“I´ve been wanting to work with Claudie Blakley for a long time. A very good theater actress as well. I always felt guilty, she is quite handsome, she´s a good-looking woman. So I felt bad about casting her as “the ugly one”, supposedly, when she´s not particularly ugly. And I promised her that I´ll cast her as “not-so-ugly” person in the future.”
(Joe Wright, Director)
Lizzie and Charlotte come out of the drawing room laughing and run straight into Mr. Darcy.
Mr. Darcy: May I have the next dance, Miss Elizabeth? Lizzie is stunned.
Lizzie: You may. Darcy walks away.
Lizzie: Did I just agree to dance with Mr. Darcy?
Charlotte: I dare say you will find him very amiable, Lizzie.
Lizzie: Which would be most inconvenient since I have sworn to loathe him for all eternity.
“The Bennet family was in a very precarious situation, with five unmarried daughters and the ghastly Mr. Collins waiting to inherit the house. It wasn’t just a fluffy social comedy. The reason the book was so funny was that the comedy arose from real pain, the real prospect that unless Mrs. Bennet did her stuff and found suitably wealthy respectable husbands for her daughters, the consequences were dire. And we see those consequences with Charlotte Lucas, over the hill at 27, who makes a conscious decision to marry a physically repulsive man she doesn’t love because the alternatives are even worse: total dependence on her family, not being able to go anywhere unless someone else is going too, or a job as a governess, how grim is that?”
(Deborah Moggach, Screenwriter)
Charlotte: Count your blessings, Lizzie. If he liked you, you’d have to talk to him.
Lizzie: Precisely. I wouldn’t dance with him for all of Derbyshire, let alone the miserable half.
”She´s a lovely actress, Rosamund Stephen (Miss de Bourg). She doesn´t say anything but she plays the role really beautifully, I think”.
(Joe Wright, Director)
Lizzy: I think he likes her very much.
Charlotte: But does she like him? Few of us are secure enough to be really in love without proper encouragement. Bingley likes her enormously, but might not do more if she does not help him on.
Lizzy: But she’s just shy and modest. If he cannot perceive her regard, he is a fool.
Charlotte: We are all fools in love. He does not know her character as we do. She should move fast and snap him up. There is plenty of time for us to get to know him afterwards.
“I think it was a really nice choice of Claudie’s to have Charlotte change and become impressed by Lady Catherine and to kind of get involved in Mr Collins’s set of values.
The idea that they’re happy together, that they’ve found some way of living. Perhaps much later in life she’ll look at him and wonder whether she did the right thing, but right now, she’s happy”.(Joe Wright, Director)
Mr. Bingley: But her sister Elizabeth is agreeable.
Mr. Darcy: Perfectly tolerable. Not handsome enough to tempt me.
“I wanted to set this under this kind of seating. I quite liked putting them underneath the stairs, underneath the seating, cos it reminded me of an 80´s teen film, like the Breakfast Club or Grease. I think there was a great snogging scene under some seating in Grease. It´s a teen movie, basically. I grew up with them and I love them”.
(Joe Wright, Director)
