Anne Hathaway has said she was feeling “creatively beige” before the late director Jonathan Demme inspired her to make her new film.
Oscar-winning Anne, 34, worked with the Silence Of The Lambs filmmaker on Rachel Getting Married, a project that brought the star her first Academy Award nomination in 2008.
After Jonathan died last month, Anne described him as her “favourite rebel angel,” saying: “Thank you for cracking open the heart which is now breaking (it’s always worth it).”
She will next be seen in Colossal, an off-beat drama in which she plays a woman struggling with alcoholism who realises she is connected to a giant monster destroying Seoul, and said Jonathan was instrumental to her taking the part.
She told the Press Association: “Sometimes you have to get really hungry when you can’t quite get turned on by anything. I was just in that place creatively and couldn’t connect to the scripts I was sent. They all felt like versions of things that have been made.
“Then Jonathan Demme wanted me to watch Ben Wheatley’s film A Field In England. He was the best and when he said this was a film I should watch, I went.
“To feel so creatively beige and then see this movie, which was so wild and technicolor and trippy and different, I just knew that I wanted to make something that had the same qualities as that.”
Anne said she emailed her management team, asking them to find her a similar project and Colossal came to her a week later.
She added: “I loved it because it was different in its DNA but not trying to be different. It wasn’t a pony painted as a unicorn. It was a pure unicorn.”
The movie received its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last autumn, where Jonathan was promoting his last film Justin Timberlake And The Tennessee Kids, and Anne invited him to the screening.
The actress, who is married to producer Adam Shulman and mother to their one-year-old son Jonathan, said: “He loved it. I was able to tell that story in front of him. He knew how integral he was.
“After the person I married and the person I gave birth to, he was the person who was most important to me.”
She has recently started working as a producer in an effort to continue generating her own material because of the continued shortage of substantive roles for women and hopes this will give her longevity in the industry.
She said: “There is such an unevenness in the numbers of opportunities between actors and actresses. If you have ambition it behoves you to look for opportunities.”
She added: “I want to do everything. I want to do it (acting) for as long as they will let me. I want to be that lady in my seventies that they have to find a way around the insurance. I have ideas. I’m taking a lifetime approach.
“But if I had to give it up tomorrow, I’ve had such a fun run. I’ve really had some wonders in my time.”
Colossal is released in UK cinemas on May 19.
