Oh no, Bridget Jones is back!
Kate Muir | The Times – September 6, 2016
Most
heroines have fans, but Bridget Jones has a support group. Through thick
and thin — and Bridget varies — we root for her, laugh with her and
neck cheap chardonnay with her as we too fall over and forgive ourselves.
Bridget has another, slightly more professional support group: the women
who created her and brought her to screen in the latest film, Bridget
Jones’s Baby. The author, Helen Fielding, worked with Emma Thompson
on the script and it was directed by Sharon Maguire, aka Shazzer in the
books, who also invented the phrase “men’s emotional f***wittage”.
Maguire is just a tad hungover when we meet for lunch in Islington the day
after the London premiere and glamorous rooftop after-party. Today, her
hair is in plaits and she’s wearing a Breton top rather than the
bouffant up-do and gold dress in which she addressed the crowds at the
Odeon Leicester Square.
Maguire revealed that she could hardly breathe because she was wearing
“three pairs of Spanx” and told Working Title’s grand be-suited
producer, Eric Fellner, on stage: “Eric, you’re looking f***ing hot
tonight… Bit more flesh on show next time, love.”
That was the first laugh of an evening that turned the tables on men, and
there were many more to come in the third rom-com in the series, which has
career-woman Bridget suddenly torn between two lovers — either of whom
may be the father of her unborn child.
Her suitors are the uptight lawyer Mark Darcy, once again played by Colin
Firth, and Jack Qwant, an American dating magnate and chick magnet played
by Patrick Dempsey.
A sign of how engaged Bridget’s fans are came when she staggered, in her
white jeans and high heels, into a muddy Bestival-style festival and fell
drunkenly into bed with Jack for a no-strings shag. Everyone clapped and
cheered in the cinema as the world’s most famous singleton got lucky.
“I just loved that,” says Maguire, who directed the first Bridget
Jones movie in 2001. “I don’t think it’s going to get any better
than having delivered that to screen. That was a hard-won cheer and we
dropped various talking scenes before that. They just bonked. Some people
were saying Bridget just wouldn’t do that, but with one of her great
loves dead, the other married to a Camilla, she’d been through a lot.”
Spoiler alert here, but Hugh Grant is no longer in the running, since he
declined to be part of the third film. (It sounds like the back-room
shenanigans on BJB were epic; in his speech Fellner mentioned Fielding
being tough to work with, then added how much he adored her.) Anyway, what
Maguire refers to as “the dysfunctional Bridget Jones family” dealt
with Grant’s missing Daniel Cleaver character in a killingly funny
manner.
Of course, the other media-fanned drama on this movie has been whether Renée
Zellweger has had cosmetic surgery, after the Variety
film critic, Owen Gleiberman, complained: “She doesn’t look like
Bridget Jones!” He added: “Celebrities, like anyone else, have the
right to look however they want, but the characters they play become part
of us. I suddenly felt like something had been taken away.”
Zellweger has denied having surgery. “Not that it’s anyone’s
business,” she wrote, “but I did not make a decision to alter my face
and have surgery on my eyes.” She is also 20lb lighter now than she was
as the first, pudgier Bridget. However this is, to say the least, a
vanity-free performance, and Maguire springs to her defence.
“Reneé’s happy to project a really unvarnished version of herself.
Sometimes I’m the one that says, ‘I think this is going too far,’
and she really does not care. She would do her own make-up and rub it off
sometimes. She hates make-up, she hates it, and she’d much rather just
get on with things rather than sit and be primped.
“In fact I thought, ‘Jesus Christ that’s quite an unglamorous
image,’ when I saw the first scene. Owen Wotsit is quite wrong. He
should be photographed naked and we should look at him in another 15 years
and scrutinise how different he looks, and then let’s judge him.”
Maguire, 55, waxes lyrical about Zellweger’s English-rose complexion:
she is 47, but plays 43 in the movie. “All it is, is she’s got older
and thinner. My children don’t recognise me from photo albums 15 years
ago. I don’t recognise me now! It’s a bit scary. Everything’s
fallen.” Maguire’s so resolutely un-Hollywood, you want to hug her.
Fielding and Maguire have been friends since the Nineties, when Bridget
was first conceived as a diary in The
Independent. Maguire worked with Tracey MacLeod at the BBC on The
Late Show at the time, and some of this background has gone in to
making Bridget a major “hard news” television producer in the new
film.
The three friends “did spend a number of years just going out ranting
about our lives and drinking too much”, says Maguire. “I did once slip
down a wall shouting about emotional f***wittage, so that was me, but I
think Shazzer is a combination of me and Tracey.”
Like Bridget, Maguire was late to motherhood, and at 42 turned up single
and five months’ pregnant to see her Irish Catholic mother. “Bridget
has always reflected my life back at me. That’s what I like about her.
When Helen invented her we were in our thirties, and life hadn’t handed
us marriage, babies or any of those things, and we were out there
floundering. Alarm bells were ringing from society and the answer was to
just go out and get trashed.”
Now Maguire is more sober, with a daughter of 12 and a son of 6 with her
partner, the director Anand Tucker. She missed shooting the second Bridget
Jones: The Edge of Reason in 2004 while pregnant, made Incendiary with Ewan McGregor in 2008 and since then has been
mothering. “It took so long to have babies and I had to go through seven
kinds of science-fiction to have them. But then my son was about to start
school and they offered me Bridget
Jones’s Baby and it did feel like destiny.”
The other cast members have also changed since they all first met 15 years
ago. In the hiatus, Firth has received an Oscar for The
King’s Speech and a Bafta for Tom Ford’s A
Single Man. Maguire says that Firth mark II had a firm idea of what
his character should be — very uptight, serious and unemotional — a
gamble they had to take with him.
“Colin’s always saying Tom Ford is brilliant. I had to say, ‘If this
is going any further you’ll have to stop quoting Tom Ford and saying how
instrumental he was to your career. I gave you that reindeer jumper,
don’t forget!’” Indeed, Mark is seen in the film finding the
offending jumper in the back of a drawer.
However, Zellweger and Firth still have plenty of chemistry, repressed in
his case. Maguire decides to explain how she deals with their bedroom
scene. “I throw a lot of technology at it because I get very embarrassed
and adolescent about shooting sex scenes, so I had a huge 100ft
techno-crane hanging over them, prowling.” She imitates a crane noise.
“When Eric Fellner walked into to this little set in a hotel room he
went, ‘F***ing hell, you don’t usually have techno-cranes in
sex.’”
Interviewing Maguire, even while she’s sober, is like being on some mad
girls’ night out. She continues: “I sort of sit behind the monitor
like this” — she peers through her fingers — “then I can’t watch
it, and Renée sees my shoulder shaking and she gets the giggles, and then
Colin’s saying, ‘Can we all grow up and just get on with it so we can
all go home?’”
The conversation then segues on to “modesty garments”, little
skin-coloured pouches to cover the worst on film, and whether Bridget
should have kept her bra on like they do in most American rom-coms to keep
the ratings low. “I said, ‘If there’s a black bra, you’re going to
be wearing it, Colin.’”
A PR is lurking to take Maguire away from the restaurant, but nothing will
stop her now. “Sex is a very subjective thing: what works for one person
doesn’t for another. I find it very hard to judge, but it has to be
funny. I really like the idea that Mark Darcy’s very repressed but
he’s a bit of a tiger in bed. But Colin just goes, ‘I don’t want to
know, I’ll just do it. What do I have to say?’”
And there I think we have it. A director, an auteur, whose actors love her
so much they’ll do almost anything — and it shows in the warmth and
generosity of the movie.
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