Kristin Scott Thomas on her Directorial Debut: “A Story From My Prism”

“Do you have sisters?” asks Kristin Scott Thomas over Zoom. Yes, I reply. “Well, you’re familiar with that very specific and special sisterly dynamic then.” With a career that spans four decades and a cinematic oeuvre that traverses Britain, America and France from The English Patient, Four Weddings and a Funeral, to Ne le dis à personne and Mission Impossible, Scott Thomas is well known as an actor. But all the time she spent in front of the camera left her wondering what it might be like behind it. “I was desperate to tell a story from my prism,” says Scott Thomas, whose directorial debut, My Mother’s Wedding, is now out in the UK. 

Set in the British countryside, My Mother’s Wedding follows three sisters, played by Scarlett Johansson, Sienna Miller and Emily Beecham, who reunite for their mother’s third wedding. Scott Thomas straddles the lens, not only directing the film but starring in it as the twice-widowed mother. As her daughters, all now mothers themselves, return to their childhood home, it would seem family life is more complicated than the idyllic settings that the events play out in might suggest. Each with their own problems, mother and daughter alike are forced to revisit the past. “A house with lots of people in it is the most fantastic opportunity to explore a family’s psychology,” says Scott Thomas, adjusting a bird brooch on her 1950s dungarees – a costume from a play she did a few years ago.

Heartfelt and at times funny, it’s a story about sisterhood, motherhood and the evolving nature of being a woman. “I think we’re super beings, really, us women, these multifaceted creatures,” she says. “We adapt so quickly to changing circumstances and roles, from being a lover, to a wife, to a mother, to a widow, to a grandmother. Curious people, career people, sensible people. Through these cycles. And I think that’s quite cool. Isn’t it?” I’m reminded of her monologue in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag about womanhood and pain.  

My Mother’s Wedding is partly autobiographical. Co-written by Scott Thomas with her husband John Micklethwait, the story is inspired by true events of the actor’s past. Scott Thomas’s father, a Royal Navy pilot, died in a flying accident. Her mother remarried and he too was a Royal Navy pilot, who just years later died in the same way. Scott Thomas and her siblings were raised by their mother in Cornwall. Her memories – of their father, of their stepfather, of saying goodbye, of being told he too had passed – appear as black and white animations, interspersed throughout the film. “Those animated scenes are my memories, exactly as I remember them.”

“I’m sure you’ve done your homework, but every profile piece on me refers to this ‘tragic childhood’ of mine,” she says. “Every time I think ‘hang on a minute’, my childhood was happy, it was great. But losing people who are important in your life, one after the other, in the same way, was traumatic.” 

Scott Thomas had long planned to return to these memories through animation. “It quickly grew into something much larger.” Was the film a means of processing the events of her childhood, I ask. “I did that when working on Electra [the play by Sophocles] about 10 years ago, which follows a girl avenging her father’s death. This was absolutely cathartic for me, a place I was able to put all my wrestling.” She pauses. “We all wrestle and will continue to for the rest of our lives, whether it’s been traumatic or not. My experiences as a child have made me who I am.” 

“I’m lucky enough to have found a job where I was able to make a living at the same time as exploring a lot of that untold sadness,” she continues. “I realised that the motor for many of my choices, for many of my performances – for what I’m good at, or was hired for anyway – is this secret sadness, and playing characters who share this.” Fiona from Four Weddings and Katherine in The English Patient are examples. “I know what sadness feels like, what it looks like.” This seems to ensue in My Mother’s Wedding, where on the surface all is wonderful but beneath that “something funny, is going on.” Something unresolved. 

The three sisters in Scott Thomas’s film are manifestations of her own siblings. “They come from my experience as a sister, that funny sisterly dynamic, the bickering, the closeness, the ‘those are my socks’,” she says. Aspects of that dynamic are tangible. “But I think mostly, they’re all a bit of me. I know what it is to want to have the perfect family [Beecham’s character], to find the perfect man [Miller’s], to have a fabulous career [Johansson’s]. It’s not a self-portrait exactly because one invents and imagines that they might be braver, or sillier, but the springboard for that is the self. Every time you write something, a piece of you comes out.” 

As for the mother character, who Scott Thomas plays, “she’s absolutely not my mum. When I told my mother, she was really worried about it like ‘darling, darling, no no,’ so we created a sort of fantasy mother, someone really ballsy, who really gets her daughters in order.” Scott Thomas’s own mother passed away before the film was finished. “She would have enjoyed it,” she stops. “She would have shed a tear.” 

Scott Thomas trained as an actor in London and Paris, moving to the French capital in her early twenties where she stayed for several decades. At 25, she landed her first acting role in Under the Cherry Moon (1986). After which, the five-time Bafta-winning and Oscar-nominated actor never stopped. “I’ve always loved film, the culture of cinema,” she says, speaking of French cinema as a revered seventh art form. “I love the process, the teamwork, the fact all these people come together for 20 seconds in front of the camera, that bullseye moment.” 

“When I was at acting school, I didn’t really think of myself as becoming a cinema actor at all, I really loved theatre.” While Scott Thomas is perhaps best known for her filmic work, the stage has been of equal importance to her. “You have huge responsibility when on stage.” Later this year, she will take part in a West End production of Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard. In many ways, My Mother’s Wedding draws parallels with another of his plays, The Three Sisters. “Nothing can get close to Chekov. He’s extraordinary.” 

Acting was never a choice for Scott Thomas, it was an outlet for the emotional weight she carried with her, a way of making sense of it. She recalls the moment she realised performing was what she wished to do. “I was playing cops and robbers in the back garden of this military base we lived on in Yorkshire with my neighbour, a girl called Susan, we’d walk to the village shop. I was convinced that the lady who ran the shop wouldn’t recognise me if I dressed up in different clothes … Gosh, I wonder what Susan’s up to now. ” 

Written, directed by and starring Scott Thomas, informed by facets of her life, one would expect the making of My Mother’s Wedding to be hugely emotional. “I had to take all the emotion out and watch what was going on objectively.” Shifting between actor and director can’t have been easy either, even for someone to whom film sets are by now second nature. “I’ve been so many characters in front of so many cameras, directed by so many people, but this was certainly a learning curve,” she says. Understanding what it’s like to be directed gave her a sensitivity towards her cast, but at the same time, as director, “it’s got to be what you want, not just to make everyone happy.” My Mother’s Wedding only stoked that burning fire within. She’d like to direct again.

My Mother’s Wedding is out in the UK now.