The Year of Spectacular Men follows the story of Izzy Klein (Madelyn Deutch), a young woman just out of college who struggles to navigate post-college adulthood and also ignites and ruins relationships with several men. As she figures life out, she leans on her mother (Lea Thompson) and younger sister (Zoey Deutch) for support. The Klein family isn’t just family onscreen. Madelyn and Zoey are Lea’s daughters. Lea also directed the film.
HollywoodLife spoke EXCLUSIVELY with Zoey and Lea at The Cinema Society’s premiere of MarVista Entertainment & Parkside Pictures’ The Year of Spectacular Men about going on this journey with Madelyn. Zoey told us that she was so “honored” to have been asked by her sister to star in the movie. “She’s so gifted, and I’m hoping she’ll give me another job in the near future,” she said. Zoey noted that Madelyn
“specifically curated a lot of these parts and jobs for all of us to try out something we hadn’t done before and parts I wasn’t getting offered and parts she wasn’t getting offered.”
The Year of Spectacular Men is a love letter to millennials, and if you are one, you’ll undoubtedly connect to the film on so many levels. “I think that it’s relatable in so many different facets, specifically that you’re not alone if you’re a millennial and you’re not sure if you’re doing the right thing, or if you’re wandering, or if you’re a little scared. I think there’s a beautiful line in the film that Maddie wrote, ‘The ends are just the beginning.’ Sometimes it feels like the end is the end and we’re asking, where do we go from here? I find that to be really encouraging and really beautiful and also slightly scary, but ends are just the beginning. There’s so much more to come.”
The movie also had Zoey and Madelyn under the helm of their mom. For Zoey, she was so impressed with her mom directing her first feature film. “Well, she’s always been the boss because she’s my mom, but I learned that she’s the boss boss when she’s my mom and director. I was so impressed by her, and she has 30-plus years of experience of being an actor and working with so many directors that she’s able to pull all the pros and the cons and mesh it into this deeply compassionate director.”
Lea told us at the premiere that the whole experience working on the film was a dream. “I was super excited [that] I was kind of part of the inspiration to do it, and I felt really honored that she actually finished writing it. I just loved it and that she let me do it. We partnered up so we helped with the producing part, my husband helped. Maddie and I, we just picked each other up and kept each other going and moving forward.”
Lea love being brought into this millennial world and telling this story through a woman’s perspective. “All I can say is every ingenue part that I did was written by a man,” she continued. “I was kind of designed to be their ideal girlfriend. This was a whole different thing. I had to retrain my brain to direct that.” She added that her daughters gave her “a lot of strength. They empowered me and made me think about myself in a way that I had been trained to not think about myself.”
The Year of Spectacular Men is now in select theaters and OnDemand. The after-party was held at Legacy Records.