Honoured with the Women in Motion Award at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, Nicole Kidman looked back on a promise she made in 2017: to make a film with a woman director at least every 18 months. Eight years later, she has worked with women directors 27 times.
“I was going to make it possible”
Kidman has been coming to Cannes for 32 years, since Far and Away and To Die For. When she made her pledge, she recalls, the list of women who could be considered for a film was painfully short, and studios hesitated to “risk” a first-timer. So she decided to take the risk herself: to mentor, support and protect women directors “like a force field”, and above all to give them more than one chance. A film that is badly received, she says, is not a failure: “It just means you’re in process.”
When Kidman made her promise in 2017, women directed about 4% of the top-grossing American films. That figure is now 13.6%: progress, but still low. Her answer for the next eight years is to keep working, to find mentors and financial backers, and to see more “patrons of the arts” who invest in unknown directors simply to watch them grow.
No interest in playing it safe
At this stage of her life, Kidman says, she does not want to be contained or safe. She looks for roles that put her somewhere uncomfortable: the powerful, unapologetic Masha of Nine Perfect Strangers, whose second season was shot in the Austrian Alps; the woman in crisis of Babygirl, written and directed by Halina Reijn, a film that found its audience largely through TikTok. A director recently warned her that his project was “incredibly disturbing”. Her answer: “Great.”
She also loves very low-budget, experimental filmmaking, where she is happy to sit on an apple box and wait in the car. That is where she started, in Australia.
The circle widens
Her company, Blossom Films, now produces work led by other women: Margo’s Got Money Troubles with Elle Fanning, also a producer, and Michelle Pfeiffer, and the Australian series The Last Anniversary. She is reuniting with director Susanne Bier and Sandra Bullock for Practical Magic 2.
Will she direct one day? She says no, then admits she often changes her mind. For now she writes at three in the morning and prefers to put herself in a director’s hands. The moderator closed with a line from Jamie Lee Curtis: when Nicole Kidman works, other people work.