UK actor Aimee Lou Wood said she had to “quieten her voice” early in her career and is still discouraged from speaking up on film sets.
“[You’re] having to hide how clever you are and how much you can see things and how you’re clocking absolutely everything,” Wood told Screen at the BFI London Film Festival premiere of The Idiot(s) on October 14.
“But you have to dilute that to make people feel comfortable because men have very fragile egos a lot of the time.”
The Idiot(s) sees Wood play Anna Dostoevskaya, a real 19th-century Russian memoirist and wife to the famed author, Fyodor Dostoevsky.
“In this industry, there’s a lot of trying to be right and not be the one who got it wrong,” the actor continued. “Instead of working together and collaborating as us versus the problem, it becomes very hierarchical, and I just don’t get it.”
Wood said she was told she “should be afraid” to speak up on sets and to producers, when she believed everyone on set was equal.
“Sometimes I have found, not anymore but when I was younger, I had to tone down and quieten my voice basically,” the actor said.
Love for European cinema
The Idiot(s) is directed by Polish directors Małgorzata Szumowska and Michał Englert. Johnny Flynn and Vicky Krieps also star.
Krieps, who has worked in several Hollywood features, says she always comes back to European films.
“You will find me often in movies where I have very small parts, and that’s something I do to support European independent cinema,” Krieps told Screen. “I will always do that forever. It’s something I do very consciously.”
UK actor Flynn echoed Krieps’s thoughts on filmmaking in Europe as compared to the UK. “People can take bigger risks [in Europe],” he suggested. “It’s easier to get funding for a film like this. I’m not sure this would be made in the UK.”
Suggesting that restrictions to funding in the UK are to blame, Flynn continued: “There’s an auteur culture in Europe that perhaps serves a more interesting version of cinema than a by-the-numbers UK approach.
“But this is more an appeal to the government to release money, and the institutions that fund films, rather than a criticism of British filmmakers.”
Flynn also stars as theatre director Richard Eyre in Simon Stone’s LFF opening film Elsinore.
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