Any other director would be intimidated by Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda’s long friendship and even longer filmographies, but not Paul Weitz. The director of About a Boy, American Pie, and Netflix’s Fatherhood, is no stranger to the industry and no stranger to working with Tomlin. The duo first teamed up for 2013’s Admission before working on the critically acclaimed indie Grandma, where Tomlin plays a grandmother looking to help her granddaughter get an abortion.
As he pointed out to me, he brings the same tone to Moving On, Tomlin and Fonda’s second collaboration this year. It’s a smaller-scale dramedy that taps into social issues through the eyes of an older woman. Fonda plays a woman who interrupts her best friend’s funeral to tell the deceased’s husband that she is going to kill him for hurting her in the past. Tomlin plays her estranged best friend who soon joins in on the murder plot.
I sat down with Weitz to talk about working with Tomlin and Fonda as well as why he thought of this film like a Western. Watch my interview below. Moving On is in theaters now.
