Pursuing acting since she was 16 years-old, Uma Thurman has spent a career inhabiting roles as diverse as the goddess Venus in Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen to the Bride in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill: Vol.1 and Vol. 2. She has worked with such high-profile directors as Stephen Frears, Gus Van Sant, Richard Linklater, and Woody Allen. She has partnered with such leading men as John Malkovich, Robert De Niro, Sean Penn, and John Travolta. And with her portrayal of Tarantino's iconic femme fatale Mia Wallace in Pulp Fiction in 1994, she earned both a place in film history and an Oscar nomination.

However, as a woman who has not only pursued her career with a passion but also taken on the real-life role of mother to her two children, Maya and Levon, in her newest film Motherhood she may well be playing one of the most familiar roles she has ever taken on. Said Thurman of first "meeting" the frazzled New York City mother of two trying to both put together a birthday party and write an essay in one crazy day, "I fell into this world where I just felt her voice in the piece was inside my head and I was watching a little bit of a home movie and then had this wonderful warm feeling of seeing through her writing how universal a lot of what I experienced was. It was just like one unbelievably comforting inside joke to me."

While in the Bay Area to receive a Mill Valley Film Festival award and introduce the film at the festival, Thurman and her director Katherine Dieckmann sat down with me and several other journalists to discuss the realities, the sacrifices, the balancing acts, and joys that are all a part of Motherhood—both on the screen and in each of their own lives.

Katherine, as not only the director of the film, but the writer of the script, where did the ideas and situations in this movie come from? It's so personal and specific, it almost feels like it was pulled straight from the blogosphere.

Katherine Dieckmann: You know, when I started writing the script, which was probably 2003/2004 somewhere around there, there was no blogosphere the way there is now, anyway, in terms of motherhood culture. I did draw from specific things that have happened to me—including doing that u-turn at the Lincoln Tunnel, not because my child was choking, but just because I had to. But I did collect little urban, you know, anecdotes for a long time, and I was very influenced by Curb Your Enthusiasm when it first came on. You know, what happens when Larry David's in a line in a store? And could a woman be as cranky as Larry David? To which, I think actually, the answer's no. Only Larry David gets to be that cranky. I like the comedy of those kinds of pressurized incidents between people, so that part of the script, I guess the middle third of the script is from that. And the last third of the script, which is my favorite part of the movie I would say, was from really trying to talk about not just my struggles as a mother trying to be creative and be in a marriage and all those sort of things and raising kids without a lot of money, but a lot of my friends having those kinds of issues. What does domestic work do to a woman's creativity? And those are serious questions that the movie asks, and I think really asks most persuasively in the last third. Everything else, is like, these are all the situations that are going to lead to these questions. They're funny on the surface, but maybe underneath not always so funny.

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