“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.”

Joe Wright petitioned Donald Sutherland to take the part of Mr. Bennet. ‘We ended up having a long email correspondence about everything from 18th-century agriculture to my relationship with my father. I cast Donald a) because he’s a god, and b) because you needed someone of that strength to handle those six women.’

“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)

Dame Judi Dench, who had a supporting role in the film as Catherine de Bourg, had more time off set and was often found embroidering pillows.
“She makes these beautifully intricate needlepoint pieces and you kind of seeing these words materialize during the shoot like ‘You’re a fucking shit,’ or ‘You’re a cunt,’” MacFayden laughs. “This is the absolute gospel! They do anything to relieve the boredom. They’re not staid in any way.”

“I was dubious about the entire thing because I knew Joe didn’t want me. I felt that after The Jacket, where I’d had John Maybury turning around and saying, ‘I don’t think you can act and I don’t want you,’ I just wanted to work with somebody who immediately goes, ‘Great, be in my film’. Our meeting wasn’t great at all and I knew I hadn’t got the part. Joe was so jetlagged and I’d been very much forced into it and I was so frightened of going for it anyway. But when I met him again in London and he realized that I am a complete tomboy and scruffy and not what he’d imagined, he offered me the part. It was the realization of a life-long dream.”

(Keira Knightley)

“In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.”

Elizabeth’s astonishment was beyond expression. She stared, coloured, doubted, and was silent. This he considered sufficient encouragement, and the avowal of all that he felt and had long felt for her immediately followed. He spoke well, but there were feelings besides those of the heart to be detailed, and he was not more eloquent on the subject of tenderness than of pride. His sense of her inferiority—of its being a degradation—of the family obstacles which judgment had always opposed to inclination, were dwelt on with a warmth which seemed due to the consequence he was wounding, but was very unlikely to recommend his suit.

In spite of her deeply-rooted dislike, she could not be insensible to the compliment of such a man’s affection, and though her intentions did not vary for an instant, she was at first sorry for the pain he was to receive; till, roused to resentment by his subsequent language, she lost all compassion in anger. She tried, however, to compose herself to answer him with patience, when he should have done. He concluded with representing to her the strength of that attachment which, in spite of all his endeavours, he had found impossible to conquer; and with expressing his hope that it would now be rewarded by her acceptance of his hand. As he said this, she could easily see that he had no doubt of a favourable answer. He spoke of apprehension and anxiety, but his countenance expressed real security. Such a circumstance could only exasperate farther, and when he ceased, the colour rose into her cheeks, and she said:

“In such cases as this, it is, I believe, the established mode to express a sense of obligation for the sentiments avowed, however unequally they may be returned. It is natural that obligation should be felt, and if I could feel gratitude, I would now thank you. But I cannot—I have never desired your good opinion, and you have certainly bestowed it most unwillingly. I am sorry to have occasioned pain to any one. It has been most unconsciously done, however, and I hope will be of short duration. The feelings which, you tell me, have long prevented the acknowledgment of your regard, can have little difficulty in overcoming it after this explanation.”

(Jane Austen,”Pride and prejudice”, Chapter 34)

Matthew Macfadyen TFF 2005, “Pride and prejudice” press conference.

“Macfadyen says it’s interesting, meaning annoying, that people are so proprietorial about the BBC version, even though it was, he hears, “fantastically good”. Flattering as it was to begin with, Colin Firth was stuck with the Darcy “bodice-loosening” nonsense for years, long after he had moved on. Does he fear that the same might happen to him? “No,” he says. “I don’t think it will happen, for one thing. I would worry if I was offered James Bond.”

“Pride and prejudice” first edition (1813).

“I had never read Pride and Prejudice, nor seen a television version. I come from a background of television social realist drama, and so I suppose I was a bit prejudiced against this material, regarding it as posh. But as I read the script adaptation, I became emotionally involved and by the end I was weeping. So I read the book, and discovered that what Jane Austen had written was a very acute character study of a particular social group. I saw that she was one of the first British realists. She had read the gothic literature which was fashionable at the time, and she turned away from that, and started writing what she knew, thereby inventing a new genre.”

(Joe Wright, Director)

Is it true that originally you wanted Keira to play Briony (Atonement)?
“Yeah, I imagined that Keira was the same person that I’d met on “Pride & Prejudice”. You spend all your time editing and looking at these people in the cutting room and so I kind of imagined she was that person still I think, and therefore wasn’t sophisticated enough to place Cecelia, but then she turned up at the Toronto Film Festival in this dress and suddenly, she developed into this woman, and that was kind of extraordinary, and I wanted to try and capture that change and realized that she was perfect for Cecelia. “

(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)