The Daily got the chance to sit down with director Katherine Dieckmann and Academy Award nominated actress Uma Thurman to discuss their new movie "Motherhood" (2009), which opens in limited release on Oct. 23.
Thurman was in town to receive the Boston Film Festival's Film Excellence Award and present "Motherhood," the festival's opening film. The film follows Thurman's character Eliza as she faces the challenges of motherhood on the most stressful day of her life.
Question: What does motherhood mean to both of you?
Uma Thurman: I've come up with a one-word answer, which I think covers everybody: growing-up.
Katherine Dieckmann: I was saying earlier it's about devotion and letting go, and if you do your job right, you raise children to be adults who leave you and hopefully still like to visit you.
Q: Why did you create this project from both an acting standpoint as well as a directing and writing [standpoint] ... what drove you to make the movie the way you did?
KD: I wrote it because I was very frustrated with the absence of movies about mothers, and when I really had to sit down and think about [it], when has a mother been the subject of a movie? [Thurman's character] is the subject, not ... an ancillary character, but she is at the center of the movie. What happens to a woman's psyche and sense of self when she, by parenting, finds herself having to give up so much time and consciousness? And I thought that was an interesting subject to explore, but I wanted to do it in a comedic way.
UT: It's a real rarity these days, more and more, to get to find a piece that's about the human experience at all — and the domestic, private, family side of who we are as people and as a culture and the way it is captured in the smallest acts. I felt that Katherine's script so beautifully took me inside an experience I had both shared and was a part of, a private side I have never really discussed with anyone. It's a type of storytelling and communication that I'm probably most passionate about, so I was very happy to be involved.
Q: You see a lot of motherhood stories, and they tend to be very generic, and this one is a little more realistic. The more generic ones are always in the suburbs so I was curious about your choice to move it to an urban setting and especially New York.
KD: There's something about the urban peculiarity of life in New York — the idiosyncrasy of life in New York — that lent itself really well to a comedy and also makes the physical tasks you have to get through as a mother much more difficult ... like doing laundry and getting things in and out of buildings without a car.
UT: And in an urban environment, by doing it there, in New York, you can get much more done. The distances you have; you don't plan your life.
Q: What you've done here is created a woman who has suppressed her creative desires and then comes back to [them]. What are your thoughts about that?
KD: That is the main point of the movie. The pragmatic facts of motherhood, what's involved in motherhood, make it very difficult or challenging for almost any woman to pursue her passions. They're always pursuing them against something else as opposed to when you don't have children, you're just pursuing them whenever. Children are a fixed thing; they're not going anywhere. So you have to find a way to manage your inspirations or your dreams or your desires or however you want to put it as a creative person against a lot of pragmatic obstacles. I think women find all kinds of ways to do that ... or not. Some wither and have to shelve everything and hope they can find it later. I think it is different for every person.
UT: Well, one of the things that I really love that Katherine had in there is that this woman is slightly frustrated because what she is passionate about, what she's doing, is underappreciated. And she is underappreciated. The idea [is] to make art by viewing this passion or this essential human role of being a parent with ... meaning, and that being looked down upon is itself a kind of like a wonderful conundrum. And in a way her frustrations have her agree with the deriding of her own job — parenting. So she is in cahoots in devaluing herself. And the journey of the movie is her trying to take it back.
Q: There is a scene when Eliza's husband defends himself and says "Well, I make sacrifices too." It's called "Motherhood" but maybe it's more about life, it's about family. So, can you talk about your thoughts on that?
KD: That's what I like about that scene, that is done so beautifully by Uma and Anthony Edwards. It's not just that she's not feeling seen, she's so spun out by the pressures on her that she can't see him and in that moment he forces her to see him. His point of view is very valid too. It's really valid. Maybe for her to be able to break out of that mode she's in and go like ‘Oh yeah, that's his take on it' and that also has a weight and a truth to it. There's a way to be free of it in a certain sense and get beyond it.
UT: We all forget what we have so often in life. You get so caught up in the struggle that you don't necessarily always stop and go outside and be grateful. It's a beautiful moment of realizing some gratefulness at the end of the movie.
