Kidman wants more women directors

Express Tribune

19-05-2025

Australian megastar Nicole Kidman lamented on Sunday the "incredibly low" number of hit films made by women directors, and revealed that she often wakes up at 3.00AM to do her own personal writing, reported AFP.
Despite her efforts backing and mentoring women-led projects, the number of women-made films among the highest-grossing films "is incredibly low", she said as she received a Kering Women In Motion award at the Cannes film festival.
Kidman pledged in 2017 to work with a woman director at least once every 18 months, saying then that there was "such a disparity in terms of the choices".
"You would go, 'OK, could a woman direct this?' There just wasn't a number of names that you could consider," she said.
The Oscar-winning actor confirmed that she had worked with 27 female directors since her pledge eight years ago.
Only seven of the 22 films in the main competition in Cannes this year are directed by women.
But Kidman heaped praise on an early critics' favourite, Mascha Schilinski's The Sound of Falling, a German-language drama about multi-generational trauma among women on a farm.
"To have Sound of Falling heard on the world stage, that's fantastic," she said.
Although she ruled out writing her own script, she did reveal that she frequently wakes up during the night to write.
"It's a very ripe time for things to happen because you're in that slightly removed state from reality," she said.
"I wake up and I'll write something, be it a dream, be it something that's circulating in my mind."
Lawrence talks parenthood
Meanwhile, actors Robert Pattinson and Jennifer Lawrence, who star in the Cannes Film Festival competition title Die My Love, reflected on Sunday on the difficulties of the postpartum period and how they brought their own experiences of parenthood to the film, reported AFP.
"There's not really anything like postpartum. It's extremely isolating," Lawrence, who recently gave birth to her second child, told journalists in the French Riviera resort town.
However, "as a mother, it was really hard to separate what I would do as opposed to what she (her character) would do," said Lawrence, who won an Oscar for Silver Linings Playbook in 2013.
Pattinson and Lawrence play a couple, Jackson and Grace, who move to a small Montana town and have a child, which puts increasing pressure on their relationship as Grace, a writer, struggles to deal with her new identity as a mother.
"When dealing with a partner going through postpartum or any kind of mental illness or difficulties, trying to deal with her isolation, figuring out what your role is, is difficult, especially if you don't have the vernacular," Pattinson said.
The film, the latest from Scottish director Lynne Ramsay, known for emotionally intense dramas like We Need To Talk About Kevin, received a nine-minute standing ovation at its premiere on Saturday night and has been well-received by critics.
Pattinson, who gained fame in the Twilight series before both taking on less mainstream titles like The Lighthouse and donning Batman's suit, said becoming a parent himself last year had reinvigorated him.
"In the most unexpected ways, having a baby gives you the biggest trove of energy and inspiration," said Pattinson.
Lawrence, of the Hunger Games series, said that becoming a parent made her realise that she didn't know just how much she could feel - "and my job has a lot to do with emotion".
"I highly recommend having kids if you want to be an actor."
Anderson's A-list army
In addition, US director Wes Anderson brought his latest A-list cast led by Benicio del Toro to the festival, ramping up the star power as the competition reaches the halfway mark.
Anderson's typically whimsical The Phoenician Scheme, which also finds roles for Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson and Kate Winslet's daughter, Mia Threapleton, is in the running for the top prize at Cannes.
It tells the story of risk-taking and accident-prone European tycoon Zsa-zsa Korda, played by del Toro, a character loosely based on Anderson's Lebanese father-in-law.
"He was a completely different sort of person, but he was an engineer and quite alpha," the director told AFP.
"His relationship with my wife is probably the DNA of the movie. He told her one day, 'I need to tell you about how my business works because I won't live forever.'
But "the way he told her about his business was he opened a closet and started taking out shoeboxes and said, 'This is the project that we are doing in Saudi. This is the project we are doing in Gibraltar," Anderson added.
"She came home and she said, 'This is crazy.' So all of that went in the movie. Sorry," said the maker of such quirky hits as Asteroid City, The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Darjeeling Limited.
With Anderson's film always thick with stars, the film's red-carpet premiere was packed with stars, with Edward Norton, Julianne Moore, Benedict Cumberbatch and Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro also in town.
Sunday also saw the premiere of Nigeria's first film in an official slot at Cannes.
My Father's Shadow, the debut feature of newcomer Akinola Davies is set during a 1993 coup, a pivotal moment in Nigeria's recent history, when the military annulled the election and General Sani Abacha eventually took power.
"Getting into competition for the first time ever shows that Nigerian cinema has come of age," Prince Baba Agba, a cultural advisor to Nigeria's President Bola Tinubu, told AFP.
Culture Minister Hannatu Musawa led the large and stylish Nigerian presence on the red carpet for the premiere.