But as to when or where she and Busson will tie the knot (tabloid reports had suggested they were planning a wedding in the Caribbean), Thurman is prepared to give up nothing. “I’m happily engaged, but we haven’t set a wedding up,” she says, brushing the matter aside. “I’m not in a rush to do anything. One day we’ll do it, when we’re ready.” Thurman does say, however, that she has zero intention of leaving New York. “We can’t live anywhere else because my children’s father lives here,” she says flatly. Whether that means Busson, who is based in London, will relocate, Thurman won’t say. “We’ll figure that out. I don’t really want to comment on some of these things, because there are other people involved.”
What Thurman is quite open about, however, is her desire to refocus on her career. “When my son turned seven, I felt myself stand upright and realize that I wasn’t going to be bending over so much,” she says, getting out of her chair and comically throwing her arms to the floor as if tending to a small child. “I realized I had been kind of in this position for years! It’s nice to think that everybody’s getting more independent and now I can kind of maybe, slightly selfishly, think about work again.” The echo with the themes of Motherhood is almost uncanny. “You know, I do care about my work, and it is part of me. And I am a mother, but I need to do what I’m good at doing,” she says. “You really can’t let go of all of yourself…. Even your kids need you to be who you are.”
To be near her children, she says, she has lately taken projects that don’t require a lot of time away from New York, something that has clearly limited her choice of roles. “I’ve been living at home for work for a long time,” she acknowledges. “If I don’t leave soon, I’m going to literally choke my career to death.”
Thurman may be exaggerating a bit, but her calendar is surprisingly wide open. Now that Percy Jackson (scheduled for release in 2010) has wrapped, she has nothing else set to shoot—a state of affairs she’s clearly not satisfied with. Eloise in Paris, a film based on the Kay Thompson book that she was meant to star in, has “met with a tremendous number of problems,” she explains, and is currently on hold. And Girl Soldier, based on the true story of a nun who rescued more than 100 Ugandan schoolgirls kidnapped by the Lord’s Resistance Army, is still in development. “Everyone always hopes we’ll start shooting sooner rather than later, but until you have a draft that really functions, I don’t think you should consider it a go picture,” she says a bit wearily. “There are always these odd elements…. But there are a number of scripts I’m looking at. I just haven’t put my finger on the next one yet.”
