“When they’re in the kitchen, they’re dying ribbons with beetroot juice. I didn’t put that in, but it’s brilliant. They had to be making do. Again, a nice touch from my production designer, Sarah Greenwood. She´s my closest collaborator. We started in television together, and she’s just brilliant. She’s the one that comes up with ideas like the beetroot. When I don’t know what to do about a scene, she’ll come out with things like the beetroot.”
“Pride & Prejudice must have been a similarly great experience for you?
Absolutely, yes. It was really happy. But that’s the thing about rehearsing. If we hadn’t rehearsed on Pride we wouldn’t have been able to capture that kind of atmosphere on film. We wouldn’t have seemed like we knew each other; we had to be a family by the time we started to film. And it really worked.”(Rosamund Pike)
“I like the difference between this breakfast and the previous one. They´re all hungover. Mr. Collins coming out of the darkness. To declare himself. No one actually listens to him. The only one who listens to him is Mary. Cos Mary´s actually in love with Mr. Collins and wishes that he´d asked her. But he is too stupid to notice.”
(Joe Wright, Director)
Is he amiable?
“Brenda with her apple. Brenda does things like that, carries apples around. It´s always as if Mrs. Bennet has come from somewhere else or doing something else. The original draft had loads of scenes where Mrs. Bennet was collecting eggs. I cut all those scenes.”
(Joe Wright, Director)
I’m getting dreadfully into it and I want, you know, I want it all to be real and I want to be Mary. And I want us to all live in the house together and us all to be really sisters and it all to really happen. And then it doesn’t, and then Joe (Wright) says, you know,`check in the gate´and then it stops and I’m thinking, `oh, what happened?´.
(Talulah Riley)
“I wanted to be able to shoot through the windows. I wanted a relationship between the interior and the exterior”.
(Joe Wright, Director)
“Camera tilting down here is an excuse to get us to Mrs. Bennet´s feet, but it tells the story of Mr. Bingley and Jane at the same time.”
(Joe Wright, Director)
“The scenes between Matthew and Keira, I hadn’t seen until I watched the film and I just got that feeling in my tummy, of longing for them to work it out.”
(Brenda Blethyn)
“You´ve got a mother who´s hideously embarrassing…
…unrequited love for a complete cad…
…you fall madly in love with somebody who you can´t admit you´re in love with and who you hate…
…you´ve got sisterly jealousies and squabbles. You´ve got loyalties. I mean it´s all there. It´s family life. The Bennet family could be a family nowadays”.
(Deborah Moggach, Screenwriter)
“I find empire line dresses are very ugly, so I did some research. Although the novel was published in 1813, Jane Austen wrote her first draft of “Pride and Prejudice”, then called “First Impressions”, around 1797. So we used the fashions of the earlier period, where the waist on dresses was lower and more flattering. When Caroline Bingley appears, she would obviously be wearing the latest creation. But Mrs. Bennet’s dresses are earlier than 1797, and Lady Catherine’s are even earlier, because those two would have best clothes from previous years in their wardrobe.”
(Joe Wright, Director)
