Behind the Scenes of Feature Film 'Ramona at Midlife' with Director Brooke Berman
Show Snapshot:
What if your best years are still ahead of you? What if midlife isn't about fading into the background, but stepping boldly into your next act? This week, writer-director Brooke Berman joins host Katie Fogarty to share how she made her first film in her 50s, challenging Hollywood's assumptions about age and creativity. Through the lens of Brooke’s debut film "Ramona at Midlife," we explore the questions that matter most to women navigating their middle years: How do you reclaim your voice after years of putting others first? Where do you find models for vibrant aging? What happens when you stop waiting for permission and decide to do it yourself? Join us for an honest discussion about creative rebirth, the power of age mentors, and why your midlife rage might be pointing you toward your next chapter. Ready to write a new story? This episode is for you!
Show Links:
Follow Brooke
Quotable:
I think it would be foolish to pretend that gendered ageism doesn't exist because it does, but it would be equally foolish to let that stop us.
Transcript:
Brooke Berman [00:00]
And once you take the risk and the commitment of "I'm going to do it myself," then you're unstoppable, because then you know that the goal is to get the thing made. And at this age—I'm now 55—at 55, I just don't have that much time left. I'm not going to sit around and wait for somebody.
Katie Fogarty [00:20]
Welcome to A Certain Age, a show for women who are unafraid to age out loud. I'm your host, Katie Fogarty. Today we have an incredibly fun show. I am sitting down with writer and director Brooke Berman to dive into her debut film, "Ramona at Midlife."
Brooke first made her creative mark as an author and a playwright and has made a midlife pivot into film with "Ramona at Midlife," a witty, charming, perceptive look at a woman refusing to fade into the background just because society thinks her best days are behind her. Ramona gets a midlife shakeup, reclaims her creative self, and reexamines her life from the vantage point of age and experience, and in doing so, invites us to do the same.
We are talking all the things today: midlife, creativity and reinvention, finding art in life, making art to live, making a movie when you've never done it before. And we are doing it with a creative force—from founding an advocacy group for women playwrights over 40 to tackling Hollywood's age bias head on, Brooke Berman brings a singular perspective on what it means to find your voice and then find it again. Welcome, Brooke.
Brooke Berman [01:37]
Thank you. Thank you. I love that—"Find your voice and then find it again." That's really good.
Katie Fogarty [01:44]
You know what? It's such a repeated theme of this show, right? We have moments of time when we're young, when we feel like we know who we are. Sometimes along the way, we lose track of that. We sort of rediscover and reignite. This is a theme of the show. It's a theme of the movie. We're going to explore your career, because it's a little bit of a theme in that as well. And I'm very excited. I know we kind of had to go back and forth to land on a date for this, but we were doing it at the perfect time, because the movie is available. People can get it right now. It's coming out right now.
Brooke Berman [02:36]
The movie is about a midlife, single working mom, Ramona Lee, who used to be an essayist of some note. A decade later, she finds herself working in a veterinary clinic, raising her daughter, and really just trying to kind of make it through her day when she finds out that a hot filmmaker has a project in the works that is blatantly ripped from not only her past work as a writer but also her identity—a character's name, Ramona. In learning about it, rather than spurring her on some kind of big Hollywood revenge fantasy, this wakes her up to herself. It makes her start reconciling with old friends and thinking about who she used to be, but really asking the questions that will help her move into the person she wants to be next. So it's really about a woman making room for herself at midlife, but also about a writer, as you say, refinding her voice, because the voice she will use moving forward won't be the same one that she used in her work a decade prior, and certainly before becoming a mother. She has to figure out who she is now.
Katie Fogarty [03:50]
And why did you choose to focus on midlife? We meet Ramona at midlife versus young Ramona when she was ostensibly at the height of her literary power.
Brooke Berman [04:00]
It wasn't really a choice. I have a very organic writing process. I had been in development with a different movie for six years. The earlier movie had a protagonist who was in her late 30s. It was based on a play that I had written when I was in my late 30s. And like I said, going through the way Hollywood movies and independent movies, as a corollary of that, have historically been set up is that you write the movie, you set a budget, you go find a movie star, and then based on the movie star, you can raise the budget to make your film. And that was where my project kept stalling out, because we had a million-dollar budget, and we spent two or three years offering the role to movie stars.
So when I sat down to write Ramona, it wasn't so much that I was thinking about, "Well, who will my protagonist be, and at what point should we meet her?" It was literally—I sat down to write one day, and this woman showed up and started telling me her story. She was putting lipstick on to go see her ex-husband, and I knew she was still in love with him, and that was where the whole thing began. I think she was born out of a lot of conversations, because I wrote her for the actress who plays her, Yvonne Woods, and the character, I do think, was born from a lot of conversations Yvonne and I had had about success and failure and aging. So I think it was always kind of baked in the DNA that Yvonne would play her, and we were both at that age, and we were both asking those questions. And for me, a character comes out in questions.
Katie Fogarty [05:40]
She was wonderful in the role. She's so appealing—she actually reminded me of somebody that I know in my personal life. So I just felt such a great affinity for her. And it's interesting, at one point, Ramona is sitting on the park bench with a sort of gaggle of moms, and some of them leave, and she's with one of the younger moms, because she's had her child a little bit later in life, and she's on a playground with people of different ages. She's sitting with this younger woman who basically alerts her to what you just outlined for our listeners, that she is the subject of this hot filmmaker's new film, and that she's really being depicted as almost a cautionary tale. And Ramona is so stung. I want to hear from you, how do you see Ramona?
Brooke Berman [06:27]
That's an excellent question. I will say the moment that you're talking about—it's actually two different scenes.
Katie Fogarty [06:33]
Oh, I've like, put them together in my memory.
Brooke Berman [06:37]
The first of which is when that younger woman, Sage, says to Ramona, "I know who you are." And to me, that's what starts the whole journey, because she has been undercover on that—I call it the mommy bench, because I spent a lot of time on the mommy bench.
Katie Fogarty [06:56]
Brooke, we all—most of us—have. It's like a decade-plus on that bench.
Brooke Berman [07:03]
A decade on that mommy bench, right? And at some point, those are the people that you see the most of. Intimacy is based on the amount of time you actually spend with people. I was more intimate with the other moms on the mom bench than I was with any of my besties prior to having kids, because those were the people who I saw every day. Those were the people who—I remember sitting on that mommy bench once and thinking, "Oh geez, I have to pee." I live in New York City, so I would have to leave the playground and go find a coffee shop and come back. And I thought, "Who's gonna watch my kid?" and one of the other moms said, "I got you." And it was like, oh, of course—you are the person that has my back. And if I have to go move my car because our meter is up, you are the person that I know will have your eye on my kid. And it's a very sacred bond, those women you sit with on the park bench.
So in the first scene, Sage says, "I know who you are," and that's what I think kind of—the gig is up for Ramona, because I think she's been hiding out. It's not that she's not writing, it's that she's not writing the way she used to be writing. And for me, I had a flurry of career activity in my 30s. I met my husband when I was 39, and we got married and had our son when we were 41—we were the same age. So suddenly, in my 40s, I felt like I was back to being 22 again, because all the things I thought I knew about myself had changed, and everything from what time I woke up in the morning, to what I wore, to who I saw, to how I conducted my friendships—it was all out the window, and I had to relearn who I was now that I was a mom and was responsible for this small person.
And Ramona is there. Ramona is right there, and I do think she's a bit of a cautionary tale, but not in the way that Sage thinks. Sage thinks Ramona is a cautionary tale because she was in a position of power and now is in a position of weakness. But I think the cautionary tale here is, how do we as artist moms move forward in a way that honors taking care of our child and also taking care of that part of us that needs to make stuff and tell stories and create?
Katie Fogarty [09:33]
I absolutely love that distinction. It's more the loss of identity and self versus the loss of sort of surface power and fame and acclaim that Sage was sort of attracted to.
Brooke Berman [09:53]
Brooke Berman [09:53]
I just want to say that it's okay if we lose ourselves for a little while. I was very soothed by—there's an essay... The playwright Sarah Ruhl wrote a collection of essays called "100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write," and in one of them, she says something that really stuck with me. She says, "I've lost pieces of myself, but who says those were the best pieces?"
Katie Fogarty [10:18]
Oh my gosh, that's so powerful!
Brooke Berman [10:22]
I know. So I do think it's okay if we lose our way for a little bit, as long as we're honest about that and open to discovering what the new self wants to be and how she wants to move through the world and what she wants to talk about.
Katie Fogarty [10:39]
Okay, we are picking that right up after this quick break. I want to hear what you think Ramona should be talking about. We'll be back in just a minute.
[BREAK]
Katie Fogarty [10:50]
Brooke, we're back from the break, and we went into it—you shared this beautiful, powerful quote about an essayist who talks about losing a sense of self, but thinking, maybe those weren't the best parts of me anyway. Maybe there's something new that I'm meant to be doing and saying and being at this stage, and Ramona is starting to explore that in the movie, when she has this unhappy wake-up realization that her life is being depicted as sort of less than or inadequate, or it's a cautionary tale. She really needs to look more closely at her life. How did you use that conversation, in that moment to kind of reorient and rejigger what Ramona is doing and being and saying in the film?
Brooke Berman [11:34]
That's an excellent question. I think that what Ramona does is rather than try to force herself back into an earlier iteration of herself and write about the kinds of things she used to write about and pretend to be the 35-year-old she was before she had a kid—and I think she says in the movie, "I used to write about coffee and boyfriends and politics"—but that, in fact, is not her terrain anymore. And what she is actually writing about, and she comes to realize is worthy of calling itself a manuscript, is she's writing a series of letters to Patti Smith in her head.
So she wakes up in the morning and says, "Dear Patti Smith, when you were raising your kids in Michigan, did you ever sleep past 6am? Did you think of motherhood as a call to action?" And I think it's the very honest questions that current-day Ramona is asking that have to be the questions that guide her forward. In my Substack today, I interviewed Rebecca Walker and talked about asking questions and how powerful it is, even if you think you know the answer, how powerful it is to engage with a very, very honest question-asking process wherein you may not know the answer. So for Ramona, I think she's genuinely asking, "How do I do this?" And she eventually says to Patti Smith, "You say that you saved yourself as an artist by moving to Michigan and raising your kids. Could you tell me about that? I want to know about salvation."
Katie Fogarty [13:28]
And why is she asking them of Patti Smith? What made you choose this sort of literary music, poet figure?
Brooke Berman [13:34]
Well, I was interested in Patti Smith for a couple of reasons. The first is that I met her on my honeymoon at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles. I was very pregnant on my honeymoon, and my husband and I lived in LA and we couldn't really afford to go anywhere super exotic, and because I was so pregnant, like we clearly weren't going to—you know, we just needed to keep a mellow honeymoon, so we went to the Chateau Marmont. I had a dear, dear friend at the time who was general manager there.
And the morning after getting married, I got up early and I went down to the coffee shop, and I ordered a coffee, and they had this amazing banana bread French toast. And I pulled out my journal to start writing about how freaked out I was to become both a wife and a mother at this late juncture. And I looked over and there was Patti Smith, and she had the same breakfast as me, and she had the same looking journal as me, and we each were drinking our coffee and writing furiously in our journals.
And I leaned over and I said, "Excuse me, hi, like you're Patti—I'm Brooke. Our books are in the bookcase at the same time. I really just wanted to tell you how much I love 'Just Kids.'" And she was very polite, but clearly she wanted to be writing. And I went back to my writing, and I realized later that what I wanted from her... In that moment, I wanted her to tell me it was going to be okay. I wanted her to tell me I could do this.
And by "this," I mean—Smith somehow was able to keep her identity as an artist intact while—I mean, when she writes about her children and motherhood, it is so clear how much she values the two of them, and that whole experience of taking care of them, and it sounds like she was a very devoted mother. She uses the word "devotion" a lot when she's talking about her practice as a writer. And I just wanted to know how to do both of those things at the same time.
And I was really interested in Patti Smith in the way that—how once her kids were older and she moved back to New York, she was able to step back into the spot she had held in the culture without, it seems like, without any rupture. She's the punk princess, right? But, you know, she's 78 years old...
Katie Fogarty [16:03]
And she's still touring, Brooke. She's still—I just read that she actually just in Brazil during a concert, like, two days ago, which I didn't know that. It's—she's back, and she's fine, but she's—yeah, I mean, she's 78 years old and she's on stages across the globe. So she's a pretty amazing woman to be writing your questions to for Ramona. I love that.
Brooke Berman [16:25]
Yeah. I mean, I'm just so curious about what those years in St. Clair Shores were for her. When she talks about them, she says that time saved her as an artist. I'm so curious about what that means and how she did it.
Katie Fogarty [16:43]
I wonder if it prevented her from burning out, or if motherhood, which is so wonderful and exhausting and in some ways depletes you, perhaps filled up her cup in another way. You know, she's such a creative force and a star – perhaps she would have felt like she might have just burnt out had she kept going in that one track.
She's going to have to write another book.
Brooke Berman [17:15] She has – she's written many, many books. Something else that's really interesting about her is she doesn't try to be the artist she was at 30 or 40 or even 50. She really allows her artistry and her identity as the maker of that art to evolve. When we look at some of the rock stars of her generation, they're trying to look exactly like they looked 30 years ago. That's not what she's doing.
Katie Fogarty [17:44]
And they're playing the same music. They're like nostalgia acts versus contemporary creative forces that are tapping new wellsprings and bringing new work into the world. And there's nothing wrong with that – I love a nostalgia act. I'm not always opposed to that, but I hear what you're saying about the way some people spend their time.
Brooke Berman [18:06]
Well, and especially for women, because there's so much gendered ageism in the entertainment industry. I think a lot of women artists have a real fear of letting ourselves age in public. And Smith does not seem to have that.
Brooke Berman 18:25
She looks like a naturally aging woman, whatever that means these days.
Katie Fogarty 18:30
That's true. I think Instagram and filters have confused us. But in any event, she's just a creative force. And it's interesting that Ramona is writing to her. If you had Patti Smith's pen, what would she be saying back to Ramona?
Brooke Berman 18:49
That's so funny. I wrote a letter from Smith to Ramona, but it never made it into the movie. It didn't make sense. She says that she never blamed her husband for her choices.
Katie Fogarty 19:01
Ooooh. You know, we've been talking a lot about the theme of the letter writing to Patti Smith, and this is Ramona, a cautionary tale, yes or no, but the movie has multiple other themes. It's perimenopause, menopause, sex and dating, long-term marriages, divorce, reconciliation, forgiveness. There are multiple themes, not even just in romantic relationships. Reconciliation is a theme both in her romantic life potentially, and there's reconciliation in her friendships as well. And to me, that felt so real, because I feel like I've said this multiple times on the show: no marriage makes it to midlife without getting dented and scratched. You can't live with somebody for 20, 30, 40 years without there being serious transgressions. But there have been highs and lows that are just natural, and friendships ebb and flow as well, and feelings of hurt. So I just thought the movie really explored a lot of themes that I've seen play out in my own life and that I hear from women on this show, and it was really enjoyable. How did you choose what to put into this mix? Because the movie's, how long is the movie? It's under two hours, am I right?
Brooke Berman 20:14
It's under two hours, yes. I mean, it's under an hour and a half. It's a small movie. We had a small budget. We shot it in 15 days. There were a couple of scenes that we just didn't have time to shoot. There was a beautiful scene where Ramona is putting her daughter to bed, and Kiki, the eight-year-old, says, "Tell me about when you and Daddy met," or "Why did you fall in love with Daddy?" And Ramona says to her daughter, "Daddy was the first boyfriend who was nice to me." And it was a beautiful, quiet little scene, but it was meant to help us understand Ramona's progression back to the marriage, because she has kicked him out, and now they're living apart, but she still yearns for him, but she's so enraged she can't quite get there.
Katie Fogarty 21:08
I totally noticed that. It's funny, I was just at a menopause event the other night, and a couple of women that I did not know well at all, and one of them brought up the topic of rage. And I was like, "Oh, that's familiar." The very first podcast I ever did was called "Toxic Rage: The New Hot Flash," because that was my big menopause symptom. But I think this notion of rage is something that I've heard in different rooms, in different places, and we do see a little bit of Ramona experiencing that.
Brooke Berman 21:38
Did you see "Night Bitch"?
Katie Fogarty 21:40
Not yet.
Brooke Berman 21:41
I really loved it. And I loved it specifically because of that rage you're talking about. I feel like "Night Bitch" is like Ramona's little sister.
Katie Fogarty 21:50
Oh my gosh, I'm checking that out. By the way, that's first of all, I love Amy – I'm forgetting her last name.
Brooke Berman 21:57
Amy Adams.
Katie Fogarty 21:58
Love her so much. She's a really appealing actress, I think with a lot of range. It sounds like she might have a lot of rage in the movie, but I'm definitely curious to check that out. Tell me more.
Brooke Berman 22:10
What's interesting about the way that "Night Bitch" handles rage is it is the inchoate rage, the unexpressed rage in her body that allegedly turns her into a dog at night. But then also the dog in her is her wild self, her wilderness, the part of her that's just really feral right now, and that's what leads her back to her art. So there's a relationship between that rage and our creative power.
Katie Fogarty 22:39
And also, I think there's probably a relationship between your anger and what potentially you're missing. You often hear people say that envy is a prompt for examination of what perhaps is not what you want in your own life. Envy is unexpressed desire for something that you are not going for, basically. And I think that rage can be that sort of sublimation of these powerful feelings.
Also, by the way, I think that rage is not always fun to go through, and I'm delighted to be out of the perimenopause phase and to feel like I've got a much better handle on my emotions. But I was going through these sorts of bouts of rage during late-stage perimenopause. It was not fun. I felt like my emotions were not – I was not in control of my emotions, which was not something I wanted or desired. But I do think that when you think about what is inflaming you or making you so angry, part of it was the hormones, but it was triggered by things that you're forced to examine more. Like, "Well, why is this thing making me so upset?" And to get a handle on it, we have to ask ourselves those questions.
So I think all of these sorts of bouts of outsized emotions – envy, rage, fear – they're signals. I had a wonderful psychiatrist on the show to talk about how anxiety is basically like your system's alarm bell letting you know that there's something that is causing you distress. Anxiety can be a great canary in the coal mine. We think of these things as being negative, but if we look at them as more like signals to ourselves, we can have a more positive relationship with them.
Brooke Berman 24:20
I love that so much. And for Ramona, I think when we meet her, she is someone who has compartmentalized her life and made a series of choices. She calls it in the movie "being a good soldier." So because she's a good soldier, she's going to be the one that wakes up on time, and she's going to do everything, and she doesn't ask for help, and she's decided she doesn't have time to write. She's showing up at this job that she's talked herself into liking, and she's sitting on that mommy bench, and she's taken her writer identity and put that person in a box and put that box up on the shelf. And she's basically said, "I'll get to you later." And so later is now. Everything has to come down off the shelf. These kinds of decisions she's made about how she's going to be in this period of her life have to fall apart so that she can open up and see what's really in front of her.
Katie Fogarty 25:20
Did writing and creating and bringing this movie to life in any way change your sense of what's possible in midlife?
Brooke Berman 25:28
Well, I made my first movie at 52, so that's possible.
Katie Fogarty 25:32
So you're like, "fuck yeah."
Brooke Berman 25:36
Yeah. You know, they say "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind." I had a beginner's mind. I went in and said, "How do I do this?" and learned a lot. I think a great many things are possible in midlife. And I think it would be foolish to pretend that gendered ageism doesn't exist because it does, but it would be equally foolish to let that stop us. A great many things are possible.
Katie Fogarty 26:03
When I was prepping for the show, obviously I watched the movie. I subscribed to your Substack already, but I went back over to it, and your Substack asked the question, "What if our best years are ahead of us?" And I obviously love that question, and I would love to hear how you personally answer that.
Brooke Berman 26:23
Another reason I think Patti Smith is in the movie is that my mother was sick. Growing up, I had a mother with very extreme diabetes. She had multiple kidney transplants, she had glaucoma. She spent the last decade of her life not doing very well, and she had been a very vibrant, vital, beautiful, creative woman who was powerful in the workplace. She was a concert pianist, and then she became a publicist, and she always had great friendships. And up until she was about 50, so my 40s were really easy, because I had seen what it looks like to have a dynamic, creative mother. But once I turned 50, I realized, "Oh my God, I don't actually have the models in front of me." I can't, you know, I don't have that psychic memory of watching my mom thrive in her 50s. And so I started a Pinterest board of extraordinary women in their 50s that I could look at and say, "Oh, that's possible. Okay. I could do it like her. I could do it like her. Like, what does she have to say?" And that's really kept me sane.
Katie Fogarty 27:36
Who are some of the women on that board, Brooke? Would you mind sharing a few?
Brooke Berman 27:39
I mean, Julianne Moore, obviously. Diane Von Furstenberg, I love her so much. Toni Morrison – the documentary about Toni Morrison is amazing. She didn't start publishing until she was older. She was a professor, I think, for a long time. And who else is on that board? Toni Morrison, Diane Von Furstenberg, Julianne Moore, Nicole Holofcener is like a filmmaker idol of mine. She's older than me. Julia Louis-Dreyfus, so many great women. This French actress, Isabelle Huppert, like, there are so many great women.
Katie Fogarty 28:15
Diane Von Furstenberg has got a great memoir, "The Woman I Wanted to Be," which I've read, and it's just wonderful. She's had such an interesting, captivating life.
Brooke Berman 28:26
Diane Keaton has a great memoir. She's had a really interesting life, and she started making films, I think, in her 50s.
Katie Fogarty 28:33
I started this podcast initially – it was designed to feature women over 50 who are knocking it out of the park and doing creative things, launching businesses and purpose and organizations and creative projects. And it's still that, but I've also evolved the show a little bit to feature experts that help us with what's challenging, because we get to midlife and we have to start worrying about things like bone health and menopause and caring for aging parents. But I agree it's so important to have models in front of you that inspire you and excite you. And I had a wonderful guest on the show in the first season, Dr. Juliana Houser, who is a therapist with a specialty in relationships, and on her guest appearance, she talked about the importance of finding age mentors.
Katie Fogarty 29:45
And those are women who are exactly that – women who are ahead of you chronologically, that you are lit up by, that are living in a vibrant, joyful way, or productive way, or creative way, whatever it is that you admire and that you're able to see in front of you. And when she said that on the show, instantly both my mother and my mother-in-law came to mind, because they are both models to me in different ways, because they shine in different areas, but they are both women who really inspire me with the way that they've aged and how they've approached their life. So I think it's such a great thing. I would encourage everyone who's listening to Brooke and I talk right now to think of somebody in your own life. And it doesn't even have to be somebody you know – it could just be somebody in culture.
Brooke Berman 30:14
Absolutely. I will add two things. One is that I just fact-checked it, and Toni Morrison worked in publishing. She was an editor before she started publishing her books.
Katie Fogarty 30:23
I love that you're fact-checking live. Brooke, are you sure you weren't a journalist?
Brooke Berman 30:28
I was a fact-checker when I got out of graduate school. That's how I made a living – I worked as a fact-checker in publishing while I was writing my plays.
Katie Fogarty 30:43
You probably have a lot of fun facts, and you're probably very good at trivia.
Brooke Berman 30:46
No, I'm not good at trivia. My husband's good at trivia.
Katie Fogarty 30:50
You're good at checking the facts, not retaining them, I guess. And in terms of age mentors...
Brooke Berman 30:54
I was lucky, because my grandmother lived until she was 100. The grandmother that we would go visit in Detroit every summer made it to exactly 100 – she died a month after her 100th birthday. So my therapist used to say, when I would complain that I didn't have a mother who lived past 65, my therapist would say, "Well, okay, Ida is going to be your age mentor." My grandma worked until she was 94 – she sold real estate.
Katie Fogarty 31:20
Okay, that's remarkable. That's a great set of genes. That's good stuff. Brooke, our time is coming to a close shortly, but I don't want to let you go without switching gears for just a quick minute and asking you about the grit that it takes to make a feature film. You said that you started one in your 30s, that you had to shoot this quickly, in 15 days. It's hard to get a movie made without a big star. You do have some big names in this movie, but I wanted to just hear a little bit about – on a scale of one to 10, how hard was it to get "Ramona" made?
Brooke Berman 31:59
I mean, really hard. But look, the actual story is that I had sold a play of mine when I was 30-34, I sold a play to Natalie Portman. So I had a project in Hollywood 20 years ago that Natalie Portman was attached to, and that didn't get made, and that had a movie star, and that had so much machinery behind it. But what I learned when I moved to LA and was working as a screenwriter is the number of projects that don't get made is staggering. And at that point, I wasn't a director, so I wasn't attached to direct.
The reason I started directing was that I had four or five different projects in Hollywood that I had sold and made money on that weren't getting made, and ultimately it's because the director wasn't out there, pushing them through. Things would sort of fall apart in the development stage, where we were packaging who's going to be the director and who's going to be the star, and it's putting those pieces together that either make the thing happen or not.
And so when I wrote "Ramona," I always knew I was going to write it for my friends. I was not going to wait for big names. I would only cast people I could call directly. I was not going through agents. I mean, eventually I went through agents to do the paperwork, but if I couldn't call you directly and get you on the phone, then I probably didn't offer you a role in the movie. And I got the locations, and most of them were donated. It was the day that Lisa Salamensky gave me the green light to use her house in Forest Hills – then I knew I could make this movie. I had incredible help fundraising. I went and raised the money myself, but in the meantime, I connected with some great executive producers who were interested in raising the rest of my budget, or raising – you know, this fantastic guy came in and raised a third of my budget. So that really helped, but I just didn't take no for an answer. And when you're the person out there raising the money, then it's interesting how the aesthetic things fall into place. I mean, once the train's left the station and it's on the track, it's much easier to get it where it wants to go.
Katie Fogarty 34:21
This is a reminder for me and for I hope for all my listeners who've been maybe with the show from day one, that sometimes when you want something done, you just have to do it yourself. And I think that midlife really teaches us that. I've had so many women come on the show – they've done things like launch nonprofits or start a business because people were not hiring them, or not green-lighting them, or not agreeing to be the director, and then they're like, "I'm gonna do it myself."
Brooke Berman 34:47
That's right. And once you take the risk and the commitment of "I'm gonna do it myself," then you're unstoppable, because then you know that the goal is to get the thing made. And at this age – I'm now 55 – at 55 I just don't have that much time left. I'm not going to sit around and wait for somebody.
Katie Fogarty 35:07
I love that. That is the perfect note to end on. Brooke, I have so enjoyed this conversation. I loved your charming, sweet movie. I love that it features everyone that you know, and that it was put together with so much wittiness and love and perception. And I so enjoyed it. And I want to make sure you can tell our listeners where they can find it and how they can support it.
Brooke Berman 35:30
They can find "Ramona at Midlife" on Prime. It launches February 11 on Prime. It's on a couple of other streaming outlets as well. Apple TV is one of them, but Prime is really where we're telling people to go. You can find information on the film at our website, RamonaAtMidlife.com.
Katie Fogarty 35:51
Thank you so much, Brooke. This was a total treat.
Brooke Berman 35:55
Thank you. This was great.
Katie Fogarty 35:57
Beauties, this wraps up "A Certain Age" and this wraps up a fantastic conversation. I loved hanging out with Brooke. She is so smart and creative and thoughtful. I appreciate your hanging out with us and sticking around to the end. Before I say goodbye, I have two quick favors: I would love your reviews over on Apple Podcast or Spotify. Reviews truly help the show grow. They help listeners understand that a podcast is worth spending time with. They help advertisers and sponsors see that people love and support the show. So show us a little love over on Apple Podcast or Spotify.
And number two, I would very much appreciate it if you share this episode and any of the other episodes of "A Certain Age" pod that you thought were smart and fun and inspiring with the women in your life. Passing this along to your girlfriends, DMing them, texting them – this really helps the show grow.
Special thanks to Michael Mancini, who composed and produced our theme music. See you next time and until then, age boldly, Beauties.