Emma Thompson left comedy after being called a 'man hater.' But she never stopped making trouble
LOS ANGELES - If you want to understand why the number of female directors, cinematographers, studio heads and screenwriters remains so maddeningly low, all you have to do is ask the only woman - and the only person - who has won Oscars for acting and screenwriting.
Men, says Emma Thompson, have a huge motorway to power, with lots of lanes in it, which makes it easy for them to aid other men along the same path.
"Women, on the other hand, have a kind of rutted track, on which there are many boulders. You can't even get a bicycle down it; you have to get off the bike and lift it over things."
Before we get into all of that, however, an admission: After more than a decade spent interviewing famous people, my usual response to any friend who expresses envy that I've interviewed [fill in the blank] is, "Yeah, it was cool, but it's not like I'm invited over for Christmas dinner." But if I'm being honest, I have secretly always wanted Emma Thompson to invite me over for Christmas dinner.
She did recently invite me for tea, however, and that's something.
"My husband is in the kitchen with next to nothing on," she says, greeting me at the door of a big, crazy Mulholland-adjacent house she and her husband, Greg Wise, found on Airbnb, "and
