Interview: Jim Cummings – Thunder Road

He first came to our attention as one of the producers on Patrick Wang’s The Grief of Others and Trey Edward Shults’ Krisha, but it’s with his Grand Jury Prize winning Sundance short Thunder Road where Jim Cummings firmly becomes his own “boss.” Fast-forward to a successful Kickstarter campaign for the feature film version, the producer-director-writer-actor would commence shooting in November, win the Grand Jury prize at SXSW in March and would move onto France for the international premiere in the ACID section at the Cannes Film Festival. While not necessarily issue-oriented but there contains a subtext that this acerbic dramedy is a pleasant shapeshifter in terms of tone with several unexpected emotional state of mind resting places for it’s protagonist. I had the chance to sit down with Jim for a lengthy chat on the differences between the short and feature in terms of tone, discuss the attributes of the character at hand, the challenges of writing comedy and his future projects.