Paul Weitz wrote 'Grandma' for an audience of one: Lily Tomlin

WASHINGTON - In "Grandma," Lily Tomlin's character bears a striking resemblance to Lily Tomlin.

It isn't just that the actress wears her own clothes in the film, which charts the course of a single day, as Tomlin's Elle (pronounced like the "L" in Lily) tries to make sure that her pregnant 18-year-old granddaughter (Julia Garner) has an abortion. The no-nonsense long-sleeve black T-shirt, jean jacket, black pants and Jack Purcell sneakers that Elle wears are all Tomlin's, as is the vintage car in which she chauffeurs her granddaughter around Los Angeles: a black 1955 Dodge Royal Lancer that Tomlin bought in 1975. "It's a cream puff car," she says.

What's more, the character of Elle is, like the 75-year-old actress herself, a lesbian feminist with a dim view of self-serving behavior and a tart tongue. "The character's sense of humor is flat-out Lily's sense of humor," says writer-director Paul Weitz, who created the role of Elle with Tomlin in mind, after working with her in "Admission" (2013). (We sat down with Weitz at a Georgetown hotel, where he was promoting the film. Tomlin had phoned in a few days earlier from East Hampton, where she was attending a screening of "Grandma.")

According to Weitz, it took a bit of "wooing" to get Tomlin to say yes to "Grandma," the title character of which is something of a crank.

"When I first went in and talked to her," Weitz says, "Lily was like, 'This character gets angry a lot. Why? I'm not sure I can understand that, or get into that aspect of the character.' I kind of paused for a moment and she said, 'I know you've seen the video.'"

Ah yes, the video. Weitz is referring to the viral video leaked from the set of the 2004 film "I Heart Huckabees," in which Tomlin and her director, David O. Russell, engage in a obscenity-laced shouting match. For the record, that "performance" isn't why he cast Tomlin, he notes. In conversation, the actress comes across as unfailingly polite, even grandmotherly - if your grandmother were funny and prone to the occasional f-bomb (for which Tomlin consistently apologizes).

Weitz puts it this way: "In the midst of all of her warmth, there's something inherent about her that says, 'Screw you. You don't own me.'"

Since his blockbuster hit "American Pie," Weitz's films have sometimes struggled to find an audience. "Admission's" cast - including Paul Rudd and Tina Fey - made it look like a comedy, but it ultimately played more like drama. And despite the heavy themes of "Grandma" - which, in addition to the unwanted pregnancy, also deals with the recent loss of Elle's longtime partner, Violet, and a painful reunion with a former boyfriend, played by Sam Elliott - the movie is actually funny.

"I didn't know it was going to play as funny as it does," says Tomlin, describing herself as taken aback by the belly laughs the film earned at Sundance. Weitz was similarly surprised. "It played more like 'American Pie' than any film I've done since 'American Pie,'" he says.

All of that is well and good, Weitz says. But when it comes to "Grandma," which the filmmaker describes as "chamber piece," there's only one viewer whose opinion matters. "In this case, very specifically, I feel like my audience for the film was Lily," he says. "The character is so close to her. She was the inspiration for it, but also, if she hadn't been happy with this movie, I would have been so upset, because there was so much in the movie that was just this perception I had about her. If Lily had said to me, 'I don't believe that this woman would have ever been with a man,' I would have cut that. But she didn't say that. It made sense to her."

Weitz describes his perception of Tomlin's sensibility as a mix of the caustic and the caring. "You can see through her comedy that she's very perceptive about what's wrong with human nature," he says. "How selfish we are, and how much we enjoy messing with each other. Look at Ernestine, the switchboard operator. What you hope when you meet somebody is that they are as cynical as you thought they'd be, and at the same time that they're kind. That was the main thing that I felt about Lily."

Tomlin says she could never see the humor in cruelty. "Even as a kid, I did not like cartoons where the cat swallowed dynamite or something. He would bounce back - I knew he would be OK - but even as a small child I didn't like that kind of cruelty."

Although the actress describes her input to the script as "minimal," Weitz disagrees. "When I first wrote the off-screen character of Violet - this long-term love of hers - every time anybody talked about her, it was in glowing terms," he says. "Lily said, 'Look, this is fake. If these people were together for almost 40 years, they would have had fights and periods when they were on the outs, where they were at each other.' I went back and seeded in things, like where Elle says, '(Violet) was the one with the temper.'"

Tomlin knows whereof she speaks. She and her wife, writer-director Jane Wagner, have been together since 1971; they married in 2013.

Although Tomlin, who was feted for her career at last year's Kennedy Center Honors, continues to find regular work - she and Jane Fonda co-star in the Netflix series "Grace and Frankie" - she hasn't had a lead role in a movie since "Big Business" (1988). There's already Oscar buzz for her performance in "Grandma," but it's not the kind of performance that some might be expecting from a septuagenarian, a demographic of actor that is all too often relegated to parts built around incurable diseases or lumbago jokes.

Weitz compares Tomlin's enduring cool to that of 68-year-old rocker Patti Smith. "There's something inherently youthful about somebody who has the guts to be themselves without becoming resentful or mean," he says. "One thing early on I said to Lily is, 'This is a movie about a woman in her 70s. There's no deathbed scene. The end of the movie is the beginning.'"