Lexington native brings movie to Kentucky Theatre after Sundance premiere
Growing up in Lexington, independent filmmaker Alex Thompson says “movies were a big part of my life.”
His “cicada-filled summers” were spent playing capture the flag and making short films he’d show his family and friends.
Thompson remembers pizza and movie nights every Friday with his family. And on Saturday mornings, he said he and his siblings would get up early and watch them again, taking care not to wake their parents.
His grandfather, who lived in California, was a movie buff who often joked “that if the movie was in color, it probably wasn’t very good.” Thompson’s “Popou,” who was from Greece, introduced his young grandson to those classics.
When he got to Henry Clay High School, Thompson said, “every year we showed our movies that we made in TV and radio class at the Kentucky Theatre.”
He remembers thinking, “Someday, I’ll make a movie that gets played there.”
In the spring of 2020, it almost came true.
The first feature film Thompson directed, “Saint Frances,” was scheduled to play at the Kentucky, but the pandemic derailed those plans.
Now, he’s getting a do-over, this time with his third motion picture, “Ghostlight,” a heartfelt drama about a construction worker who stumbles into a community theater production of “Romeo and Juliet” and finds that it helps him begin to work through a tragedy in his own life.
“’Ghostlight’ is really about community and the healing power of art in a lot of ways,” Thompson said. “It’s all about this family coming together and learning to express their emotions and talk about things.”
Thompson co-directed the movie with his partner, actor Kelly O’Sullivan, who wrote the screenplay for “Ghostlight.” O’Sullivan also wrote and starred in “Saint Frances.”
The couple, who live in Chicago and have a 6-month-old baby, will be at the Kentucky Theatre for a Q&A session and encore showing of “Ghostlight” July 9. Tickets will be available online or at the theater in advance.
“It was really important to me that the movie come to Lexington,” Thompson said.
“Ghostlight,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, was picked up by IFC Films and was playing in just over 500 theaters as of June 25.
The film was shot last October on a tight schedule, just in time to make the cutoff for Sundance, Thompson said.
“We were editing the whole time we were shooting,” he said.
After his 2022 thriller, “Rounding,” Thompson said he and O’Sullivan had planned to make a different film, “Mouse,” last year, but because of the SAG-AFTRA strike, that had to be put on hold.
Instead, they got permission from the union to do “Ghostlight,” which had a smaller budget, and asked the crew they’d lined up to work on “Mouse” if they would like to be a part of it.
“This was the impromptu project,” Thompson said.
A real-life family of actors — Keith Kupferer, Tara Mallen and their daughter, Katherine Mallen Kupferer — play the family in the film.
The cast also includes a group of actors portraying actors.
“It was a very gratifying experience, because a lot of these actors I’ve known the whole time I’ve been in Chicago,” Thompson said.
The film will run through June 27 at the Kentucky and “it’s done relatively well” there, said theater manager Fred Mills.
Mills said it was clear the movie was resonating with audiences, because they came out giving him a thumbs up, placing a hand over their hearts or straight-up telling him, “You need to go see that film.”
Now, Thompson said, he and O’Sullivan are preparing to shoot “Mouse” in her home state, Arkansas, in September.
Its plot centers around the relationship between two high school friends.
Thompson both he and O’Sullivan are drawn to “people movies.”
As for his goals for the future, Thompson said, “My imagination is not fizzling out.”
He said he and O’Sullivan have “amazing agents, a wonderful manager, people who believe in us.”
“My hope is that each project makes the next one easier to make,” he said of breaking into the motion picture industry. “If the challenges are mostly creative, that’s really exciting.”
He said the scary part of the business is having a great script and not knowing whether you’ll be able to make the project happen.
“It is important that someone believes in you other than yourself,” he said.
Thompson got a healthy dose of that as a child growing up in Lexington.
At Meadowthorpe Elementary, he said the children recited the same mantra every morning: “If I believe in me, I can be anything I want to be.”
“I just felt like I could do anything,” he said.
Thompson said his parents, Tina and Randy Thompson, still live in Lexington, and whether he’s daydreaming about buying a house here or considering the possibility of shooting a film in Kentucky, he said, “I’m always thinking about ways to come back.”
This time, he said, “It’s really exciting to come back with something to share.”
This story was originally published June 26, 2024 at 11:56 AM.
