Olivia Colman rediscovered her love of acting while making Jimpa.

The Oscar-winning actress lost some of her passion for movie-making after previously clashing with a director - but Olivia rediscovered her love of acting while shooting Jimpa, the drama film co-produced and directed by Sophie Hyde.

Olivia, 52, told Variety: "I had just done a job where I really didn't see eye to eye with the director, which is quite unusual for me. It made me go, 'I don't want to do this'. Then my agent said, 'I think you'll really love Sophie. You'll love the way Sophie works.'"

Jimpa helped to restore Olivia's love of acting.

She said: "I was given freedom.

"It was such a creative process. It's the antithesis of what I had just done, where I was sort of used like a wall prop, and was told 'chin up a bit, chin down a bit.' You know, that's not acting. It's not the work I enjoy. And Sophie was the absolute opposite of that."

Olivia admits that she'd actually prefer to act in private.

The award-winning movie star explained: "All of it sounds pretentious. Whenever you talk about how you do it or how you don't do it, or whatever … it sounds unbearable. I just like doing it, and ideally I'd like to do it with no one watching ever. But I know that's not possible."

Meanwhile, Sophie explained that the new movie is a deeply personal story for her.

The director shared: "All my movies are very personal; they're just a little bit more opaque about it.

"This is explicit. I have named the film after my own father, and I have a character that's a filmmaker in it, and she has a nonbinary teenager, and that non binary teenager is played by my own nonbinary teenager, Aud. So it's deeply upfront in its connection to me.

"But I wanted to look at the relationship between my parents and the stories that I've told about them, so I could question whether those stories are the whole truth."

Sophie also admitted that because of the film's subject matter, it was difficult to get the project off the ground.

The filmmaker said: "It has been a challenge. Do I think it's political? Yeah.

"We watched the film industry slide away from diversity and play it fairly safe in certain ways. Queer stories don't get much airtime. Stories by and about women don't get much airtime. We found out last year that there was a lot of pushing queer stories to the side."