Exclusive: James Ponsoldt Discusses His Coming-of-Age Movie Summering

There’s an infectious energy and optimism to filmmaker James Ponsoldt, a man whose eyes light up when he hears the title of old international films he likes, someone who would happily discuss movies and ideas with strangers, exuding a joy often unheard of from people as deep in the industry as he is. This is a man whose filmography is an accurate reflection of his passion for people and cinema alike, which is why, when noticing the paucity of great, mature films from the perspectives of young girls, he decided to make Summering.

Ponsoldt has worked with some of the biggest actors in the industry (Tom Hanks, Emma Watson, Jason Segel, Jesse Eisenberg, Aaron Paul, John Boyega, Miles Teller, Shailene Woodley), on some of the most subtle and emotionally acute films of recent years (The Spectacular Now, The End of the Tour, Smashed). So it’s surprising that his new film Summering follows four very young actors with a handful of acting credits between them, but it makes sense in context.

Ponsoldt and his co-writer Benjamin Percy have daughters, and realized that the majority of media available to them was largely androcentric, they decided to rectify this themselves and make a film they’d be proud to share with their kids. Ponsoldt spoke to us about Summering, the state of children’s movies, and how to peek past their own blind spots to make a movie that honors women’s coming-of-age.

Coming-of-Age in Summering

The vast majority of great coming-of-age movies are centered on boys (from The 400 Blows to George Washington), producing a disparity in perspectives. There are of course masterpieces about girls’ coming-of-age, but for every one of those, there have seemingly been 50 about boys’, at least until recently. Enter Summering, a tender variation on Stand By Me that flips gender and narrative, so that a group of young girls in the hot last days of summer discover the corpse of a man who jumped from a bridge. This is a borderline magical realist film, so the girls decide to tell no one about their discovery and attempt to find the man’s identity on their own before the treacherous years of middle school separates them and disrupts their lives.

One of the great elements of Summering is Ponsoldt’s inclusion of each girl’s mother, allowing viewers a glimpse into a multiplicity of parenting styles, differences in familial relations, and a subtle look at how race and class affect each person’s coming of age. Parenting had been on Ponsoldt’s mind quite a bit.

Related: Top 10 Underrated Coming of Age Movies

“It all starts for me, I think, as a parent. I have three young kids,” explained Ponsoldt, “and my wife works at a middle school slash high school, so every year there’s a new group of 11 and 12-year-olds coming into school, and she’s dealing with the kids and the parents. So a lot of my life is conversations between parents and kids, talking, you know about larger structural issues through the lens of a family, and sometimes realizing that we have very different takes.”

James Ponsoldt and the Perils of Parenting

There is no monolithic absolute truth about parenting; difficult subjects and tough talk depends on context, and everyone handles it differently, something Summering is adept at displaying. “With Summering, it started with a dead body. There was a man found dead not far from where I live, an older man who could not be identified, and he still hasn’t been identified,” said Ponsoldt. He continued:

To not even receive the dignity of being named when you die is a signifier of a larger, troubling breakdown in our social contract with each other. And trying to talk about that with family and friends, and specifically my kids, and to talk with them about issues related to equity and responsibility, like structural issues that can affect being unhoused, or families breaking down, or toxic masculinity, all of these things sort of became a conversation [with his children] that was the fertilizer, so to speak, for this story.

The death in Summering isn’t only of the body; that corpse feels like a harbinger of the death of innocence, of childhood, of friendship, of all the difficult things parents try to prepare their kids for. How do you tell your children that there is no Santa Claus? How do you explain the death of their grandparents? How do you console them after a mass school shooting? These are challenging things every parent tip-toes towards with trepidation, and Summering compassionately explores parenting and the different ways we all deal with our tiny apocalypses.

Summering Shows How Men Can Tell Female Stories

Of course, a man’s good intentions of creating a story about female experiences from girls’ perspectives is, by definition, thwarted by blind spots. This is why Ponsoldt not only drew from his experiences with all the women in his life but also ran everything by them along the way. Summering was, in a sense, guided by a surfeit of women whose input Ponsoldt trusted.

“I would say I started with my sister, my mom, my daughter, my wife, all the kids in my wife’s school,” listed Ponsoldt, who had already been discussing equity in filmmaking for years. “A lot of the conversations we were having already were about the necessity for multiple subjectivities in stories, and men telling stories that include women and women telling stories that include men, and everybody benefits from that. Even if there are blind spots, it’s worth digging into.”

Ponsoldt explained how this cross-section of perspectives informed Summering, from writing the script with Ben Percy to filming it:

Ben and I have similar backgrounds, in that we both are very close with our mothers and sisters and have daughters, and have both had experiences where our daughters have asked us “Where can we see ourselves in this book or in this movie?” And that was sort of a catalyst for this, and then as the script was being written, we shared it with dozens and dozens of friends, chiefly female friends, many of them writers and filmmakers. Some of them were friends of ours who had traumatic childhoods, some of them are single mothers, some of them have totally healthy relationships, some have all of these.

In reflecting a multiplicity of subjective female experiences, Summering became arguably a more collaborative process than most of Ponsoldt’s other films. “It became part of an ongoing conversation with all of my creative collaborators,” said Ponsoldt, who mentions a litany of talented women behind the scenes, from casting director Avy Kaufman and cinematographer Greta Zozula to music supervisor Tiffany Anders and composer Sofia Hultquist. “All of them read drafts of the script and talked about their own childhood, what was so central about friendship to them when they were 11 or 12 years old and, for many of them, how they look at that now as a parent.”

The Themes and Meaning of Summering

Ponsoldt drew from all this to create a learned reflection authentic to the spectrum of girls’ experiences, with a variety of themes. “How they remember their childhoods and the raw reliability or unreliability of their memories was important,” said Ponsoldt, “and the differences between female friendship and male friendship at that age and, and kids’ subjectivity, being at an age where they’re not yet teenagers, but they’re almost out of childhood.” He elaborated:

These are characters for whom their friendship is one of the most important things in their lives, and they can articulate that, they can talk in an earnest way that might be uncomfortable to adults, they can talk about the value of their friendship and how afraid they are to lose it in a way that, when I was that age with my male friends, we did not talk about […] So all of those things informed the script, and then obviously there’s the cast, whether it was our four young actors, or the four amazing adult actors, some of whom I’ve worked with before, like Megan Mullally, and just sort of asking them, like, what was your experience when you were this age, and what would you do? And asking Lake Bell as a parent, “How is it with your kids?” That sort of extended to everybody.

Related: James Ponsoldt Talks Smashed and The Spectacular Now [Exclusive]

Again, Ponsoldt’s very empathetic passion for people informs his cinema here, and the director’s unassuming politics of representation comes not from a place of didactic polemics but instead from an honest, quiet, and deeply humanistic desire to understand and sympathize with others.

Ponsoldt and the Quest For Equitable Representation

He recognizes that there have been some great titles in recent years, but, “In many other ways, I think there are lots of marginalized groups that are not being represented, but also, I don’t think representation is enough,” said Ponsoldt. “It’s a deep desire to understand how they think. We need multiple subjectivities in films if we’re going to understand and unpack structures, structures related to race, privilege, and gender.”

“If we’re not trying to embrace and explore those subjectivities, if men aren’t also taking part in that even if there are going to be blind spots, we’re going to remain stuck,” said Ponsoldt. “There are so many groups that are under-represented, whether it is young people, whether it’s elderly people, whether it’s neurodiverse people. I’m thinking of a lot of groups that are very meaningful to me, because I have a lot of people in my life that check those boxes. I think we can’t possibly have enough good, healthy, smart, curious, complicated, specific portraits. It’s not enough to just represent, it’s about being specific and trying to write smart, complicated characters who would not necessarily look the way you want, or say or think or make decisions the way you would.”

Ponsoldt makes a passionate case with his usual good cheer, emotional insight, and hopeful optimism. It’s a passion that’s contagious in the best way, and after seeing Summering, you’ll likely catch it too. From Bleecker Street, and produced by P. Jennifer Dana and Peter Block, Summering will be in theaters starting August 12th; Ponsoldt is also directing the new Apple TV+ series Shrinking, with Harrison Ford, Jason Segel, and Jessica Williams, which will likely be released later this year.