Kristin Scott Thomas is rewriting her story by writing it herself.
The British dame, 65, makes her directorial debut in “My Mother’s Wedding,” a film she co-wrote based on her own life growing up in a single-parent household without a father. She also stars.
Speaking to TODAY.com on Aug. 6, Scott Thomas says that while she added “lots of artistic liberties,” there’s at one element of the movie that aligns with her upbringing completely.
“The part that is absolutely true and is my experience as a child is all the memories that Scarlett Johansson character carries in her head,” Scott Thomas says. “That all happened to me, and those are my exact memories.”
“And that was sort of the seed for the film in the beginning — wanting to explain that to my family, what I remembered about our fathers,” she continues.
Scarlett Johansson’s character in the film, Katherine, and her younger sisters, Victoria (Sienna Miller) and Georgina (Emily Beecham), come together to celebrate the third marriage of their twice-widowed mother, Diana (played by Scott Thomas). Diana’s first two husbands, the girls’ parents, both died when the girls were little.
The three daughters, all of whom are working through their own grief, must work to embrace their new stepfather and their mother’s new chapter.
In her own life, Scott Thomas was the eldest of five children. Both her biological father and stepfather were navy pilots and died in crashes when she was 5 and 11 years old, respectively, per an interview the actor gave to Vogue.
Acknowledging the pain of her childhood, Scott Thomas says she was likely only able to create “My Mother’s Wedding” at this point in her life.
“I have to admit, I’ve been living with all of this for such a long time that I think I was out the other side before we started to make the movie,” she says. “I think that’s probably why I was able to make the movie — because I’ve recovered.”
Scott Thomas continues, “But it certainly takes a long time if you don’t really look at look at these things properly as a child. And, of course, when those things happened to me, it was a really long time ago. It was in the 60s and 70s, and we didn’t have the intelligence we have now about mental health and things like that.”
The actor says it “took a long time” for her to be able to talk about her past, be “more generous with it” and understand that other people share a similar story to hers.
“In fact, I was amazed at how many people making the film with us — how many people on the crew came up to me and said, ‘I lost my mom when I was 8.’ ‘My sister died when I was 15.’ ‘My mom died from, you know, my father died, you know,’” she recalls, adding it was “amazing” to hear such similar experiences.
I played it as the mom that I would like to be.
Kristin Scott Thomas on her role in ‘My Mother’s Wedding’
“As a child, I thought I was the only one,” she continues. “And then, growing up, you realize that actually this is thing.”
Though the storyline resembles Scott Thomas’ real life events and memories, she says her character Diana is not based on her own mother.
“I played it as the mom that I would like to be. The idealized version,” she tells TODAY.com.
“It was really fun, actually, because I got to invent a whole family, which would be kind of an idealized family. Recreating a chaotic, intimate, slightly fractious, very loving family was actually really, really fun to do.”
Similarly, Scott Thomas says she didn’t direct Johansson to model the eldest daughter, Katherine, after herself.
“The important thing for me was that the memories should be mine and then the rest was theirs to play with,” she says.
