Ron Shelton on why his new 'Just Getting Started' is a stealth holiday movie
It’s a debate almost as old as the holiday season itself: Is Die Hard a Christmas movie or is it just an action movie that takes place at Christmas? Here at Yahoo Entertainment, we most definitely fall in the former camp. In fact, when we made our own list of the best contemporary holiday movie classics, we cited John McTiernan’s classic as a reason for picking several titles that hew to the spirt — if not the snow-covered, candy cane-flavored letter — of the season. This Friday, writer-director Ron Shelton gifts audiences with another version of a holiday movie in the form of Just Getting Started, an action comedy that unfolds in the dry desert heat of a Palm Springs Christmas. “It’s a Christmas movie to me,” Shelton confirms to Yahoo Entertainment about his first feature film since 2003’s Hollywood Homicide. “Maybe not to anyone else! They’re all singing Christmas songs and having Christmas cocktails and parties. It just so happens that they’re in the 100-degree heat of Southern California.” (Watch an exclusive featurette about the film, and its director’s career, above.)
Beyond those Christmas movie staples, Shelton says that Just Getting Started — which unfolds at a retirement community that becomes the battleground for the alpha male clash between former mob lawyer Duke (Morgan Freeman) and retired FBI agent Leo (Tommy Lee Jones) — also has a seasonally appropriate message. “It’s saying that, no matter what your age is, keep looking forward. Nobody is looking at their high school yearbooks or pictures of their grandchildren. They’re just like, ‘We’re here, we’re vertical, we’re healthy. What’s next?’ They didn’t go there to die; they went there to party.”
One of the places that Duke and Leo like to party is on the golf links — familiar territory to Shelton after directing the 1996 hit Tin Cup. Sports has played a major or minor role in almost every one of the director’s films going all the way back to the baseball classic Bull Durham, which celebrates its 30th anniversary next year. But Just Getting Started presented Shelton with a distinct challenge: how to film amateur athletes playing badly. “With Tin Cup, I had fake the world’s best golfers playing each other in the U.S. Open,” Shelton says, chuckling. “This time I didn’t have to worry about that. This is not even good golf — this is terrible golf. They have activities in these retirement communities, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to shoot a shuffleboard match, so I just thought a match between two not very good golfers was good.” Asked whether Freeman and Jones had a side bet going over which of them was the better player, Shelton says he wasn’t made aware of it. “It wouldn’t surprise me! They’re competitive anyway. But golf usually isn’t about winning money — it’s about bragging rights in the bar afterwards.”
Besides Freeman and Jones, Just Getting Started also stars Rene Russo in her first film with Shelton since Tin Cup and Glenne Headly in what proved to be her final film performance. The actress passed away this summer following a pulmonary embolism. “We’re all still trying to cope with it,” the director admits. “I was getting off a plane when I heard the news, and just couldn’t believe it. It’s one of those shockers you can never quite come to terms with. I remember telling her, ‘Just trust your instincts and go with it. Don’t worry about some kind of perfect performance. Just let it go a little bit. And she was thrilled to do that; she hadn’t been able to for a long time.”
Like his characters, the 72-year-old Shelton is all about looking forward rather than backwards. So while he gamely fields questions about White Men Can’t Jump, which celebrated its 25th anniversary this year, and Bull Durham, he’s most animated when talking about the films he’s hoping to make next. For example, he’s currently exploring offers for Escape Artist, based on the story of expert jailbreaker Ed “Hacksaw” Jones, who freed himself from over a dozen prisons during his life. “He was a guy trapped by the criminal justice system and turned himself into a genius trying to beat it. It’s political and triumphant in a way and also maddening in a way.”
And, of course, he’s got another sports movie in the works. “I’m just about to turn in the Joe Namath story that I was hired to write,” he reveals. “That’s interesting, because it’s in the ’60s and I think there’s some similarities to the ’60s [and today]. Keep in mind, the 1968 Olympics was the year of Tommie Smith and John Carlos, and I’ve got a picture of Muhammad Ali on my wall. Athletes joining social protests or civil rights protests have a long history — that’s why I was sort of shocked and dismayed over the whole reaction to the [Colin] Kaepernick thing. It was a non-violent protest, a silent protest, and it seems to me to be sort of elegant in its way and now it’s spiraling inelegantly out of control.”
Just Getting Started opens in theaters today. Watch the “Santa Fight” clip:
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