4 1GT Monday July 20 2020 | the times
times
W
e called
it Emma
Thompson
Day,
because
it was the
day Emma
Thompsonwas on set. Usually, the cast and
crew numbered about ninety people
— camera operatives, wardrobe,
make-up, lighting, sound, riggers,
drivers and the guys in catering who
had really nailed their jerk seasonings.
A small hamlet of people, trying to
get through five pages of script a day,
which is a lot. Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes
Wide Shut took 15 months to film.
We’re shooting this in six weeks.
Independent British movies hit the
ground running and go at full pelt
until the last minute. Every minute
and penny counts. So there’s usually a
very brisk, no-nonsense, earnest vibe
on set. People are getting on with stuff.
Except on Emma Thompson Day.
She’s due to arrive at 10am, I’m there
at 9.30am, and I can’t help but notice
that our little movie family has...
increased, overnight. It looks as if all
the people who are usually back in
the office are here, plus the people
who technically finished working
a few weeks ago, plus another
half-dozen or so who are busy trying
to look busy, but are clearly Just
Waiting To See Emma Thompson.
There’s one dude I’ve never seen
before who’s carrying a chair around,
like it’s his alibi for being here.
Obviously, everyone’s been cleared by
security — but everyone has asked to
be cleared by security. If you work in
the film industry, being on set with
Thompson is the equivalent of being a
birdwatcher and being able to tick off
a pied flycatcher. Everyone wants to
watch Emma Thompson at work,
because... she’s Emma Thompson.
I’ve written her into the movie as
a character who’s basically a cross
between Lady David Bowie and God
— the woman who changes the life
of a teenage girl on a quest; a modern-
day Glinda the Good — and this is,
indeed, how she advents from her car.
Cropped, paper-white hair, leather
jacket and a box of posh chocolates
the size of a coffee table.
“These are for everyone!” she says,
taking them round the cast and
crew like a chocolate waiter. The
chair-carrying dude takes two. He
can’t believe he’s just been served
a nougat by Nanny McPhee.
Obviously, she nails everything
within two takes as I watch on the
monitors, marvelling that words I’ve
written are being spoken by Remains
of the Day. It’s a pivotal scene between
her and the lead, Beanie Feldstein,
who is playing a character based on
me when I was 16. This is all back
in July 2018, when Feldstein had
just wrapped on the yet-to-be-released
Booksmart and was hot from her
break-out role in Lady Bird. Watching
Hollywood’s newest star playing
opposite a legend is fascinating
— Beanie glows in Thompson’s
presence, everything goes up a gear
and Thompson regards her with
matriarchal pride.
It’s a matriarchal vibe: we’ve got
three female producers, a female
director and the most female/LGBTQ
crew ever assembled on a British
film. We’re trying to do something
as new and different as possible,
within budget and a 90-minute
running time — something that
will be good, right down to the bones,
for girls who watch it.I walk
around
saying, ‘I’m
so sorry,
this all
seems such
an effort’
Yet whenever I view the rushes, in
the evening, I can’t tell if it’s working
or not. I’ve never made a film before.
I don’t know what all these raw pieces
will look like when finished. Is it
good? Is it bad? Is it so terrible I will
lose friends and future employment?
I DON’T KNOW.
All I know is that whenever I go on
set I feel like I understand why so few
British women make films. Because as
I watch gear being set up, and catering
dole out hundreds of meals, and sets
being built, and extras being dressed,
and wait for the anxiety-inducing
shout of ACTION! before everything
goes quiet, I feel deeply embarrassed.
I wrote a script, and now it’s causing
such a fuss. Such a hoo-ha. I walk
around, saying, “I’m so sorry —
this all seems like such an effort”
to everyone I meet, in the most
apologetic British lady way possible.
“I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry I wrote a
film. And a film about me. Oh God.
Jesus. That’s actually, now I think of
it, appalling behaviour. I’m so sorry.”
I’m not being delightfully and
quirkily self-deprecating — it all gave
me terrible diarrhoea. I spend most
of Emma Thompson Day on the toilet,
hoping she wasn’t outside, queueing
to use the cubicle I’m in.
Everyone at some point, I think,
wonders what a movie about their life
would be like. By this point in the 21st
century we’re all so film-literate thatwe know when things are happening
to us that are like tropes in a script.
“This is my all-hope-is-lost moment!”
we think when we get evicted from
a flat. “This is where the orchestra
would surge up and soundtrack my
sorrow,” we sigh as we walk home in
the rain, after being dumped, trying
to look noble.
And because we’re so film-literate
we start idly comparing our actual
lives to the movies they most
closely resemble.
The moment I realised that I
actually did want to make a film, if
I ever got the chance, was when I
considered all the funny coming-of-
age movies I’d watched and noticed
that none of them, no matter how
much I loved them, touched on any
of the big moments in my teenage
years. Working on the presumption
that there must be a few others who
felt similarly unrepresented, I started
doing a very satisfying thing:
compiling a list of all the things
I’d want to have in a movie if I
ever made one:
1) Have a working class heroine.
Very few comedies about teenagers
are about working class teenagers.
In American movies, even if the hero
isn’t comfortably middle or upper
class — Mean Girls, Dirty Dancing,
Clueless — they live in houses
with verandas rather than “a front
doorstep”, and their main problems areIt’s a film with
a working class
heroine who
hustles — me!
Caitlin Moran could never recognise her own life
in coming-of-age movies. So she decided to adapt
her autobiographical novel for the screen
Emma Thompson and
Beanie Feldstein in
a scene from How
to Build a Girl