“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)

“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)

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)

“We actually had the luxury, Joe had the brilliant idea of having the Bennet family go down to Groombridge Place before we started shooting so that we would absolutely know the house inside out before starting to work. So we wouldn’t have to stop and think ‘which way is the kitchen’, we’d know. We knew every nook and cranny of that house even before we started to film there. It was great.”

(Brenda Blethyn)

“The descriptions of Mrs. Bennet are taken from a teenage daughter’s point of view, and I know my mum used to embarrass me something awful but if you stop and look at it totally objectively, she was only doing what mums do in her love for her children and Mrs. Bennet is no exception.”

(Brenda Blethyn)