Roving Woman needed to be set in Los Angeles. That’s what Polish director Michal Chmielewski says in our interview ahead of the film’s world premiere at Tribeca 2022. It makes sense considering Roving Woman is a road movie that follows Sara (Lena Góra) as she, fresh from a break-up and shut out of the only home she knew, wanders aimlessly around L.A. before impulsively deciding to steal a car and roam the desert roads. “Poland is too small for the movie because you can [drive across] the country in five hours,” Chmielewski says of where he and Góra — they wrote the script together — had initially thought of telling the story. “Lena lived in L.A., and she knew the area very well — Los Angeles, Joshua Tree, and the Mojave Desert — so we decided to go out there and [wrote] the script in one month.”
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
For Góra, Roving Woman proved to be a personal journey. Like her character Sara, Góra had recently gone through a break-up that left her more or less without a place to stay and unsure of what she would do or where she would go next. The only thing she could think to do was get in her car and drive. “A lot of things in this movie are drawn from real life,” she says. “We could go on and on about the things that are real in the film, but I think the most important thing to say right now is that the reality and fiction of the story of Sara and our lives bend a lot and mix.”
Roving Woman is, in a way, as much a meditative journey through nature — the desert, in this case — as it is a story of a disappearance. The movie takes its title from the eponymous song by singer-songwriter Connie Converse, who, in 1974, feeling burnt out and disillusioned, packed all of her things into her car and drove off, never to be seen or heard from again. “She’s more like a ghost that [was] leading us, this ghost in the wind of the desert,” Góra says of Roving Woman being loosely inspired by Converse’s story. “The story of her disappearance was really haunting for us because I think we could all really relate to it. We could all relate to not being able to fit into this world and wanting to disappear in some way.”
John Hawkes Initially Said No to Starring in the Movie
Amor Vacui Films / Friends With Benefits Studio
Over the course of Roving Woman, Sara meets a handful of characters, with whom she shares varying degrees of interaction, from nighttime talks around a fire pit to simple questions regarding directions. Interestingly, the people she meets are a mix of characters played by actors and actual people that Góra had come upon while driving. It’s akin to Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, during which, per Collider, Scarlett Johansson drove around Scotland’s streets, dressed in character, and picked up real guys who thought they were in for a good time. “We had a camera in the passenger seat, hidden [by] books and blankets, [and] Michal hiding in the back seat with [the back window] taped up,” says Góra on how they were able to shoot inconspicuously in order to capture Sara’s real interactions.
Of course, the most important person Sara meets in Roving Woman is John Hawkes’ character Gregory Milloy. However, the actor says that he initially declined to star in the movie. “I’ve taken a lot of time off lately after a 40-year hustle, and I was not necessarily on board,” Hawkes says. “And especially when COVID came, things changed.” He and Góra had been friends for a while, so although he declined to star in the movie, he offered to write songs for it instead. “I [went] to where they were staying every few nights and just played songs for them live, sitting on a porch, and, through that, they found a song or two that they liked for the film.” What ultimately swayed Hawkes was “a two-minute, little edited piece of the film” that Chmielewski and Góra had put together and sent to him. “I was really moved by it and thought, ‘Well, I’m screwed. I do want to be part of this.’”
As it turned out, while Milloy’s songs were always intended to be heard in the film — it’s his car that Sara steals, after all, and inside are his self-recorded CDs — neither Chmielewski nor Góra knew for certain if she would actually meet him in-person by the end of Roving Woman. “That’s the sort of reality and fiction bending and us being led by something,” says Góra of there being a looseness to the way production — and thereby the story itself — unfolded. “With this movie, we really didn’t [set things in stone]. We had ideas of where we needed to go, Sara had to hit certain marks, [and] certain clues had to be given to her by characters in order for the story to go along. [But] besides that, we just played along.” Chmielewski adds, “We were prepared for [John not doing the film]. We shot a difference scene [where] Sara doesn’t meet Gregory in the end. We had Plan B and Plan C, so it was like a real journey shooting this film because we were writing while we were shooting.”
Ultimately, Sara decides to return Gregory’s car in the end, so the two do end up meeting. The scene is arguably the most beautiful of all the interactions Sara has throughout Roving Woman. Gregory, like Sara, is on his own, likely has been for quite some time when they meet, and what ensues is an admission of truths about themselves to each other that they probably wouldn’t have shared with anyone else. It’s a moment of connection and kindness for Sara, and, for the audience, a true exhale after all the time she spent roaming the desert and meeting (mostly) less-than-helpful characters along the way.
That the scene was actually improvised only adds to the beauty of the moment. “When John saw our teaser trailer, he said, ‘I want to be involved in your movie, but I want to improvise,’” says Chmielewski. He and Góra, then, prepared bullet points, specific beats that the actors had to hit. “I still haven’t seen the movie — I’m really excited to — but I do recall being pretty lost in that scene in a good way. You kind of had to be to pull it off. I just had to be present.”
Roving Woman made its world premiere on June 13. For other screenings of the film throughout the festival’s run, you can head to Tribeca’s website for details.
