It started as a 13 minute, one-man film that came out of nowhere and won the Short Film Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2016. This week it arrives in UK cinemas as a fully-fledged feature film, with an SXSW win and a Spirit Award nomination under its belt.
The brainchild of writer/director/actor Jim Cummings, Thunder Road in its first incarnation concentrated on a police officer’s agonisingly comic eulogy at his mother’s funeral. Those painful moments are just the springboard for the full length version, which follows the same man in the midst of a perfect storm – the death of his mother, the collapse of his marriage, separation from his beloved daughter and the loss of his job.
The film’s title comes from the Springsteen song although, as Cummings explains to THN’s Freda Cooper, it didn’t make it to the final cut of the feature, despite having been used in the short version. He also talks about his reasons for developing the original short into a feature, describes his love of British comedy – and considers the similarities between his character in the film and Basil Fawlty. And he also sings some of Thunder Road!
Watch the interview in full below.
Thunder Road is released in cinemas on Friday, 31 May.
