My Old Ass: Megan Park’s about her Attention-Grabbing Title, Starring Maisy Stella, Aubrey Plaza

It was a dumb thing, but then it worked,” the director says of the title of the Maisy Stella and Aubrey Plaza coming-of-age film.

In 2020, mid-pandemic, Megan Park experienced a crisis like so many others that year. She was holed up in her childhood bedroom, grappling with nostalgic feelings and present-day anxieties involving her months-old daughter and a COVID-delayed transition from actor to filmmaker.

That collective unease would lead to My Old Ass, her different follow-up to her Jenna Ortega and Maddie Ziegler-led directorial debut, The Fallout (2021), which chronicled the aftermath of school shooting.

Now streaming on Prime Video, the coming-of-age tale with a dash of fantasy centers on 18-year-old Elliott (Maisy Stella), who’s enjoying her final lakeside summer before heading off to the University of Toronto. Recognizing that her adolescent days are dwindling, she opts to consume magic mushrooms, which result in a surprising encounter with her future 39-year-old self (Aubrey Plaza). Older Elliott then tries to steer her younger self away from making the same mistakes she made.

The attention-grabbing title of My Old Ass is verbalized in the movie when Elliott asks Older Elliott if she “can touch her old ass.” But prior to its reference in the dialogue, Park wrote the title first on a lark. Produced independently by the Margot Robbie co-founded LuckyChap Entertainment and Indian Paintbrush, the My Old Ass team became so attached to their unconventional title that it became a dealbreaker during the eventual bidding war at 2024’s Sundance Film Festival. Amazon MGM Studios ultimately acquired worldwide distribution rights for $15 million, which included a theatrical release this past September.

“Initially, I titled it that because I just wanted to see my lawyer writing contracts and email titles that said My Old Ass. And now my whole inbox is nonstop titles of My Old Ass,” Park notes. “It was dumb, honestly. It was a dumb, stupid thing. But then it worked.”

Park’s film doesn’t over-explain, nor does it have to, Older Elliottt’s dual ability to time travel through the use of hallucinogens and text-message from the future. She also wrote a couple lines to justify the fact that Stella’s Elliott and Plaza’s Elliott are not spitting images of one another in the slightest. For Park, she just wanted the actor who could best sell the 39-year-old character’s unaddressed pain and disenchantment.

“With Older Elliott, we really got hung up on who looks the most like [Stella’s Elliott]. So there were conversations about the biggest names possible,” Park recalls. “But at the end of the day, we were just like, ‘Who do we want in the role? Who cares about the physical stuff? I can write jokes around it.’ And so I just said, ‘I want Aubrey.’”

Pondering how your younger self might help your present-day self?

I figured out that ending takeaway as I was writing it, but it started more with the idea of getting to go back and tell my younger self something. I had just become a parent, and I was staying at home in my childhood bedroom during the pandemic. My family dynamic had all changed, and it was just a lot. So I was more in the place of “old ass” in the movie, feeling depressed and nostalgic. So it came from that place, but ultimately, through writing it and definitely through making it, there’s a lot that I could take away from my younger self. You have to go through the things that you go through to get where you are. I had a weird path to writing and directing, and I feel like I found my passion at 34 when I switched careers. But I never would’ve found this had I not found it the way that I found it, so it’s better late than never. I started writing it very much from the place that Aubrey starts the movie in, and then I figured that ultimately therapeutic lesson out as I was writing.

It is set on lake in Canada, where you grew up. How autobiographical is this movie?

It’s zero percent autobiographical in terms of the actual characters. That setting [Muskoka Lakes] was a place that I went to every summer, but it wasn’t where I grew up. I also didn’t grow up on a cranberry farm. So I had a very different family dynamic. I have an older sister, my dad is a dentist and my mom is a retired teacher. So I had a very different upbringing, but despite not being remotely autobiographical, there’s part of me in each of these characters. The one exception is that Elliott is Canadian like me, but she is so different than I was at 18. The most autobiographical scene in the movie is the scene between Elliott’s mom and Elliott when she’s talking about rocking 2-year-old Elliott down to sleep and singing “Twinkle, Twinkle [Little Star].” That was a very personal moment in the script for me, but other than that, it’s honestly not that autobiographical.

In this era of limited attention, you wanted a title that would prompt double take?

I started with the title of My Old Ass as a joke. I was like, “Obviously, someone is going to make me change this. They’re never going to let me keep this title.” And then, when we were going to Sundance, we were like, “Well, let’s keep the title. Now we are into it.” So it became a part of the bargaining because we were lucky enough to be in a situation where we had multiple bidders on the movie. So if somebody wanted to change the title … But people really liked it, and it made sense at that point. Initially, I titled it that because I just wanted to see my lawyer writing contracts and email titles that said My Old Ass. And now my whole inbox is nonstop titles of My Old Ass.

My Old Ass: Megan Park’s about her Attention-Grabbing Title, Starring Maisy Stella, Aubrey Plaza

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