Emma Thompson wouldn't have jumped into a pond. Hear the Oscar winning actor and scriptwriter on playing ugly in her sequel to the laugh riot The Nanny Returns
Emma Thompson wouldn't have jumped into a pond. Hear the Oscar winning actor and scriptwriter on playing ugly in her sequel to the laugh riot The Nanny Returns
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No wrinkle-lift creams for Emma. Her character Nanny McPhee is ageless |
Emma Thompson'su00a0 alter-ego Nanny McPhee is back, warts and all, with her magical powers to tame terrible children.
She has travelled in time to visit a new family, this time during war-time, on a muddy farm where a frantic working mother is living with five children and sundry animals trying to make ends meet while her husband is away fighting for the nation.
"As Nanny McPhee is ageless and timeless, who knows how many families she's visited or for how long?" asks Thompson, an actress brave enough to look truly hideous as McPhee but in real life is 50 and fabulous, adding, "Playing ugly releases me from the effort of looking good. I don't have extreme vanity and playing Nanny McPhee means I don't have to go to bed early to avoid bags under my eyes. As Nanny I can just 'be'."
We meet in London to talk about the film. Tanned from her holiday in Mexico with friend, the actress Kate Winslet, her tousled hair is sun-blonde and she is amusing and enthusiastic. The night before she had gone to the premiere of the film and taken a pig u2014pigs feature prominently in the film - with her on the red carpet.
Thompson started writing the script for this Nanny story while the original film was still in production five years ago. "I've tried to keep to the spirit of the original material, the Nurse Matilda books of the bedtime stories that were told over the years in the family of writer Christianna Brand, about a family of ill-behaved children and the supernatural nanny who arrives to tame them. I see Nanny McPhee as a bit of a zen mistress, with no ego and huge power coming with an apparent lack of effort. In some ways she is not human and I always think of her as a collection of projections. It's a tremendously interesting part to play."
"Maggie (Smith) arrived wearing a floral frock, sort of English gardenesque style, and she was absolutely what I had hoped for the slightly flappy English Mrs Green. We usually associate her with very cool, funky, edgy movies so it is great to see her doing something quite different. She' a real team player and gave lots of input."
Also different is a joyful Busby Berkley scene of synchronised swimming piglets in a country pond. 'Of course we couldn't train pigs to synchronised swim. However, in this scene, the children in the film were required to react with spontaneous and unbounded delight to an empty pond and that's a very difficult thing for children, or even adults, to act, so to help them with their reactions I unexpectedly popped up in the pond while the cameras were rolling and acted out what the piglets would be doing.
"What you're watching in that scene is children laughing with unbounded and spontaneous delight at me, basically drowning!" jokes Thompson.
"We used CGI for some of the pig scenes although pigs are brilliant and train up really quickly but not to synchronised swimming routines or climbing trees. We also used CGI for the 30-acre barley field that harvests itself but for my 'familiar', the jackdaw Mr Edelweiss, we trained six birds for months. I grew really fond of my jackdaws. Interesting birds."
"What could Hollywood have for me?' she questions rhetorically with a smile. "I'm a Londoner and I have everything here." The golden Oscar gongs, she says, hang out, appropriately, in the loo in London along with her other awards from a 30 film and substantial theatrical career.
And then there are the books and screenplays.
"Writing really suits me as I can stay home and do it. Since our daughter Gaia was five (Thompson is married to actor Greg Wise) we haven't had a nanny. I take her off to school and between 9 am and 3 pm I have writing time.
That's plenty. I am very disciplined. I have periods of intense activity, then stop. I never write for more than four hours. Then I go and pick her up from school. We're very much "at home" people."
They live in the 1930's house in which she grew up in North London, with her mother living across the road and sister living nearby. Currently she is writing a script for a third Nanny McPhee film set in contemporary times.
"With contemporary children Nanny McPhee will come in contact with the technological age, machinery, computers, electronic gear, possibly drugs, all sorts of things. She is going to have to be a little more present, a lot more modern."
Emma Thompson on writingWriting really suits me as I can stay home and do it. Since our daughter Gaia was five (Thompson is married to actor Greg Wise) we haven't had a nanny.
