Mumbai, February 18 – Oscar-winning actress Olivia Colman lost some of her passion for filmmaking after previously clashing with a director, however, she rediscovered her love of acting while filming "Jimpa."
"Jimpa" is directed by Sophie Hyde. Based on Hyde's own family story, after her father, Jim Hyde, came out to his wife as gay when they were married with young children, the film stars Olivia Colman, John Lithgow, and Aud Mason-Hyde.
Colman told Variety: "I had just finished a job where I really didn't see eye to eye with the director, which is quite unusual for me. It made me think, 'I don't want to do this.' Then my agent said, 'I think you'll really love Sophie. You'll love the way she works.'"
"Jimpa" helped restore the award-winning actress's love of acting.
She said: "I was given freedom. It was such a creative process. It's the opposite of what I had just done, where I was sort of used like a prop, and was told 'chin up a bit, chin down a bit.' You know, that's not acting. It's not the kind of work I enjoy. And Sophie was the complete opposite of that."
She said that she would actually prefer to act privately.
She said: "All of it sounds pretentious. Whenever you talk about how you do it or how you don't do it, or whatever… it sounds unbearable. I just like doing it, and ideally I'd like to do it with no one watching ever. But I know that's not possible."
Meanwhile, Hyde explained that the new movie is a deeply personal story for her.
The director shared: "All my movies are very personal; they're just a little bit more opaque about it.
"This is explicit. I have named the film after my own father, and I have a character that’s a filmmaker in it, and she has a nonbinary teenager, and that non binary teenager is played by my own nonbinary teenager, Aud. So it's deeply upfront in its connection to me. But I wanted to look at the relationship between my parents and the stories that I’ve told about them, so I could question whether those stories are the whole truth."
The director also shared that because of the film's subject matter, it was difficult to get the project off the ground.
The filmmaker said: "It has been a challenge. Do I think it's political? Yeah. We watched the film industry slide away from diversity and play it fairly safe in certain ways. Queer stories don’t get much airtime. Stories by and about women don’t get much airtime. We found out last year that there was a lot of pushing queer stories to the side."
