Uma Thurman - star producer

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.


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