“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)
“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)
“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)
“We had the Bennet giggle,” says Knightley of the way she and the four actresses who played her sisters set the mood before each scene. “It’s a high-pitched, screaming, chaotic monkey-like giggle that would get us into it. Joe wanted us to always speak over each other so you got the feeling of people who are so used to each other, they don’t even listen anymore. I do think it will make it more accessible.”
“I have a very poor opinion of young men who live in Derbyshire; and their intimate friends who live in Hertfordshire are not much better. I am sick of them all. Thank Heaven! I am going to-morrow where I shall find a man who has not one agreeable quality, who has neither manner nor sense to recommend him. Stupid men are the only ones worth knowing, after all.”
(Elizabeth Bennet, Pride and prejudice, Chapter 27)
“I think when classics are made the code of conduct of the period is painted too heavily on top of the natural behaviour. I think behind closed doors people behave differently no matter what period we’re looking at, because people have to stand up straight in public but can slouch behind closed doors. Can you imagine wearing those corsets? I mean, just to lie down would be heaven, and you see the difference with this family when they have guests for dinner and when they are alone. I think Joe (Wright, director) did a very good job of doing that; you can almost smell it.”
(Brenda Blethyn)
