“The two older sisters, they´re just perfect creatures. Then there´s the two younger girls who are giggly and silly. Then there´s Mary in the middle, who doesn´t know what she´s doing half the time.”

(Talulah Riley, Mary)

“You have no idea, you know, when you come into a picture what Keira Knightley is going to be like. And it turns out, she is as extraordinary an actor as I’ve ever met in my life. Rosamund was…it’s indescribable how ethereally beautiful she was. Talulah was…oh, I just embraced her. Carey… they were like children, you know. And Jena, she just became this silly child. They were wonderful. It was just a wonderful family, you know. Headed and embraced and supported and catalysed by Brenda Blethyn.”

(Donald Sutherland)

“I think Jena helped a lot ‘cause I kind of leaned. I have leaned on her the whole summer basically, because it’s kind of, A: in my character, and B: just because she’s so much more experienced. She kind of psyches me up for stuff, so she kind of helps me get in the giggly frame of mind all the time”. (Carey Mulligan, Kitty)

“You know when I go up she goes down and we both sort of hop, she skips and just sort of becoming synchronized with another actor. It’s quite hard, actually. I feel like I’ve been so welcome here, and like. It’s just been so nice”. (Jena Malone, Lydia)

“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)

Curls and corsets.

“I just wanted to find out what was underneath their dresses. I was interested in underwear, really. All those corsets and wonderful laces and so on, take the costumes out of the costume drama, you know?”

(Joe Wright, Director)

“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)