Over her fruitful acting career, Dame Kristin Scott Thomas has played some of the most complex and layered female characters on screen, from the rebellious and passionate Katherine Clifton in The English Patient to the calculating spymaster in TV’s Slow Horses. Now she makes her screenwriting/directing debut with My Mother’s Wedding, to tell a story that’s deeply personal.
Written with her husband, journalist John Micklethwait, the film is a touching yet multipronged look at three sisters, their feisty mother, and the emotional undercurrents that keep them from becoming their true selves. For screenwriters, it’s a great example of channeling personal trauma onto the page while telling a sweet yet poignant ensemble story.
Reclaiming the Past
Kristin says she wanted to tell this specific story on film to reclaim her past in a way that was meaningful to her.
“Every single profile ever written about me has a couple of paragraphs about my tragic childhood,” she says. “I decided to reclaim that. Now that I’m grown up, I can tell it as it is.”
The oldest of three siblings, she lost her father and stepfather, both pilots in the Royal Navy, in air accidents before she was 12. Those calamities sparked her interest in how loss and tragedy shape people’s lives.
To honor both of her fathers and give her younger siblings - who were too young to remember them - joyful glimpses into the men they were, she decided to create short animated vignettes. These would be told from the perspective of her childhood self, who often went mushroom hunting with her loving dads.
“I thought I’d give them something that moves, that isn’t just a static photo of a man in uniform, but shows the tenderness between father and child. That’s how this whole project started,” she says.
Knowing there was a deeper story behind the animations, they soon evolved into a feature script. While the film is inspired by her real family, she says she took a lot of creative license with the script.
“I thought, no one’s going to be interested in my life. Let’s invent something!” she says.
Keep It Simple
At home together during Covid, Kristin and John began the screenwriting process.
“We were all enclosed at home and had plenty of time to get on with things, so we sort of knuckled down,” she says.
Though John isn’t a screenwriter by trade, Kristin says, “He’s very, very good at structure and keeping a story moving. I think what I’ve learned is to try and keep things as simple as possible and not to have too many characters. We’ve got so many characters in this film!”
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","img":{"alt":"Scarlett Johansson, Sienna Miller, and Emily Beecham in My Mothers Wedding","height":475,"src":"https://200838.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/200838/Scarlett%20Johansson%2c%20Sienna%20Miller%2c%20and%20Emily%20Beecham%20in%20My%20Mothers%20Wedding.png","width":840},"link_url":{"no_follow":false,"open_in_new_tab":true,"rel":"noopener","sponsored":false,"url":{"content_id":null,"href":"https://www.imdb.com/title/tt20911974/?ref_=ttmi_ov_bk","href_with_scheme":"https://www.imdb.com/title/tt20911974/?ref_=ttmi_ov_bk","type":"EXTERNAL"},"user_generated_content":false}}]{% endraw %}{% end_module_attribute %}{% module_attribute "smart_objects" is_json="true" %}{% raw %}[]{% endraw %}{% end_module_attribute %}{% module_attribute "smart_type" is_json="true" %}{% raw %}"NOT_SMART"{% endraw %}{% end_module_attribute %}{% module_attribute "tag" is_json="true" %}{% raw %}"module"{% endraw %}{% end_module_attribute %}{% module_attribute "type" is_json="true" %}{% raw %}"module"{% endraw %}{% end_module_attribute %}{% module_attribute "wrap_field_tag" is_json="true" %}{% raw %}"div"{% endraw %}{% end_module_attribute %}{% end_module_block %}Creating the Frost Family
The first thing Kristin did was to craft three distinct sisters, knowing each needed to be on a different but related journey. The eldest is Katherine (Scarlett Johansson), who follows in her father’s footsteps by serving in the Royal Navy. While successful in her career, she keeps an emotional wall between her and her romantic partner Jack (Freida Pinto).
The middle sister is Victoria (Sienna Miller), a glamorous B-level Hollywood actress whose career and romantic chaos serves as a distraction from her own emotional pain and grief.
The youngest is Georgina (Emily Beecham), who works as a hospice nurse and navigates a cheating husband while pretending to have a perfect family life. It’s clear that each of the sisters are infused with some of Kristin’s own truths and are authentic to her.
“I feel very close to them, as if I’ve known them forever, even though they were invented on paper,” she says. Kristin plays Diana, the mother of the sisters. But she insists that Diana is an invention and not anything like her own real-life mother.
“The sort of tragic part [of the story], that’s true. And my mother did get married a third time to a wonderful man, the opposite of Geoff (James Fleet). But my mother was very different from Diana. Diana’s a ballsy, feisty woman who has her own sort of set of rules. For me Diana is an ideal mother, and the boss. I loved the idea of having a mother like that,” she says.
Beyond the main characters, the three sisters and their mother, there’s significant others, along with children and surprise wedding guests. There’s even a private detective hired by Victoria to spy on Georgina’s philandering husband that generates some of the film’s comic relief. But creating such a large ensemble brought its own challenges when writing the script.
“You have to keep tabs on who’s who,” she explains. “In real life, you might go to a house and not know which child belongs to which parent but on screen, the audience needs clarity. That’s why we used little supers [on-screen text telling the audience the name and occupation of each sister] at the beginning to introduce each sister.”
Character-Driven Writing
Kristin’s vast experience as an actor informed her writing, especially as she built the characters.
“I think we did come at it from a character point of view,” she says. “But you also have to think about how to get from moment A to the end. We took a lot of different paths before reducing them down.”
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Monologues in movies are somewhat rare and often discouraged. But when you have such a formidable actress at the helm, it just makes sense to have one. The screenplay’s most poignant moment is a graveyard monologue, delivered by Diana to her three daughters. The speech was the product of collaboration. Feeling stuck, she handed the task to her co-writer.
“I said, ‘You’ve got to write something smart and profound, but not using smart and profound words. Easy enough, go do that, please!’ Then I went in and jiggled it around a little.”
The result is a moment that distills the film’s central theme: the need to make your own choices in life. Kristin explains:
“What happens when children grow up with one parent, that parent becomes the be all and end all. I know this because it happened to me. It’s very difficult to pick up, to make a choice, because you learn that the surviving parent is the oracle, they know everything. That’s what she’s explaining to them in the graveyard – they’ve got to grow up, separate from her and learn to make their own choices, even if those choices feel enormous.”
Advice to Writers
For screenwriters, My Mother’s Wedding is a great example of what can happen if you’re willing to mine your own life and explore the painful bits. But Kristin says it’s also important to give yourself permission to fictionalize the story as you see fit.
When asked what advice she’d give to first-time screenwriters, Kristin says, “Go and watch a lot of films, but not TV.”
But perhaps the most important takeaway from Kristin’s process is that every person has the right to reclaim their own story and shape it into the form that best serves them.
My Mother’s Wedding opens in theaters Aug. 8.