Filmmaker Stella Hopkins has opened up on directing her husband, multiple Oscar-winning veteran actor Anthony Hopkins, in the film “Elyse”. The debutant director says she found it easy because they mutually respected each other’s position within the film unit.
“He respected my position and I respected his, although I recognised that I was working with a man who clearly has 55 years’ worth of acting experience from which to draw,” Stella said, according to a femalefirst.co.uk report.
There were differences of opinions, of course, and she gives an instance. “For the therapy scene he said, ‘I’d like to sit a little bit back in the dark but, at a certain point, when I really need to get her present, I’ll lean forward’. I objected, and said, ‘It’s going to be too dark, and you’re going to be in the background!’ But it was his choice, and he was right,” she added.
Stella and Anthony Hopkins got married in 2003, and she says they never had an agreement that he’d be part of her film and that he joined the cast after reading her script.
“After I wrote it, I gave it to him and said, ‘Look at it. There’s an obvious part in there for you, but if you don’t want to do it you don’t have to. You can say no’. He read it and said, ‘Very interesting. Definitely. I’m in!’,” she told The Times.
Stella understands the comparisons coming up between her film and the 2007 film “Slipstream”, which was written and directed by her husband.
“It’s not an accident that his film and my film have that similar thread. Because we are both fascinated with the dreamlike quality of our reality. We can spend hours discussing it, where sometimes we end in laughter and others not. It was very much the very beginning of our meeting and our first conversation,” she recalled.
