Breaking Baz: Filmmaker Sophie Hyde Says It Wasn’t Easy Casting Olivia Colman To Play Her In Hot Sundance Movie ‘Jimpa’
EXCLUSIVE: Sundance prize-winning filmmaker Sophie Hyde (Good Luck to You, Leo Grande) says casting “a version of yourself” is not an easy task.
“It’s very tricky to do,” says Hyde, director of Jimpa, which is premiering today at Park City’s Eccles. It’s a film that sublimely explores what constitutes the makeup of family in our era.
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From the get-go, though, Hyde knew that Oscar-winning Olivia Colman would be perfect to play her, or rather a fictionalized version of herself called Hannah.
Like Hyde, Hannah’s a married film artist from Adelaide, the mother of a transgender, nonbinary teenager and the daughter of a father who came out gay when she was a child.
Along with Colman as Hannah, Jimpa also stars Hyde and partner, editor and producer Bryan Mason’s 19-year-old offspring Aud Mason-Hyde playing Hannah’s teenage child Frances and John Lithgow as their grandfather Jim, the lively, provocative title character.
The film was produced by Hyde and Mason’s Closer Productions with Liam Heyen of Mad Ones Films with support from Screen Australia, the South Australian Film Corporation, Netherlands Filmfonds and Netherlands Film Production Incentive.
Heyen and I had many conversations over email in the early hours due to the 10?-hour time difference between Adelaide and London.
I idly wonder whether Hyde will cast Colman, Lithgow and Mason-Hyde in her next picture, An Ideal Wife, which she reveals is happening “in the middle part of this year” and will star Emilia Clarke playing Constance Wilde, Oscar Wilde’s wife, who had a literary career of her own. “So it’s my first period drama, set in 1894 London. I’m really looking forward to it and filming in London,” she adds.
But I want to focus on Jimpa and its stunning performances.
Over Zoom from their home in South Australia, Hyde, with Mason-Hyde in tow, tells me that the film is “very much inspired by our lives and my family, and particularly my dad, Jim, who did come out just after I was born.”
She adds: “And so there’s a part of the story that’s incredibly sort of drawing on our real lives, and then there’s a whole lot of fiction as well. There’s parts of it that are very much made up or like created for the story and for the film that we wanted to tell. Obviously there’s Jim and there’s also Aud who is my child and they’re a bit older than Frances, but there’s elements of the relationship between Hannah and Frances that definitely are in us,” Hyde explains.
Very early on in the Jimba development process, Hyde knew she wanted Colman to play Hannah, who is seeking to make a film about her parents and how their lives changed when her father came out gay and how it impacted the family.
“It was really early on — I really wanted Olivia, and we couldn’t get the script to her,” says Hyde, who wrote the screenplay with Matt Cormack. “I just couldn’t get it to her. And so we put it aside, and we put it aside for a few reasons. We had another film we were going to make and then some health crisis in our family. So the film got pushed around and we waited.
“And I had been told back in the day, Olivia wasn’t reading anything, but I was talking to one of her agents in the UK [at United Agents] and I said, ‘I’ve got this film, I really want to get to her.’ And she just sent it straight to her. And within a week, Olivia and I were on a call and she was signed on. It was so fast. Olivia’s response is very instinctual to everything, I think, that she does. She has an instinct about it. And she goes for that, and that’s what makes her so watchable and so empathetic. So she just came straight on, and then we just had to work out how to make it and how to put everything together around her — because once we’d cast Hannah, it all made sense,” Hyde adds.
I nod in complete agreement because Colman’s Hannah is the heart of the movie. I was privileged to see both an unfinished and a completed version of Jimpa, and each time I was bowled over by Colman’s compassion for the role. It just shone through.
I wonder how similar Hannah and Hyde are. ”Parts of her are like me,” Hyde responds, laughing.
“Parts of her, I think, are very Matt Cormack, who’s my co-writer, interestingly. But he gets to hide a little bit more than me. Look, one of the things about casting someone like Olivia in the role was that Hannah as a character always felt quite cold to me and was drawing on funny elements of myself, interesting things about myself. But Olivia’s so warm, and so this kind of combination happened. And that’s not to say that I think I’m particularly cold, but I think that their character as she’s written is funny and that non-confrontational part, which is definitely in me, is pushed a little further in the film.”
I ask Hyde if Colman studied her at all during the film’s shoot.
“I thought she didn’t, honestly. I thought she was being very — not doing that, but sometimes she would suddenly do something on set, or I’d see it in the editing suite. I’d think, ‘Oh my God, she’s literally doing me there.’ She’s literally just making a joke to me about myself. … She was just very me.”
Colman captures tender moments of Hannah’s underlying sense of pain about her parents.
Hyde acquiesces and says you can still have a sense of “gratefulness” for the manner in which her parents split “but still feel the disappointment, still feel the pain. And I think Olivia really understood that from the first conversation that I had with her. She’s just tapping into something about this and really unjudgmental about it. And I mean, Olivia’s emotions are right there on the surface. Sometimes she’d say to me, ‘You don’t want me to cry, do you?’ And I’d be like, ‘No, don’t talk to me about it yet.’ Because things just trigger for her really quickly.”
Certainly, Hyde’s upbringing allowed her, I say, to fully comprehend and support Aud’s decisions about their sexuality.
“I think that is true,” says Hyde.
“I mean, I feel like I grew up in a queer family, the idea of queerness — which is about curiosity and questioning the ideas that we’re told, that there’s a sort of set way to be — were very strong. But more specifically than that, my dad’s choice to live openly as a gay man, he did leave and live in a different place to us, but he was still our father.
“He still raised us. His decision to do that kind of opened my world and my eyes in a certain way that I do hope that enabled Aud to kind of feel like a more open version of themselves,” she adds.
Hyde says that she is close to her child and “always wanted to learn from them about who they were and how they wanted to be in the world and kind of help to guide them but not enforce my idea about who they should be. And I think that has to come from my dad making such a big decision at a time that was very difficult to do that.”
Colman’s Hannah says in Jimpa that the film she wants to make about her parents is a “drama without conflict but with kindness” which I’m intrigued by.
Hyde argues that “there is a lot of drama without conflict. I think things can be dramatic and tense and under the surface. I think Hannah’s position is largely that in a lot of cinema now and a lot of art, we kind of push this idea that conflict is the No. 1 thing. It’s like conflict is the thing that will shift everyone. And sometimes you want to feel like there are other ways that we can tell a narrative that can rely on other things. But funnily enough, as we started to write the film, conflict just kept coming up. How the characters deal with it is interesting, especially with that family that’s just inherently full of conflict.”
Lithgow’s Jim is always pushing and provoking conflict as does Emily, Hannah’s sister, who arrives in Amsterdam ready for conflict.
“So these things were there. And also sometimes conflict is just there brewing even if no one’s bringing it to the surface,” Hyde says.
Hyde states, however, that in reality her parents had “a very loving breakup,“ although she says “it was very difficult as well for my mum at the same time. But my parents made a very strong decision to co-parent and to raise us together. Like my dad was sometimes here and sometimes away. And they made a very clear choice to not speak badly of each other and to raise us together. So my mom would say that my dad was like her brother after a while. It’s part of your family, but you’re not romantically involved. They stayed together a long time. The couple in the film, they stayed together for 10 years, I think, after he came out. So it was a process of evolution for everybody — everybody dealing with and working out what that meant rather than just being the binary idea of gay straight we’re done. It was like, ‘What does this look like in our life? How does this work when we’ve made a commitment to have children?’“
Her father, Jim Hyde, became a leading advocate for gay rights in Australia and was a founding member of the AIDS Council of South Australia and the South Australian Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby.
Trying hard not to reveal any spoilers here, but let’s just say that Lithgow‘s Jimpa isn’t a shy bloke.
Hyde laughs and says that the first meeting she had with Lithgow, “he sent me a photo of himself naked. It sounds really bad, but he sent me a photo from when he used to do theater in the early part of his career. He was like, ‘I’ve been naked forever.’
“The thing about John is he’s so enthusiastic in a way that’s incredibly freeing. He walks into a room and he’s like, ‘tThis is a wonderful room!’ So when it comes to working with him with a character, he’s fascinated by the character and he wants to understand and he wants to present them. So something like nudity or doing anything in that particular role, he’s like, ‘This is how the character would be. This is how they would do this. I’m not going to shy away from something.’”
She adds, ”He gets his claws right inside.”
Aud Mason-Hyde is seated beside their mother during the chat on Zoom. Of course, they’re a few years older than Frances, the character they play in Jimpa, but I was struck by how they convey a sense of youthful naivety and the interplay they have with their mother and grandfather.
Frances has an up-to-the-minute approach to dealing with their queerness, but they have much to learn from their grandfather’s experiences in the fight for equality.
I ask Mason-Hyde whether they contributed to the script that Cormack and their mother penned.
They say that they were quite involved in its development. “Obviously I wasn’t there every day writing it with them, but I felt like I had a great deal of autonomy over Frances and who they were. … I feel like I grew up with Frances in some strange way.”
Their mother adds that “we were really exploring in our own lives and what it means to have a transgender nonbinary child and therefore what that looks like.”
Hyde continues: “So we were constantly in an exploration through the writing process of ‘when am I getting things wrong? When have I actually been too much trying to appease everybody and not stand up for my child? How do I put that into a story?’“
Mason-Hyde observes that they saw Frances in the film as a little bit more withdrawn than their own self in that “they do take a little bit more time to observe and maybe act with a little bit more caution than I always would,” while agreeing that “they are sort of trying to watch and learn.”
Also, says Mason-Hyde, the dynamic spark between Frances and Jim is that their grandfather “is sort of saying, ‘OK, I need you to go and experience this [sex] before you talk to me about it.’ … And I think that’s such an interesting thing to pose for Jim to his grandchild to go, ‘I want you to put this into practice. You can talk about it. You can sit here and listen to us talk about sex and our experiences of it’, but, like, ‘go on and do it!’ And I think it’s this great moment. And I think for Frances, that’s where the film, or the story, really turns when they decide to go for it.”
One key contribution from Mason-Hyde was to find the song “All Dressed in White,” which they perform so poignantly a cappella-style in a scene to Zo? Love Smith.
Mason-Hyde notes the number’s by King Princess, “a wonderful queer artist.” They “fell in love with it a couple of years ago and started playing it on the piano at home.”
They turn to their mother, observing rather touchingly, ”and you put it in the movie.”
Hyde responds with equal warmth, “We could never replace it.”
The director tried different songs “and it was always just that one. And I’ll tell you something about that song, though: Aud sang that at 3 in the morning on our final night of shooting in Amsterdam. Everything’s just chaos, and Aud just with Zo? just homed in and just sang it. And that’s the take that’s in the film.”
Hyde says: “Aud’s been in our filmmaking world for their whole life. And so we are natural collaborators. We talk about everything. We build things together all the time. So to do that on such a huge scale was not difficult at all. We were really open and clear with each other, and we just tried very hard to speak very frankly with each other.”
That’s why Jimpa’s such a beautiful movie, because what constitutes a family today is whatever people want it to be without them having to consider themselves underground or living on the outside of society.
“This is normal life, this is my life,” Hyde allows. “And I think I’m always presenting the characters with a loving lens that is about ordinary people getting on with their lives and speaking in a way that it’s like we have this idea that people are on the outskirts or people are underground as you say, or all of these things, but actually they’re not. They’re our loved ones, our neighbors, ourselves. We are all here living this life.”
In flashbacks, the film focuses on the AIDS crisis in the early 1980s. “This is sort of forgotten history that I still don’t think we really have reconciled in terms of that,” Hyde suggests.
“That was a very important part of the story for us. We were cognizant during Covid that there was this whole history of health, kind of community care that just kind of got left to the side. “
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