Cool beauty Uma Thurman has gone from cult heroine to the star producer of a romantic comedy. She explains why she’s still searching for the fairy tale.
”It’s funny,” beams Uma Thurman, “but in Hollywood, you don’t hear the word `bitch’ as much as you used to. Up until recently, if ever a woman was doing well or achieving something, that term was liberally applied. Women were called all sorts of names.” Sitting in the comfortable confines of London’s Dorchester hotel, looking remarkably fresh in her earth-coloured trousers and top, and acting especially chirpy for someone who stepped off a transatlantic flight just four hours earlier, Thurman is musing on Hollywood’s perception of female writers and directors. A trio of women screenwriters crafted her latest movie, The Accidental Husband.
“I think female writers and directors have been getting more work in recent years,” she continues, her slender fingers fiddling with the fine blonde hair scraped back from her face. “The slow move towards Hollywood accepting women in the employer and leadership positions is getting better. I think we’re all growing up more and more. There is some positive movement, and that makes me happy.”
An undoubtedly happy Thurman – she giggles throughout the interview – has hopped into the realm of leadership herself. She is credited as a producer on her new film, buying the rights to the story in early 2001 and spending the succeeding years working with writers, financiers and her first-choice director, her long-standing friend Griffin Dunne, who is perhaps best known for his work as an actor, starring in John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London and Martin Scorsese’s After Hours before graduating to the director’s chair.
The film is her second outing as a producer, following 2002’s HBO feature Hysterical Blindness, and whereas the latter is a rather gritty black comedy, her latest is a slick romantic comedy, starring the genre mainstay Colin Firth as Thurman’s intended fiancé. He is a rather stiff publisher who represents a “safe bet” for her character, Emma Lloyd, a radio presenter who encourages her listeners to plump for the more anodyne choice in their relationships, before suddenly pursuing the opposite option herself. Reflecting a world where marriage licences could, or at least should, be printed on an Etch a Sketch, the film allows Thurman to display her comedy chops, blending the slapstick with the poignant.
“I bought the rights and developed the story because nobody at the time was letting me do comedy,” explains the 37-year-old New Yorker, a hint of frustration creeping into her otherwise sanguine tone as she recalls the earlier stages of her career.
“So I found this script, which was a good high-concept romantic comedy – something Meg Ryan or Julia Roberts would do, but which I wouldn’t even get a meeting to do. I wanted to bust into another genre, and this seemed the only way. But during the film’s long journey, coming to life, dying and coming to life again about three times, I actually broke into comedy on my own elsewhere, with things like Prime and My Super Ex-Girlfriend. But back then, it was forbidden fruit. I was all serious drama and corsets.”
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