Kathy Bates gets her way with Lifetime movie
“I just didn’t want to let anyone else get their mitts on it. I knew what I wanted to do with it. I didn’t want anyone else telling me what to do,” says the Oscar-winning actress, who is both star and director of the new Lifetime movie.
“Ambulance Girl” is no girl, however. She’s a mature woman, a real person: Jane Stern, who with her husband, Michael, chronicles American culture through books, radio and television.
The film, premiering Sept. 12 at 9 p.m. EDT, is an adaptation of Stern’s 2003 memoir about how becoming a volunteer emergency medical technician gave her the confidence to salvage her marriage and emotional health.
Trevor Walton, Lifetime’s vice president of original movies, says Bates’ casting was ideal because she “knows how to produce pathos and humor all in the same breath. It’s a really sort of compelling, sad, difficult tale, but it’s also imbued with humor.”
When Bates said she’d like to direct as well, Walton had no hesitation because “what informs her, both as an actress and as a director, is that she’s a keen observer of the human condition.”
Bates is no newcomer to directing. She earned an Emmy nomination for the A&E movie “Dash and Lilly,” and an episode of HBO’s “Six Feet Under” brought her a Directors Guild nomination. She’s also helmed episodes of “NYPD Blue” and “Everwood.”
But “Ambulance Girl” was the first time she was both director and star. She’s quick to mention the “tremendous amount of help” she received from the producers and crew, particularly cinematographer Jean Lepine.
Directing oneself, she notes, is definitely “the whole kit and caboodle.”
The first few days on the set were “sort of my trial by fire,” Bates recalled. “Once you’ve set the scene, and you know the way you want to shoot it, and how you want to play it, you’ve got to get into the scene and forget everything else.”
It was important to her that Stern’s husband, played by Robin Thomas, wasn’t just an appendage to the title character’s dilemmas. She’s pleased that Alan Hines’ script expanded on the couple’s co-dependence, which she found intriguing.
“If we had just taken it for its surface values about a woman going to be an EMT, it wouldn’t have been so enriching,” she said. Bates, who is divorced, relates well to Stern’s emotional escape from gloom. “I have been depressed on and off in my lifetime, and not enjoyed the things that life can bring. I struggle with that,” she says.
At 57, she’s reached “the young part of being old.” She finds herself a bit wistful about not having had children and pondering the future more.
“What have I done with my life so far and what am I going to do now? … Do I really want to direct a feature? Do I want to start a production company? Do I want to do something completely different? Would I love to retire and move to Europe and try to write?”
Perhaps, but not before she attends the Sept. 18 Primetime Emmy Awards, where she’s nominated for her role as the physiotherapist in “Warm Springs,” the HBO movie about Franklin Roosevelt’s battle with polio.
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