ON LOCATION : ON THE Road AGAIN : Christine Lahti and Meg Tilly Take the ‘Thelma & Louise’ route--but with a Zen outlook

In “Leaving Normal,” two women take off on the road in a trip that will change their lives. One is a tough, quick-witted waitress; the other a failure at school and in marriage.

The film, starring Christine Lahti and Meg Tilly, directed by Ed Zwick, isn’t--as everyone involved with the production is quick to point out--a two-women-on-the-road copycat of the current “Thelma & Louise.”

“The movies may start out in a similar place with two unhappy women, but they end up miles apart,” said Lindsay Doran, the producer of “Leaving Normal,” a Universal Pictures production currently being made in British Columbia, Alberta and Alaska.

“In ‘Thelma & Louise’ the women are literally and figuratively victims--their options are crime and death. But ‘Leaving Normal’ is all about a better set of options for women. It’s about women who feel trapped but do something about it.”

Lahti and Tilly play, respectively, Darly and Marianne. Darly is a gregarious cocktail waitress; Marianne is leaving an abusive marriage but still thinks there’s a silver lining out there somewhere. This unlikely twosome, joined for part of the trip by another waitress with the improbable nickname of 66 (Patrika Darbo), meet by chance as they head out of town in search of a new life. But their journey is far from predictable.

The women in “Leaving Normal” have to be both touching and funny as they develop the chemistry that turns strangers into friends. The roles are as layered as onions and the layers peel off as the women meet people along the road in places as different as a yuppie city nightclub and a dirty Alaskan shack. “There’s humor and joking around, but this movie also acknowledges the spiritual void we all know is there,” said Doran. “These women are saying they’re not doing a great job of running their lives and maybe there’s someone out there who can help them do a better job.”

Zwick, best known for creating TV’s “thirtysomething” and directing the Civil War epic “Glory,” got into this movie for two reasons: First, he was invited, and second, the hair on the back of his arms prickled when he read the script by Ed Solomon.

He says he gets a feeling of “this is it” when he reads a script that he likes. “At first I thought it was going to be predictable, some sort of genre road movie,” he said. “But it defeated my expectations and surprised and delighted me as I read. It’s very, very wrought and I’m a sucker for that.”

Zwick, 38, can afford to be choosy about what he directs. “Thirtysomething” collected 10 Emmys in its four seasons, and “Glory” won three Academy Awards.

To him, “Leaving Normal” is about choices and those who question the choices in their lives and how they were made. “It reaches to a deep place in the heart; it touches that place in all of us who long for home and for connections,” he said. “It’s for people who concern themselves with words like fate, journey, quest and optimism. It engenders, for lack of better words, an inner smile. Somehow at the end of the day it turns out to be something like a Zen comedy.”

Like Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon, Lahti and Tilly are well aware of how rare it is for a film to have two strong women’s roles. It’s a subject that engrosses several of the people involved with this production. Both actresses recounted with near-gleeful delight how keen they’d been for the parts and how hard they’d tried to land them. Zwick, Lahti says, was not going to hand these jobs out to--as she put it--”the flavor of the month.” He auditioned for the parts and was in no rush to decide who was going to get an offer when the readings were over.

“I was on tenterhooks for several weeks and by that time I was in love with the part,” said the 31-year-old Tilly, who lives in British Columbia. “It’s really hard to get me to Los Angeles these days, because I don’t like it. It has to be something really interesting to get me there. But my agent told me I’d love this part and she was right,” she said.

Tilly was most recently seen in “The Two Jakes” and “Valmont.” She received an Academy Award nomination for her role in “Agnes of God.” But her priorities these days are--most emphatically--Emily, 8, David, 4, and 8-month-old Will.

So why is “Leaving Normal” special enough for Tilly to leave the nursery?

“Because the women in this film are real people, not just stereotype women. Even the small parts are beautifully written,” she said. “When I read with Ed I got really excited. There are not many good directors around and I could tell he’s a sure hand. He knows specifically what a scene is about and what a character is about.”

As the leading lady, a blond Christine Lahti gets to wear tight, skinny jeans and beaded cowboy boots in this movie. Yet she claims she doesn’t prefer the star turns.

“What I really like are character parts,” she said. “Leading ladies are fun but they can be boring.” In “Leaving Normal,” the actress has won a role that’s a mixture of both: She’s a character, but she gets to wear sexy clothes.

Lahti, 10 years older than Tilly, has a long list of film credits that includes “Housekeeping” and “Whose Life Is It Anyway?” She won Oscar and Golden Globe nominations and the New York Film Critics’ award as best supporting actress for her portrayal of Goldie Hawn’s best friend in “Swing Shift.” In her equally long list of stage roles is the Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “The Heidi Chronicles.”

“I read all kinds of scripts but there are very few good ones and even fewer with great parts for women--usually the women are in supporting roles as someone’s wife, mother or girlfriend,” she said.

What Lahti would like to see are more women getting into decision-making jobs in Hollywood and then hiring women--”instead of getting sucked into the greed mentality of exploiting women because it’s going to sell.”

She paused, wondered if she had gone too far, then returned to the attack as she recalled that Meryl Streep has been just as outspoken on this subject.

“It doesn’t make men look any sexier when they play opposite much younger women--it just makes them look sillier,” she said. “Besides, I like to shake ‘em up in the Boys’ Club.”

But moments later, Lahti switched from militancy to motherhood. Running down the steps of a seaside restaurant, the day’s location, she was off across the beach to play with her son, Wilson, not quite 3, who was throwing pebbles into the water. Like Tilly, Lahti now arranges her life around a toddler and loves it.

Producer Doran, as president of Sydney Pollack’s production company, Mirage Enterprises, has exactly the power job that Lahti was talking about. But she doesn’t quite share the actress’s viewpoint.

“It’s not as though there are 50 wonderful screenplays about women sitting around that have never been made,” Doran said. “I feel the problem is that writers are not as likely to write about women as men. Believe me, if the material is there for women it will get made.”

As Doran sees it, “Leaving Normal” is not an obviously commercial film and neither was “Thelma & Louise,” but they got made because they are good screenplays.

“I hope both films are big hits,” she said. “And I hope we’re the second of eight great movies about women.”

The film’s difference from “Glory” and “thirtysomething” is one thing that appealed to Zwick. “I was trained in repertory theater and that meant Strindberg one night, a musical the next night, and Shakespeare and farce in between,” he said. “I think that engendered in me a protean or chameleon approach.”

The literature he studied at Harvard is very much in evidence in Zwick’s conversation. But articulate doesn’t have to mean pretentious, and Zwick is far from that. With broad-brimmed hat tilted against the seaside sunshine, looking at swallows swooping over new-mown grass, he joked about his determination not to do the same thing for very long. And he almost seemed pleased at the day’s news: the cancellation of “thirtysomething.”

“I’m left with a feeling of extraordinary satisfaction and blessing for the ride,” he said. “We were given such license, it’s the closest I may ever come to a summer-stock experience in the world of professional entertainment.

“From the very first moment we were allowed to do whatever we wanted with never a note or even a comment. I don’t know if that sort of license or soapbox to mouth off every week on a whole world of concerns will ever be replicated in my life. I also believe nothing is a whole unless it has a denouement.

“I pride myself we were able to maintain a promise of quality that we made to the audience. It would have been very distressing to me if the end had been some sort of whimper rather than a bang.”

Zwick also derived pleasure from the fact that “thirtysomething” was a nursery for much talent: Writers became directors, actors became directors and actors became better actors. Now he’s at it again, giving a hand to what he believes is talent on the way up.

This time it’s writer Ed Solomon. “Leaving Normal” is his first solo screenplay. He’s on location to collaborate on any rewrites needed, but he’s also there most days because he’s learning how to direct by watching Zwick in action. And he has a bit part in a nightclub scene.

Solomon started his career selling jokes to comedians and writing plays. He has also collaborated with fellow UCLA graduate Chris Matheson on several feature films, including the comedy “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” as well as the sequel, “Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey.”

But two years ago at the age of 28--what he considers “entering the belly of life”--he felt he was being pigeonholed in comedy and fantasy.

“And I wanted to write from more of a personal place, more from the heart,” Solomon said.

So he went to his parents’ Lake Tahoe cabin and spent two weeks alone with his “lunky old computer” writing the screenplay of “Leaving Normal.”

The essence of the film, to Solomon, is examining “how often a person can get hit and keep getting up and going forward.”

When he finished, he showed it to Doran, a friend and colleague in other projects, and they both felt Zwick was the right man to direct.

“He had an interest in comedy but he’d also worked with serious things and, as it turned out, we hit it off well,” Solomon said. “It’s a disabling feeling to let go of your work and just hope and trust it will be made well. He’s been a wonderful guardian for my script.”