot about identity as a woman in the movie, and how we struggle with our perception of ourselves: Who we’re supposed to be versus who we feel like. I found I had a great deal of empathy for all of the characters — and when you feel for the person who is supposed to be your villain, it’s fascinating. When I first wrote the script, Carolyn was just a clear-cut bad mom. And it ended up being a more complex look at parenthood, and how complicated that is.” FINDING THREE POINTS OF VIEW Tallulah may be named after the character who drives the story, but at its heart, Heder says, is “A triptych of archetypal women” – Tallulah, Margo and Carolyn. “All of these characters are morally ambiguous,” says Heder. “I like that the person you’re rooting for is a kidnapper, while the ‘villain’ is a mom who had her child stolen — and you grow to care about her, too. And Margo is someone who thought she had her life all planned out, but is in fact someone who hasn’t taken responsibility for her life.” “I like it when the audience realizes that they care about everybody in the film, because then there’s no easy outcome,” Heder continues. “The film is about those crossroads in our lives, the moment we think we’ve hit rock-bottom. I was interested in exploring a much more complex and complicated view of what that experience is, and I used these three women to be different facets of that conversation.” THE WOMEN OF TALLULAH To bring the character of Tallulah to life, Ellen Page taps into the razor-sharp intelligence audiences have come to expect from the Oscar-nominated star of Juno. The actress is always able to find the soulful-but- youthful point where self-resolve and survival blends with selflessness and soul. But when Heder first started writing the script for Tallulah, she thought it might be a bit too early for Page to jump aboard. “Ellen was someone whose work I always loved, but when I began the project, she was too young,” says Heder. “But that was another benefit to the film coming together later. Ellen had read the script and we met and clicked right away.