High school is a precarious emotional battlefield, particularly for Marge Bickford in Gringa. Brought to life with zest by Jess Gabor, who turned heads on Shameless before it bowed, Marge can barely manage being unpopular, let alone your garden-variety teenage angst. Things get worse before getting better. Marge’s life takes a major swerve when her beloved mother (Judy Greer) unexpectedly passes away. It’s enough to send her over the edge, but there may be hope on the horizon.
Why not hunt down her estranged father (Steve Zahn in great form here). The guy is a faded ex-soccer star living somewhere in rural Mexico. Surely, Marge can reconnect with him and maintain some semblance of family? That’s the intriguing premise of Gringa, the new heartwarming and entertaining film from directors E.J. Foerster (Murder Mystery 2) and Marny Eng (The Last of Us).
Screenwriter Patrick Hasburgh (21 Jump Street) delivers equal doses of laughs and heartache throughout Gringa, and its universal themes of seeking familial connections and establishing your place in the world should strike a chord with audiences. Hasburgh also gives the cast plenty to nosh on creatively. Zahn’s disheveled Jackson is tequila-soaked coach of a local women’s fútbol team. Somehow Jackson and Marge must learn to play the game of life… and maybe heal some psychological bruises along the way. Directors E.J. Foerster and Marny Eng shared more with MovieWeb.
E.J. Foerster Explained Gringa’s Casting Choices
MW: What was the process like in casting Jess Gabor as Marge? She is the heart of the movie.
E.J. Foerster: One of the casting people said, “Hey, there's an interesting gal. You should look at this short she did.” It was a little film that she wrote, directed, and starred in called Her Story. It's really intense. I mean, it's a super intense film, and they shot in a very short period of time. She just was the opposite of what I was looking for in our film, but she was so good that we had to meet her.
MW: And how did that play out?
E.J. Foerster: I went down to Venice and met her at a coffee shop. We automatically knew she was the one. We had seen a lot of different other women, and we were kind of, “Hey, this could be good.” But Jess just owned it all across the board. She had the attitude and the physicality. She was looking for that adventure. It was going to be her first feature. She’s doing so well. Right now, she's even she's in a play for Steven Soderbergh, which opens April 25. We were so impressed with her and her connection to Steve [Zahn], was great and the core of the story.
MW: The film is a rare treat. It has all the right beats to win over audiences. Why did you feel this was the right time for this?
E.J. Foerster: This was a project that took us a while to do, because we ended up finishing it just before COVID, and we ended up posting it during COVID. It makes sense to come out now because time is our biggest asset. The time that you have with your loved ones, or with your kids, or with whatever it is, they're precious moments, and you have to take advantage of it. And, like we show in the movie, if you have a second chance at something in your life, you must participate in your own rescue. And you have to actually get involved and do that. If you do that, some things change, and you can change your life.
MW: Working with Steve Zahn must have been memorable.
E.J. Foerster: Steve is a foundational actor. And in something like this, a director is looking for a foundational actor who is so good that many other actors want to work with him. He’s Harvard trained, he's accessible, and he's vulnerable. That’s what makes him a great actor. So, once you find a foundational actor, you're basically including them into, “Okay, how are we going to cast the rest of this film?”
E.J. Foerster: Then he and Judy Greer worked together a lot and have a lot of respect for each other. They're good friends. He helped us get to Judy. And it just popped. She looks exactly like Steve and Jess. Then we went down to Mexico and ended up having a great casting director who gave us some new and great ideas on casting Hispanic actors. Steve was really an asset.
Marny Eng on Gringa’s Important Message
MovieWeb: Why was it personally important for you to launch this film?
Marny Eng: I mean, we're all about humanity. We’re all about showing the world that, regardless of what life situation you're in, and what you do, we all kind of suffer or experience similar things in life. This film goes across borders. It's cross culture. The film is really showing that how you deal with things affects the outcome. Sometimes that outcome and how you deal with it, of course, is the tool you’ll have in your kit. To me, it was just a beautiful story.
MW: Can you talk more about the screenwriter, who successfully created a heartwarming story here?
Marny Eng: Patrick Casper is an incredible writer. His pen to paper, his ability to write in those certain things and translate it all into pictures is remarkable. What you see on the screen is incredible. Patrick created a story about humans and about how we participate in what we do and what the outcome is. It has a lot of heart. It’s not just big monsters flying through the sky or crashing cars. It’s a memorable story, and it was really important to tell.
MW: What’s your biggest wish for audiences who experience this?
Marny Eng We all have choices in life and no one's by themselves. No one's alone. We all must take the risk to participate on our own rescue on things, on our problems, and on our choices, whether they're right or wrong, and know that you can recover from those choices. And that you can have second chances. And there’s the element of [...] what you do with those second chances. What do you do to make it what you need it to be? Or to be better?
Gringa, from Gravitas Ventures, hits theaters and is available on VOD April 21.