She also scored a hit with her first TV series, Nashville, which lasted six seasons. And at 68, she is taking on another first by penning a musical theatre version of Thelma & Louise, hoping her luck hasn’t run out. A story that features an abusive marriage, attempted rape, murder and double suicide doesn’t scream “jazz hands”, and Khouri had turned down offers before.
Khouri was eventually convinced. It’s been a decade in the pipeline, but things took off when uber-producer Sonia Friedman came on board, and now it has premiered at London’s Young Vic, starring Rachel Tucker and Amy Lennox. I meet Khouri at a south London studio during one of the summer’s heatwaves.
She is dressed in airy, white cotton, looking like an elegant lady who might be tending her garden in the American south – which is what she spends a lot of her time doing these days at home in Nashville, Tennessee, with husband T-Bone Burnett. When Khouri floated the idea for the musical at home, it was record producer Burnett who immediately suggested a composer, the American singer-songwriter Neko Case. She is truly a poet, but her songs are very tactile – I don’t know exactly the right word – and she’s got this voice that’s like a clarion call.” Choreography is by Bobbi Jene Smith with her husband Or Schraiber, whose dance you could also describe as tactile – and sensuous, mercurial, deeply feeling.
The director is Trip Cullman, whose Becky Shaw played on Broadway earlier this year. The musical version of Thelma & Louise is being tweaked to suit the 21st-century stage, but it’s not set in the modern day: no mobile phones, Khouri tells me. There are scenes that are from the movie and new ones that aren’t, but Khouri is reluctant to give much more away.
She had studied theatre at university but didn’t want an actor’s life, as “I didn’t like being looked at”, she says. At 29, she began the script for Thelma & Louise in secret between freelance jobs. It was the easiest job I ever did,” she says.
Khouri never would have thought she’d still be talking about this story 35 years later. In the film, a girls’ weekend spirals out of control when Louise shoots Thelma’s would-be rapist and the pair end up on the run. Inspiration came in part from Khouri’s own experiences, having twice been mugged in LA, once at gunpoint.
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