Director of The Lost Husband, Vicky Wight
“This kind of pain and loss, it cracks you open.
But we are made of magic and resilience, Libby.”
From the writer behind the 2018 screenplay Boy Genius (dir. Bridget Stokes) comes The Lost Husband, which was Netflix’s number one streamed program in the United States for an entire week and remains in the top ten movies. The tagline for The Lost Husband is ‘it’s never too late to find yourself’. The film is a slow-burn romance that follows mom-of-two Libby (Leslie Bibb), who recently lost both her husband (in a car accident) and her home (to repossession). With nowhere else to go, she and her children are forced to move in with her mother, who has never been the warm and fuzzy – or present – kind of caretaker. When given an opportunity to move in with an Aunt Jean she barely knows on a farm she’s never been to, Libby jumps at the chance. However, being handed boots and a pair of overalls does not an effective farmhand make, so Libby is forced to learn on the job with gruff barn manager O’Connor (Josh Duhamel). Along the way, she meets a vibrant cast of characters – and grows closer with O’Connor – all while learning that life after loss is more than just a pipe dream.
Irish-born Texas native Vicky Wight wrote and directed the film after falling in love with the book of the same title, written by Katherine Center. Per Wight, The Lost Husband script was written to be – and was – filmed in Texas, where the entire book is set. When discussing her decision to do this, Wight was quick to say that “the thing about shooting [in Texas], is that Katherine Center (who has also lived in Texas) wrote the character of Texas as part of the story. “So, when I read it I really understood the landscapes. I really understood all the backdrops where this kind of life happens for this woman Libby and this guy O’Connor. What I said to [Katherine Center] when I was adapting the novel was that I kept seeing these people in my real life. I would see O’Connor at the farmer’s market, literally, or at the Whole Foods, or guys that looked like him or that could be him. She wrote a really authentic story, in my mind, and I wanted to stay true to that.”
However, filming in Texas did not come without its challenges – most notably the weather. Wight speaks about this particular challenge in reference to the first day of filming. Movies can begin filming on any day of the week, but The Lost Husband had its first day of filming on an October Monday. Wight recalls that “I went out with my cinematographer on the Sunday before and walked the locations we would shoot outdoors the next day. It could not have been a more beautiful day. It was 72 degrees and the sky was clear. I’m a big weather-report person, I love knowing what the weather is, not that we ever know, but it just didn’t even occur to me to look at the weather late that night. An unexpected system came in and it went from being 72 and gorgeous to 43 degrees and pouring rain. It was like that for 10 full days.”
Bad weather or not, all filming challenges are surmountable with a good crew, and Wight had nothing but positive things to say about those who worked on the movie with her. She got to work with a large portion of the crew from Fear of the Walking Dead, which also films in Texas and was on hiatus during the filming of The Lost Husband. Wight went so far as to say that “all my crews have been good, but this crew was particularly good. I felt very lucky. These men and women were ready to work. They were used to working in tough conditions, and were willing to go anywhere in the 43-degree weather or colder and to suffer the rain. It was great.”
Wight’s positivity didn’t stop with her off-screen crew. She also had great things to say about her stars, Leslie Bibb (seen in Talladega Nights (2006), Zookeeper (2011), Iron Man franchise (2008, 2010)) and Josh Duhamel (seen in All My Children (1970-2013), Transformers franchise (2007-2017), Life as We Know it (2010)). On Bibb, Wight thinks that she’s underrated in the film industry. “I’ve been a fan of Leslie forever and ever. She has so much talent and she has so much range. Leslie can be very comedic, but she can also be very serious and nuanced. She’s also an incredibly hard worker and endlessly creative. Nobody is more prepared. She’s got so many levels and she should be working non-stop.” When speaking about Duhamel, Wight made a point to mention his versatility and professionalism. “I think we’re all in this go-Josh-go fan club situation where you want to see him do really good work – work that you can love and that he will love – because he deserves it. He’s such a generous, kind, really lovely human being and his talent is immense. He has such an ease and sense of himself and that threads through all his work. He can play anything on screen. I’ve seen him in every different capacity shooting this movie and he’s full of character and integrity because he’s one of the . . . I don’t know who said it, but there’s a maxim about the definition of class. People say something like the definition of class is treating everybody from every walk of life the same way. That is Josh.”
That being said, even the best-casted films can have poor audience reception, and this goes double for directors that are attempting to adapt books to the silver screen. Acknowledging this fact, Wight says that “when you adapt you mostly can’t win because people love the source material. People love the novel so much that you can’t adapt word-for-word or scene-for-scene because you can’t beat the book. I know better than to think that I could. If you leave a little space for the viewer to pour their assumptions in and build their own little bit of a narrative, then you’ll have the inspiration from the novel without the replication. If you’re adapting a novel, you have to be willing to leave some of the edges a little soft.”
Speaking further on her process behind adapting The Lost Husband, Wight says that it’s about getting “the essence of [the book]. When I finished reading The Lost Husband, I felt like I knew the people so well in the story. I knew that romantic piece and the electricity between these two people and the starting over theme, and I recognized all of those little moments between Aunt Jean and Libby and the mother. You want to put all that into the story, visually. It’s a wild experience to take such a beloved book and try to make it happen. It seems to have worked, so I’m happy.”
One of the good things about not trying to capture a book exactly, is that you can have a little fun. Wight got to do this by writing a scene that wasn’t in the book, where (while dancing with her) O’Connor sings a fragment of a melody to Libby, and then hurriedly leaves the situation. Wight said that it “was really nice to put something in there that felt like it raised the stakes a little between these two characters. It’s something O’Connor is actively doing, singing this beautiful melody to Libby. It also took the place of a great scene in the book that involves a shave. You’ll have to read the book to find out more on that.”
Since she both wrote and directed this movie, I got the chance to ask Vicky whether she prefers writing movies or directing them. For Vicky, there is no easy answer. “It’s hard to even quantify those two things because they’re so different. I think of myself as a writer first, but the issue with that is everything I write I want to direct. I have three projects that I’m trying to get made right now and I’ve written all three of them. I’m not looking at other projects from other writers. I think I’d like to do both – write and direct – equally.” There is something to be said for the fact that arguably – if you have written something – you know it better than anyone else, and should be the one to direct it. “Obviously, when you’re writing something you want to see it come to life and the reason you’re writing it is because you want to see it come to life. You feel like you might be the best girl for the job if you’re the one writing it. That’s how I feel about my work.” This is not a sentiment that Wight is alone in having. In fact, some of Hollywood and Broadway’s greatest hits have been directed (and acted in) by those who wrote them, including Ben Affleck (co-writer and director of Oscar-winning film Good Will Hunting (1997), written with star Matt Damon), George Clooney (who wrote, directed, and acted in 2005’s Good Night, and Good Luck), and Broadway giant Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote and starred in musicals In the Heights (2005) and Hamilton (2016), which has taken home a Grammy, a Pulitzer, and 11 Tonys.
Writing and directing is not a career that Vicky Wight stumbled into. “I’ve been wanting to be a director, writer, producer, somebody in this sort of capacity since I was little. When I lived in Ireland, I would make little films and plays. I was one of those kids that would drag all the cousins into a big, giant play and the cousins wouldn’t want to come over anymore.”
However, Wight didn’t feel able to dream of being a director for much of her childhood, due to the discrepancy that she saw in the ratio of male to female directors. “I don’t think it was until we moved to America [when I was twelve] that I had the ability to believe I could do it. When I was little, the big movie directors were Scorsese and Spielberg. To be honest, they’re still the big directors, right? They haven’t gone away. They’re still making the biggest movies in the world. There weren’t women directing that I could remember or knew about. When I came to the States, one of the biggest movies I remember seeing was Fast Times at Ridgemont High (dir. Amy Heckerling). Then you got Point Break, directed by Kathryn Bigelow and Jane Campion’s An Angel at my Table. All these incredible movies were released in the ’80s and early ’90s, and a lot of them were directed by women. That blew my mind. I was in high school and college through that time and it awoke in me this belief that of course there’s an opportunity for me to do it. I just have to try.” But, as with many artistically-based careers, making a career out of writing and directing did not come easily for Wight. “It does not happen overnight. I’m still working really hard to get movies off the ground. That’s what’s interesting about this Netflix thing. It was number one on Netflix for a week and then stayed in the top 10 for another week and then went on to be in the top ten movies. That seems like success, right? It is to a certain degree, but it doesn’t change the fact that every movie that I write will take as much work as The Lost Husband. I keep thinking at some point this process is going to get slightly less difficult, but, so far, the landscape looks the same. I can’t stop though. I won’t.”
Talking about the gap in opportunities for women versus men in the cinematic industry, Wight mentions that she is optimistic about change, and the part that she has to play in it all. “I think that’s changing. It’s changing slowly, but all change happens slowly. I’m happy to be a part of the change. I’m not one to be mad at men. You do get annoyed when you hear some guy’s going to do something that you think a woman might be right for, but you just have to keep doing your own thing and hope for the best. My plan is to keep putting work out there, hire women, hire diverse casts, and diverse crews and tell my stories.”
When asked about the possibility of a sequel to The Lost Husband, Wight is quick to affirm that there is not a sequel in the works. “I don’t know if people really actually want to see that. I think what people want to see is maybe another movie like The Lost Husband that gives them the same feeling that movie gave them, and potentially with someone like Josh in it. You know what I mean? The same types of characters. I think one of the reasons the movie connected with people is because it’s not super-fast paced. I wanted it to feel like we were in the country and moving more slowly.” Wight adds that the fact that the audience is currently living through a pandemic may have played a part in audience appreciation for the slower pace of the movie. “Our day-to-day during this pandemic has slowed down a great deal. We’re not rushing off to different things all the time. The movie echoes that pace.”
When asked whether or not a specific type of story or theme is a go-to when writing her screenplays, Wight says that she likes writing about women. “I love writing about women. That’s one of the themes I keep returning to when I write. Especially women of a certain age. Usually, I don’t write about young women. I love young women and I’m raising two young women, but I like to write about women who are transitioning in different phases of their lives. Usually that happens later in life around 40 or 50 or 60. I really like those years. Like many writers, I go back to what makes us human, our relationships and connections and the idea that we resuscitate each other in life. Friendships, families, and connections, that’s the essence of life. Who we are to each other means everything. That’s my go-to, but I write in every genre. Right now I’m developing a drama with an older man as the lead, a science fiction film, and a fun little horror.”
As we often do at the end of our interviews, we got the chance to ask Wight a few lighter questions about her preferences in the arts, both growing up and in the present. The first film that she remembers having an impact on her was A Wonderful Life (1946). Dealing in the present, Wight was quick to come up with six movies she watches repeatedly. These include Say Anything (1989), Something New (2006), White Material (2009), Pretty in Pink (1986), Pride and Prejudice (2005), and Out of Africa (1985). With regard to any guilty entertainment pleasures, Wight admits that she’s a sucker for action movies. In particular at the moment, Wight recommends a recently released French Netflix film called The Lost Bullet (2020).
The Lost Husband is available to stream on Netflix now, and additional streaming platforms including Amazon Prime, Vudu, iTunes, and Redbox. Own it on disc via Walmart or Target.
