CHRIS KNIGHT
Pen is mightier than the actor Actress Emma Thompson says a bad script never makes a good film
Movie audiences may see Emma Thompson as an actor — Hogwarts’ Professor Trelawney; Miss Kenton in The Remains of the Day; Nanny McPhee — but it’s worth remembering that the two-time Oscar winner has only one trophy for acting, in Howards End; the other is for adapting Sense and Sensibility. So it should be no surprise that when a script comes her way, it’s a scribe’s sensibility she brings to bear on it.
“The first thing I do is see what the writing ’s like,” she says at the Toronto International Film Festival — a year ago, mind — where the film The Children Act had its world première. “And that’s what I always respond to. And it doesn’t really matter about anything else, and sometimes the films I choose don’t work, but the writing’s always good.”
A film has many pieces. “But that is the first piece of the jigsaw puzzle for me because I know that a bad script will not make a good film. Sometimes a good script will make a bad film, but a bad script will very rarely make a good film. I can’t think of one.”
The Children Act, adapted by Ian McEwan from his own novel, is the story of British judge Fiona Maye (Thompson), who must rule whether to force a 17-year-old Jehovah’s Witness (Dunkirk’s Fionn Whitehead) to have a life-saving blood transfusion that neither he nor his parents wants. As she gets to know the young subject of the case, we also watch Fiona’s crumbling marriage to Jack (Stanley Tucci) and an ironically more stable partnership with her personal assistant (Jason Watkins) in one of those work relationships that seems like a marriage.
“This one was just a no-brainer,” says Thompson about taking the part, “because it’s Ian McEwan, who I love, and I’d read the book already. I’d never worked with Richard (Eyre, the director) but I’ve known him a long time, so I was excited to work with him. And it was a fantastic part. Not only her own complexities, but I was very excited to find out about family law.”
Thompson spent hours in family court, watching female judges. “They were extraordinarily inspiring to me, and it was their gravitas and dignity that really inspired the way that Fiona conducts herself.”
The key attribute she learned was their ability to listen. “It’s a wonderful thing to be asked to play, because I think acting is listening really; it’s not doing. And there was a lot of listening. And of course there were a lot of very beautifully calibrated judgments that (Fiona) delivers in speech, but the real thing that got to me was how much listening she got to do.”
The story deals with the intersection of religion and medical science, and Thompson has not hidden her religious views, or lack thereof. “I wasn’t baptized or Christened, and not raised by religious people at all. My mom and dad wouldn’t have said they were atheists, but they were at the very least agnostics.” A pause, then: “Dad probably was an atheist, actually.”
And while she understands the positives of religious thought, and admires the tenets of humanism and Buddhism, she finds the organizations troubling. “I think there are many other ways to uphold our spirituality and our ethics, and I think we need to find new ways of expressing our ethical code. A lot of stuff we’ve been using is way out of date; it’s just not adequate to our needs.”