Emma Thompson

Interview By: Rocco Passafuime
RoccoPassafuime@TheCinemaSource.com

Emma Thompson is one of Britain's most talented and elegant actresses. She is a winner of two Oscars, one for Best Actress in Howard's End, and for Best Adapted Screenplay for the film adaptation of Jane Austen's Sense And Sensibility, which she also starred in.

She's also known for a variety of quirky British films including Love Actually, Nanny McPhee, and Harry Potter And The Prince Of Azkaban. Now at the age of 49, Thompson stars in the romantic comedy Last Chance Harvey. As romantic comedy is a time-honored tradition going back to Hollywood's golden age, she theorized for us the possible origins of her character archetype in the film.

'It actually goes way back to my first movie, which was called The Tall Guy,' Thompson jokes, 'And it was Richard Curtis's first movie and I made that with Jeff Goldblum when I was 27, so it was like 22 years ago and Joel Sousa when he was like 10 or something. And then, he took this character of Kalem and this sort of no-nonsense nurse and kind of developed her.'

'Bloody hell, paranoia at such an early age,' she continues, 'It wasn't a stealing of character. It was being inspired by a character that then, as it were imagined as an older person, well, that's what Joel Hopkins told me. If he wants to hide these things from me, he has to warn people beforehand, OK''

She stars in the film alongside Dustin Hoffman, whom she has worked with before on the film Stranger Than Fiction. Thompson shares with us why she was so keen to work alongside Hoffman once again on screen.

'It was one of those things after Stranger [Than Fiction] that Dustin and I had such a good time,' she believes, ' And we'd done that thing that actors do of wouldn't it be wonderful if we could work together again and that never happens, of course, but it did unexpectedly and through a serendipitous route. And what was amazing was that it felt like something meant because I don't think we could have played this when we were 20 years younger.'

'Either of us, it's just one of those things, relatively speaking,' Emma continues, 'Because it absolutely has to do with where we are in our lives now because it's one of those strange moments where we wouldn't be able to do it in 10 years time. It's just one of those things that happened at the right moment and that's quite rare in our profession. I'm very grateful for it.'

Emma claims their comfort together on-screen even extended to the film's sex scenes.

'We were desperate to show it, all on the floor,' she says, 'It's [Dustin's] fault. Every chance we got, we took our clothes off on set. It was like, look, it's not so bad. We can shoot from this angle and, you know, it was great. We were well up for it.'

Last Chance Harvey is unique right now as it's one of the few films out in recent years that center on older and more mature characters. Emma spoke out about how she feels this film is different and how Hollywood's centering on youth in most films is potentially robbing the art form of its vitality.

'What I feel sort of is though a lot of the movies I end up going to see, I don't see many because I'm a mom and I don't get out much, it involves a lot of fast moving around and noise of various kinds and often very well-done,' she believes, 'But I rarely go and see something that is not like, that has those kind of huge emotional movements, where your heart, there's a muscle moved inside you, as you watch. And that for me is essential about filmmaking.'

'The first movie I saw that made my heart lurch like that was Les Enfants du Paradise,' Thompson continues, ' And Arletty was 47 or something like that and Jean-Louis Barrault was'those guys weren't young. It had nothing to do with that. It had to do with the great movements of the heart. It has nothing to do with your age. Some people look 27 and are as rigid as they come. You can't shift them. They've somehow latched onto something and wouldn't let go and, God love them, you can't blame them. It's not like we're providing a great deal of entertainment that does encourage you to, as it were, explore.'

Thompson also believes Hollywood film's obsession with youth also sets a potentially unhealthy message to young people in American society and abroad.

'We're not used to it, which to me, seems very odd,' Emma states, 'What are we trying to do to our young people' Are we trying to say to them, look, that's the best bit, the bit you're in now, that's the best bit. Because if they are, than we're sailing them down the river, lock, stock, and barrel.'

'If you don't talk about it, the joy of getting old or the joy of accessing yourself with a little wisdom and a little this and a little that until your ease in life is actually nicer, then I think it's a very dangerous thing to do,' she adds, 'As storytellers, we must, must make sure we don't make it all youth-centric, because they do believe, they will believe that that's kind of the be-all and end-all and we're already a little way towards that in this so-called 'developed world'.'

However, while she believes it is refreshing to have a Hollywood film centered on older characters, it's not something Emma believes should be done more of simply to fill an age demographic quota.

'It's not really about performance anymore and it really has to do with age,' Thompson believes, 'I don't think you can take a movie just to go, it's about time they do a movie about older people. It's got to do with the script and the people and the director, you know. You got to go with the story when you think the story will work. I think all other principles have to bow down to that really.'

Hoffman's character in Last Chance Harvey is a n'er do well who's daughter chooses her stepfather over him to walk down the aisle at her London wedding, who ends up staying and falling in love with Emma Thompson's character. She discussed for us the themes in the film as it relates to the relationship she has had with her own parents.

'My mother, who's actually very hands-off, and she's a great actress, a quite puritanical, Presbyterian Scot,' Thompson says, 'And as you know, British people have a difficulty with being praised, handing it out or receiving it. We sort of feel that if we are being praised, we should be having some sort of enema at the same time just in case the pride gets in and we should be purged simultaneously. So I'm standing on stage and I'm looking down at all these people, people I had grown up watching like Clint Eastwood and Al Pacino and they all have this kind of generous smile on their face.'

'They just look so please for me and my mother's basically trying to disguise the fact that she's proud,' she continues, 'Because she thinks that praise, not that it's evil, she doesn't believe in even sin or anything, is unpleasant and faulty in some regard. Therefore, she will not convince it under any circumstances. I took her to the next show after that one as well and it was the same thing. Of course, I was fine with it, it didn't matter, but it's a very interesting story.'

Another aspect of the film that is intriguing is how it paints a more realistic picture of women. Thompson discussed for us why she believes the ideals of the female hero has been so long unnoticed.

'I started a women's group when I was [co-star] Liane [Balaban's] age at home and it was for actresses,' Emma recalls, 'And my question that I started the group with was what constitutes the female heroine, the female hero, because if we continue to identify always with male heroes because they have the action, and action is very important, how do we balance that up' Because let's face it things like Superwoman and Catwoman, when the superhero is a woman, unless they're an adjunct to a male superhero or a group of them, it doesn't seem to work, so what is heroism for women''

'And after many years of discussion and examination, we came up with the fact that, I mean, it's an old idea,' she adds, 'And in fact, it's extrapolated from the end of Middlemarch by George Elliot where she talks about the fact that she talks about that she was always trying to create female heroes. And it was very frustrating for her, I think, because she found that the heroine always had to do with the smaller tributaries of life. That it was to do with detail and every little action of everyday. That's what constituted and made up the female hero, it had to do with small actions, not the grangesse. It had to do with the detail, find the detail of life than the call to'It was something that bears a lot of thinking about and a lot of examination. And there's a great deal you can read about it, of course. I recommend it, because it's still something that exercises my mind greatly.'

And as far along as women have gotten in being on more equal footing as heroic characters in the past 100 years, Emma believes that the world is still at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the roles of women as true hero characters.

'Not a lot has changed,' she believes, 'Maybe because it's generational and it maybe the next generation that it will change in. And maybe that our whole notions of heroism may change because we may grow out of that. Let's go further and say stories about women have not really been told till very recently. I mean, OK, it's short though, great, fantastic. We've gotten terribly simplistic about heroism and what is now. I would challenge our young writers and our young women to ask that question and say what is it and how we can reinvent it and retell it.'

'And I would indeed recommend something like Happy-Go-Lucky with Sally Hawkins playing a character so irritating, you want to pluck your eyes out in the first reel,' Thompson adds, 'But, then, as it goes on, you realize that it becomes a kind of portrait of absolute goodness and she is a hero and someone you never ever, ever forget, it's a very clever movie. But that's another matter. There's lots of other ways and there's ways of inventing it and maybe, maybe I'll write one before I drop off the twig.'

However, Thompson is optimistic about the future of heroic women in storytelling, considering there was indeed an era in world's history's distant past where male and female heroes truly were equals.

'We may go back to, for instance, the ancient Greeks where the whole notions of heroes and villains were interchangeable in the same way as gods and humans were interchangeable,' Emma says, 'It was far more interesting, I think, story-making time, then.'

'After the Greeks, you got a bleatingly long gap, certainly in British literature and American literature, of course,' she continues, 'Actually, Hawthorne is actually brilliant early American literature. It's very, very good on women. The definition of what it means to be a woman is very young. This is something that we mustn't forget. We are still in our infancy.'