Olivia Colman Finds Joy in Acting Again with Director Sophie Hyde's "Jimpa"

Jimpa is directed by Sophie Hyde. Based on Hyde's own family story after her father, Jim Hyde, came out to his wife as gay when they were married with young children, the film stars Olivia Colman, John Lithgow, and Aud Mason-Hyde.

Colman told Variety: "I had just done a job where I really didn't see eye to eye with the director, which is quite unusual for me. It made me go, 'I don't want to do this'. Then my agent said, 'I think you'll really love Sophie. You'll love the way Sophie works.'"

"Jimpa" helped to restore the award-winning actress's love of acting.

She said: "I was given freedom. It was such a creative process. It's the antithesis of what I had just done, where I was sort of used like a wall prop, and was told 'chin up a bit, chin down a bit.' You know, that's not acting. It's not the work I enjoy. And Sophie was the absolute opposite of that."

She said that she'd actually prefer to act in private, reports femalefirst.co.uk.

She said: "All of it sounds pretentious. Whenever you talk about how you do it or how you don't do it, or whatever ... it sounds unbearable. I just like doing it, and ideally I'd like to do it with no one watching ever. But I know that's not possible."

Meanwhile, Hyde explained that the new movie is a deeply personal story for her.

The director shared: "All my movies are very personal; they're just a little bit more opaque about it.

"This is explicit. I have named the film after my own father, and I have a character that's a filmmaker in it, and she has a nonbinary teenager, and that non binary teenager is played by my own nonbinary teenager, Aud. So it's deeply upfront in its connection to me. But I wanted to look at the relationship between my parents and the stories that I've told about them, so I could question whether those stories are the whole truth."

The director also shared that because of the film's subject matter, it was difficult to get the project off the ground, reports femalefirst.co.uk.

The filmmaker said: "It has been a challenge. Do I think it's political? Yeah. We watched the film industry slide away from diversity and play it fairly safe in certain ways. Queer stories don't get much airtime. Stories by and about women don't get much airtime. We found out last year that there was a lot of pushing queer stories to the side."

- IANS