＂The Sheep Detectives＂ Interview With Emma Thompson

I play a woman called Lydia Harbottle who is the lawyer to George Hardy the shepherd played by Hugh Jackman and I come at a crucial moment in the plot to deliver news about the will that he has left behind. She's sort of a shark in disguise but she's also very just she's not a bad person I mean she's very much you know in service to a plot which is you know the story which is really about the sheep being brilliant. One of the greatest things about working on this is to work with Craig Mason's script because he's such a wonderful writer and it's fantastic to go from somebody who can write such dark and deep things as Chernobyl and then you know turn his hand to something that is also incredibly deep but which has such humour and humanity and profundity and examines as well this very close link between humans and animals or human animals and other animals. We have the most extraordinarily brilliant cast of course the great Nicholas Braun who's playing officer Tim Derry who's the the little town's only police officer a very diffident young man who hasn't quite grown into himself and who actually finds his mojo right at the end of the movie which he's just we've just done two days with him and he's played it just wonderfully. We have the great Molly Gordon from Booksmart and Theatre Camp who's just the most fantastic actor and writer so she's got that extra kind of quality we sort of insert it into the story and it's not really this film is not about us it's about you know Hugh and it's about the sheep solving this thing so we're kind of you know we're flavours that are kind of being braided in to this beautiful story. I get a lot of information from for instance the the costume and our wonderful costume designer Rosa has created these extraordinarily beautiful tailored and incredibly cut suits it's the sort of architecture really more than clothing and they're in very bright colours so whilst they're power suits they're also in very friendly colours so that gave me the notion that perhaps Lydia was the sort of person who was very powerful but was also determined not to come across as too strong. We are also very lucky to have the extraordinary Kyle Balder who's of course responsible for those brilliant Despicable Me movies and this is amazingly his first live action movie and he's just been I mean you wouldn't know it you absolutely wouldn't know it he's delightful he knows what to do what to say he's just been a delight to work with really a delight a lovely man with great sense of exactly what he wants and so so calm. I think it's a rod. But what is it made of? Well not grass I can tell you that.