DIRECTOR'S CUT Sharon Maguire – the director behind Bridget Jones – on the hilarious character’s latest chapter

Dan Jolin | The Sun – August 19, 2016

As the release of Bridget Jones' Baby draws closer, the pressure is well and truly on.

Almost 15 years after the film adaptation of Bridget Jones’s Diary became a Chardonnay-swigging, big-pants-wearing, box-office-smashing phenomenon, the people who made it once again found themselves together in the same room. 

Colin Firth, AKA “nice sensible boyfriend” Mark Darcy, Texan star Renée Zellweger – who plays Bridget herself – creator, novelist and screenwriter Helen Fielding, and Fielding’s pal of old Sharon Maguire, the film’s director, had gathered to read through the all-new script for an all-new Bridget movie: Bridget Jones’s Baby.

“They were looking at me and thinking: ‘Christ, she’s aged,’” says Maguire, who is quick to laugh and even quicker to crack a joke. “And I was looking at them going: ‘God, they’ve held up well.’” 

She’d been away from the film business for years, having moved to Los Angeles with her director/producer husband Anand Tucker to focus on raising their two kids. And here she was, returning for a sequel to the first film she’d ever directed. 

“I was more scared than I was the first time we did the read-through [on Bridget Jones’s Diary],” Maguire admits. “But at least this time I was able to say it to them. Last time, I just had a shaky voice and thought: ‘God, I’ll just try and get through this.’ At this meeting I said: ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m crapping myself! And I hope you are too, because we need to get this right!’”

There certainly is intense pressure on Bridget Jones’s Baby. The last sequel, 2004’s The Edge of Reason (which Maguire didn’t direct, as she was busy with other projects) proved far less popular than the original. And this third instalment comes after 12 years of false starts and rewrites. 

But there’s more to it than that. Bridget is a phenomenon, a character loved by millions the world over. Also, the success of the original came as a surprise – this one has the much tougher task of recapturing the magic. 

“It was a bit bemusing,” says Maguire of Diary becoming a £200million hit in 2001. “We didn’t expect it to do so well. I was a first-time director. A Texan was playing Bridget… we didn’t know if it was going to work.”

She does feel, though, that Bridget Jones’s Baby will be as relatable as the first film. Based not on an actual Bridget novel, but Fielding’s 2005-2006 newspaper columns, Baby certainly struck a chord with Maguire. 

The story begins on Bridget’s 43rd birthday, but by this time all her friends — including the brilliantly sweary Shazza (Sally Phillips), who Fielding based on Maguire — are married with children. (Fielding and Maguire met through a mutual friend in 1991, when Fielding was a restaurant critic and Maguire a director at the BBC). 

“Something happens on that day that makes Bridget turn away from affairs of the heart and towards the pursuit of hedonism,” explains Maguire. “She winds up getting pregnant and then realises she’s not sure who the father is.”

The director didn’t merely connect with the new script because she “is” Shazza, but because it is, she says: “Very much about being a mother in your 40s. In the same way the first book and film tapped into that world of women in their 30s who hadn’t got married and hadn’t had kids and were doing the career thing, this is about somebody in their 40s who is in the last-chance saloon as to whether they’re going to have a baby or not.” 

She relates stories of how, as a 40-something mother in LA “where everybody is so young and shiny and beautiful,” she’d be called “geriatric” by hospital staff, or asked if her baby was her first grandchild. 

“There is something about having babies in your 40s that is unique in both a humiliating and amazing way. And we tapped very much into that. It’s an area very ripe for comedy.”

It’s an area, though, that didn’t require the return of Hugh Grant as eternal cad Daniel Cleaver — the character “just wasn’t involved in this particular chapter anyway” — so instead we have Patrick Dempsey (“an all-American dream boy”) as Bridget’s new love interest. 

But of course, the most important player here is Zellweger. Like Maguire, she’d been away from the movie business for a long time, having taken a self-imposed six-year hiatus. 

When the cast and crew met for the first film, Zellweger had been very self-conscious about the British accent she was then still perfecting — “she practically whispered the whole script”. But this time Renée “guffawed her way through the script,” Maguire chuckles. “The accent was fine and she yelled it out.”

Zellweger, says Maguire, “is a bit like a sister now. We’ve been in the comedy trenches. And although there is pressure on us to succeed again, we both enjoyed it a lot more this time.” 

And she’s hoping audiences will enjoy it, too. While she and her husband have a TV production company to set up here in the UK, and Maguire is finishing a novel, she hopes there will be future Bridget movies, forming a franchise like no other, where we “follow one character throughout all parts of her life”. Coming in 2032: Bridget Jones’s Grandkid?