The filmmakers

Director's statement

I wrote The Last Hurrah when I was twenty-five. More than thirty years later, I finally made it.

The story began with my own life in Missoula in the 1990s. I came to the University of Montana with two high school friends, no real plan, and no idea what I wanted to do. Five days later, I met the woman who would become my wife.

Those years were magic. We were twenty-somethings figuring out life together in an incredible mountain town. We drank and smoked too much, skied, floated the river, worked jobs we didn't care much about, and spent endless hours talking about music, movies, relationships, and whatever might come next. No one had answers. Friendship was the center of everything.

That's the world that became The Last Hurrah.

I started writing for fun, stealing shamelessly from my own life and then exaggerating and inventing until memory became fiction. The places, friendships, romances, and wonderfully strange characters all grew from the Missoula I knew and the people I loved.

Then life happened.

I built a career and a production company. My wife and I raised three incredible kids in Missoula. I was happy and busy, and The Last Hurrah became something I would make "someday."

Then one of my closest friends, the friend who introduced me to my wife and shared those early Montana years with me, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. During the eighteen months that followed, our group of friends tried to make every moment count. I returned to the screenplay, determined to finish it and share it with him.

He passed away before I could make the film.

His death left me with a question I couldn't shake: What am I waiting for?

My wife finally said, "You need to make this movie."

So we did.

More than thirty years after I first imagined it, we finally brought The Last Hurrah to life in the same town that inspired it, with an extraordinary cast and crew.

The Last Hurrah is a musical comedy about friendship, love, fear, and time. For me, it's also a love letter to Montana, to music, to the people who shape our lives, and to those seemingly ordinary moments we don't realize are extraordinary until they're gone.

It took me more than thirty years to understand what this film was really about:

The dreams we keep postponing don't wait forever.

Chris Richardson