At first glance, TOW looks like it might be one thing—a light, colorful, fast-moving comedy with a quirky underdog spirit. And certainly, director Stephanie Laing’s film has energy, humor, and a bright visual palette that immediately catches the eye. But beneath that surface lies something much weightier: a true story about corporate greed, legal indifference, and one woman’s refusal to give up when the system seems determined to erase her.
Based on the true story of Amanda Ogle, TOW follows Amanda (Rose Byrne), a woman living in her car on the streets of Seattle. When that car—her lifeline, shelter, and only real possession—is stolen and impounded, Amanda finds herself trapped in a bureaucratic nightmare that turns into a long fight for justice, dignity, and self-worth.
For Laing, that contrast between the film’s visual brightness and its darker undercurrents was entirely intentional.
“Much like life, right?” Laing says. “We walk around with our own soundtrack sometimes, feeling happy and bright and sunny on a sunny day and underneath it all, sometimes it’s not so funny.”
That balance became one of the defining creative principles of TOW. Even as Amanda’s circumstances become more difficult, the film never collapses into hopelessness. The color palette remains vivid, with pops of pink, purple, and orange that carry emotional as well as visual meaning—especially in the connection between Amanda and her daughter Avery.
Laing says that color language came directly from the real people behind the story.
“When I met the real Amanda and the real Avery, that is their colorway, that’s their color story,” she explains. “It felt really important to bring that into the movie and to keep things a little light. I didn’t want her story to ever feel bleak, because, I mean, at times it is bleak, but overall Amanda as a character is just such a fighter and just reminding us all the time that one voice matters. And I think that’s just such an important message.”
That idea—one voice matters—clearly resonated with Laing on a personal level. Reading the script, she found herself pulled in not only by the story’s emotional power, but by the anger and frustration it sparked in her.
“I read it, I loved it. Then simultaneously, while reading and devouring the pages, also was so frustrated for her and what she was having to go through, and then was angry, and then was frustrated, and then shocked at the amount of money they were trying to charge her,” Laing says. “But just in awe of that persistence of that character.”
That persistence connected Laing to Amanda in a very human way. While her own life experiences were not the same as Amanda’s, she found parallels in the struggle to navigate systems that often seem designed to confuse, obstruct, and wear people down.
Laing recalls her own experience trying to advocate for her mother during an illness, dealing with the maddening complexities of healthcare and insurance. “All the things that you would never know to ask, right?” she says. “So I think, in terms of being a storyteller or filmmaker, I really respond to those stories that have something to say that don’t ever feel too sad, because that’s just not how I live my life.”
That sensibility runs all through TOW. The film acknowledges pain and injustice, but it also keeps moving. It finds humor where it can. It embraces empathy. It remains emotionally grounded without becoming oppressive. As Laing describes it, she was constantly trying to strike the right balance “of when it’s funny and when it’s sad and when it’s frustrating.”
That tonal precision is also evident in the film’s visual design. Working with cinematographer Vanja Černjul, Laing created a visual grammar rooted in Amanda herself.
“We really wanted Amanda to move our camera,” Laing says. “We wanted it to be still most of the time. We didn’t want to be distracting. Let Rose’s character flow through these frames, and when we’re really moving, let’s move with her.”
That approach gives TOW a strong sense of place and emotional perspective. Wide shots situate Amanda in the harsh realities of her environment—on the street, on a curb, near an overpass, exposed and vulnerable—while tighter shots and carefully chosen details reveal who she is in ways dialogue alone cannot.
Laing is exacting when it comes to those details. Props, colors, and objects within the frame are not random decoration; they are part of character construction.
“I’m a freak about that stuff,” she says with a laugh. “The pen can only be this. My feeling is, if it’s nothing, then it shouldn’t… a prop has to say the right thing or say nothing at all. So it’s like our glass or the journal, right? Either it’s a pen we don’t see and we don’t recognize or we don’t care about, or it’s going to be pink or purple, because that’s her character.”
That philosophy extends across the entire frame. “The coffee cup on the counter—everything has to cohesively work together,” Laing says.
She and Černjul developed clear visual rules and committed to them, even when the temptation to break them arose. “There were many days where I would be like, I so wanted to move the camera, and Vanja would say, ‘So you want to roll today?’ And I’m like, no, I don’t, never mind,” she says. The result is a film whose visual restraint makes its moments of intimacy and emphasis all the more powerful.
That same intentionality shaped how Amanda’s emotional isolation is conveyed onscreen. Some characters are never given the usual coverage one might expect in a dialogue scene, a choice Laing says was quite deliberate. “There’s people we never cover,” she explains. “People that don’t see her the way we need her to see herself, or the way that she comes to see herself by the end of the movie.”
As Amanda grows, the visual language shifts with her. By the time she reaches the courtroom in the third act, she is no longer the same woman we first met. She carries herself differently. She sees herself differently. And Laing wanted that transformation to feel earned from the accumulation of tiny moments and details.
“Because she can see herself, right?” Laing says of Amanda’s final courtroom scene. “When people would say things to her, she couldn’t take that phrase ‘people like me’… By the end of it, she’s taking ownership of that.”
That journey is reflected not only in Rose Byrne’s performance, but in the ensemble around her. Laing’s cast includes Dominic Sessa, Octavia Spencer, Ariana DeBose, Elsie Fisher, Simon Rex, Demi Lovato, and Corbin Bernsen, and Laing is quick to credit them as essential collaborators in calibrating the film’s tone.
“This cast came to play,” she says. “They brought it on every level and just completely understood the tone. They got so interested in Amanda’s story and fell into it and wanted to tell it, and then wanted to play together.”
Laing points to the subtleties each actor brought to the screen, especially the kinds of small behavioral choices that make a character feel real. Speaking of Octavia Spencer, she notes, “People notice she’s eating a lot. She’s eating all the time. Those subtleties and those details make us fall in love with characters, and sometimes you don’t even know why until you go back and watch it.”
Dominic Sessa’s Kevin, Amanda’s first-year attorney, is another example of how Laing wanted the film’s characters to feel imperfect, searching, and human. Kevin is not presented as a polished legal savior. He is still finding his footing, and Laing actually deepened that arc after speaking with the real Kevin.
“In the first script that I read, he wasn’t really making mistakes,” she says. “And I asked him, did you make any mistakes? And he told me, ‘I filed in the wrong court.’ And I was like, ‘Oh God, can I use that?’ And he said yes, because I didn’t know any better.”
For Laing, that detail mattered. “He’s not perfect, right? He’s trying to find his way. Everybody’s trying to figure their paths out here in this movie, as everybody is in their day-to-day lives.”
Even Corbin Bernsen’s Martin LaRosa, a character who provides some of the film’s biggest comic notes, is grounded in reality. Laing clearly relished Bernsen’s delight in playing the role. “He was so ready to play the villain and just fully embraced it,” she says, adding that while the character is heightened, he is “very loosely based on many people that Amanda encountered during her fight.”
Finding the right editorial rhythm for all these characters and tonal shifts proved to be one of the film’s greatest challenges. Laing admits that in one early cut, the film played too much like a romantic comedy between Byrne and Sessa.
“The first cut, it felt like a rom-com between Dominic and Rose,” she says. “So we made some changes just in the cutting pattern.”
Laing worked with editors Max Miller, Joe Klotz, and Sarah Flack, each of whom brought something different to the process. “Joe and Max cut the comedy stuff well,” she says, while Flack, whose work includes films with Sofia Coppola, helped refine the emotional language and make fuller use of the wides and tonal rhythms already built into the footage.
Music was just as crucial to maintaining the film’s delicate balance. Laing praises composers Este Haim and Nathan Barr for creating a score that could go to darker emotional places without ever becoming too heavy.
“If we put the wrong music on, then it would have completely changed the tone,” she says. “How do you keep it a little upbeat all the time within Amanda’s themes?”
The answer came through unusual instrumentation and great attention to texture. “They used some found instruments and things that were broken to do the score,” Laing says. “And then obviously there’s a lot of vocal effects, which I love, and then clapping.” Like the production design and cinematography, the score was built with care, specificity, and a desire to elevate Amanda’s story without overwhelming it.
Costume design was equally important, especially when it came to Amanda’s sense of identity. Laing singles out Amanda’s black jacket as a key piece of visual storytelling—more than wardrobe, it is armor.
Discussing the final courtroom scene, Laing says she and Rose Byrne thought carefully about whether Amanda should dress up in a more conventional way. In the end, they decided against it.
“No, she has to stay in her armor,” Laing says. “It doesn’t matter if it’s court. She’s not dressing up. She’s more accepting herself for who she is, but she’s going to keep that jacket on.”
That choice gets to the heart of what makes TOW so effective. Stephanie Laing does not strip Amanda of her color, humor, or personality in order to make her suffering legible. Instead, she insists that Amanda’s individuality, dignity, and resilience are precisely what make the story worth telling.
And in doing so, Laing has crafted a film that is not simply about one woman’s legal fight, but about how people hold onto themselves when every institution around them seems determined to reduce them to a problem, a file, or a fee.
For Laing, Amanda’s journey ultimately comes back to something simple, but profound: the belief that one person, speaking up, still matters.
by debbie elias, exclusive interview 03/12/2026
TOW is in theatres on March 20, 2026.
