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In the 2005 film adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice,” the central love story between Elizabeth and Darcy is set in motion during a ball. It’s a rowdy, exuberant scene full of carefree dancing and whispered observations about the other attendees.
That’s also director Joe Wright‘s favorite scene. Not too long ago, Wright rewatched his debut feature, which Focus Features is bringing back to theaters this weekend in recognition of the film’s 20th anniversary. “The first ball, the community dance, I’m very proud of that scene. It has a kind of energy and a vitality and a messiness and joy,” Wright tells Variety.
In the scene, Elizabeth (Keira Knightley) first spots Mr. Darcy (Matthew Macfadyen) — “the person with the quizzical brow” —and then overhears him insulting her appearance. It’s also where viewers are introduced to Elizabeth as a young woman with sharp wit, who has a retort ready for Darcy when the two later converse.
The joy in the ballroom characterizes the film as a whole. When Wright came on board to direct “Pride and Prejudice,” he felt strongly that the film should evoke the lively nature of youthful romance as well as a “realism, a sense of mess.”
His intentions are evident in the amount of buoyant, contagious laughter in so many of the scenes featuring the Bennet sisters. There’s the oldest, Jane (Rosamund Pike) followed by our protagonist Elizabeth, then Mary (Talulah Riley), Kitty (Carey Mulligan) and Lydia (Jena Malone). Wright recalls initially thinking he should cast actors who looked similar and realizing that it would be an incredibly difficult endeavor. So instead, “in rehearsals…we developed a laugh so that they all had the same laugh, and that that was what unified them,” he says.
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The enthusiasm of the characters was reflected in the people who worked on it. Wright says despite it being his debut feature, he wasn’t intimidated by the prospect of tackling “Pride and Prejudice” and making the novel’s first film adaptation since the 1940 version starring Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier. “I was very young and reckless, and I didn’t feel the Austen pressure. I felt a pressure to make the best film I could possibly make,” he says.
“It was made in a moment of joy and excitement,” Wright adds. “Austen doesn’t need me. I’m not going to change her legacy with a movie like this, but I was so excited by her talent, by her fierceness, by her emotional, psychological honesty.”
Production designer Sarah Greenwood also remembers that momentum on set, created from people who were starting off in their careers. “We were all at the same level,” she says.
The film went on to garner Oscar nominations for Knightley’s performance, Greenwood and Katie Spencer’s art direction and set decoration, Jacqueline Durran’s costume design and Dario Marianelli’s score.
Of course, “Pride and Prejudice” had already been adapted successfully in the modern era, namely through the 1995 BBC series led by Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth. “They set us a very high bar. And our approach was a different approach, but did it justice,” Greenwood says.
One of the ways this adaptation distinguishes itself is through its emphasis on youth. Wright, pointing out that Austen herself was 21 when she wrote the novel, wanted to cast actors who basically matched the characters’ actual ages in the novel. “What I felt most importantly was that Elizabeth Bennet was 18 in the book, and I wanted to make sure that whoever played her was the correct age, that it was a story about people falling in love for the first time, not the second, third or fourth time,” Wright says.
Another distinction was the fact that this version is placed in 1797, around the time Austen wrote the novel, compared to 1813 when it was published. Greenwood says the film adheres more to the Georgian era rather than the Regency period. “You look at the BBC version, and that’s very Regency, and it’s very tight-laced and high-waisted,” she says.
And in line with the change in time period, Wright envisioned the Bennet home, Longbourn, as a place of bustling conversation. “I wanted this loud, busy household in which everyone is constantly talking over each other to try and be heard. And so that’s the atmosphere I was creating, which is quite contrary to any of the period movies that I’d seen before,” Wright says, citing Robert Altman as an influence for the dialogue. “However, I wasn’t doing it to be contrary. I was just trying to convey what I conceived to be the reality and the truth of what it must have been like in that household.”
The home is also far from pristine. In fact, there’s plenty of dirt and animals trotting around the house — a tangible way of indicating the family’s lack of wealth compared to characters like Darcy and his friend, Charles Bingley.
“What we wanted visually to get the feeling of was the fact that the farm, which was the estate [and] which would have produced all the wealth for the family, was just creeping in on them. It was just encroaching, and so the garden had gone to seed, and the animals were everywhere,” Greenwood says.
“It was just the way of reinterpreting how they could have lived and making it slightly less mannered and slightly more real, which, in fact, is all in the book,” Greenwood continues.
The Bennet house grounds the story. “It’s like a lodestone in the film,” Greenwood says. “You constantly go back to the Bennet house. All these things happen, and you go back.”
The location for Longbourn was a house called Groombridge Place. Greenwood remembers the process of re-paneling the dark brown interiors so that the production could paint over everything. The task was “delicate and laborious, but because we were shooting in the house for six weeks, it was really worth doing,” Greenwood says.
The house ended up with more colors, including blues. Crucially, the paint was made to appear rundown with “lots of aging and patina.” “Nowadays, we have very strong modern chemical paints. We have cleaning products,” Greenwood says. “In those days, they didn’t. They could repaint, but they couldn’t afford it.”
Similarly, the actual antiques in the house are out of style compared to the fashionability of other wealthy homes since the family couldn’t redecorate. “Therefore, it feels very comfy and very lived-in. We made all the loose covers for the sofas that were all frayed and ratted and torn,” Greenwood says.
Mr. Bennet’s office, a cozy nook with bookshelves, serves as the patriarch’s den, Greenwood says. She worked on incorporating the personality of Mr. Bennet (Donald Sutherland) into the space by giving the character a very specific pastime.
“He’s a lovely man, but you don’t get the feeling that he pays much attention to [the estate]. And so it was giving him a hobby that was absolutely useless, there was no purpose to it. What they used to do at the time was… breeding and importing orchids. He’s up a ladder, and he gets an orchid down,” Greenwood says.
In one shot, viewers can see Kitty tying Lydia’s corset as the camera pans around their bedroom. Fashion plates are stuck onto the walls, in the same way a modern teenager’s room would have postcards or magazine cutouts tacked up. One can imagine the two youngest sisters sitting on their bedroom floor and extracting the fashion plate illustrations out of periodicals.
“Why would a teenage girl in those days be different from a teenage girl today? There was a freedom. And I don’t think our Mrs. Bennet, played by Brenda Blethyn, would have chastised them much, she was not bothered. She was almost a child in her head herself,” Greenwood says.
The Bennet sisters’ free-spiritedness was crucial for Wright as he worked on bringing the character of Elizabeth to life with Knightley and the other artisans. He based Elizabeth on his own sister, an “anarchist punk in the 1980s who went and got a sledgehammer and helped smash down the Berlin Wall.”
Elizabeth tests social conventions and turns down proposals that she knows she cannot accept despite the pressure to get married as soon as possible. Her style in the film reflects her indifference to gender expectations.
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Costume designer Durran’s experience working with filmmaker Mike Leigh led to her approaching the clothes “through the lens of a British realism,” according to Wright.
“Everyone, all the other girls get to wear these lovely lilacs and pinks and sage greens, and Keira wears brown. There’s something defiantly unfeminine within the context of the times about her, about her costumes and her hair design, this short hair at the back, which we found a reference for, and we thought was interesting, because it created a kind of rebellion,” Wright says.
“Elizabeth was far more interested in the notion of the mind, rather than in the notion of what she was supposed to be in terms of femininity or gender,” Wright adds.
The heroine’s independence, her effort to secure a life that she wants within patriarchal structures, is a crucial theme of “Pride and Prejudice.” And the happy ending is hard-earned.
During the iconic rain scene in which Darcy shares his feelings for Elizabeth, seemingly out of nowhere, she rejects him, and two begin a thrilling, rapid-fire argument that reveals the misunderstandings they both hold about each other. “We worked almost like music. It was about rhythm. I’m always interested in the rhythm of human interactions,” Wright says.
“I remember we were taking the dialogue quite slowly and thoughtfully, and actually, they’re not thinking, they’re just at each other. And so I remember in rehearsals once I said, ‘Okay, I just want you to run the scene as fast as you can, just the words. Don’t bother acting in it.’ They, really fast, sped through the dialogue. And I said, ‘Okay, that’s how I want the scene to go until that moment of recognition at the end when you look at each other’s mouths, and actually all you want to do is kiss each other.’ And so that was a bit of a discovery for us, but it’s quite technical,” he says.
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Following Elizabeth’s refusal of Darcy’s proposal and the ensuing confusion she feels about her life, she struggles for clarity. There’s a shot of Elizabeth standing on a cliff, staring into a vast expanse as Marianelli’s score swells.
“What I most loved there was, she’d been in this house, this stifling house with these nightmarish sisters who she loved so much and her mother’s pressure and [having] gone through this quite dark period of the story when she feels like all is lost,” Wright says. “Then there’s this breaking free of that.”
Wright took inspiration from David Lean and “big cuts from an extreme close-up of the match, cutting to the landscape of the sun rising in ‘Lawrence of Arabia.’”
“The idea was this shocking cut between the close-up of her eyes, and then suddenly the orchestra. And here’s Dario coming in beautifully. The orchestra bursting out, and we cut to this gigantic wide shot filmed in Derbyshire at exactly the right time of the day,” Wright says. “And, yeah, Keira bounded out onto that cliff’s edge, and everyone freaked out and she was rushed back and they put a wire on her so she couldn’t fall off.”
Marianelli’s romantic score endures on social media. Wright says he remembers being “blown away” by the compositions, which he calls “rhapsodies, almost, these outpourings of emotion.” Marianelli’s music can “express some of the emotions that the characters were required to, because of the social etiquette at the time, repress,” he says.
The romantic tension ramps up in the film when Elizabeth travels with her aunt and uncle to Pemberley, Darcy’s estate. Chatsworth House, which was supposedly what Austen had in mind for Pemberley when writing the novel, served as the filming location — but not without an initial hurdle.
Chatsworth was notorious for not allowing filming, according to Greenwood. “We said to Joe, ‘Well, we can go and look at it and see what we think of it, but, we can’t film here.’ And he said, ‘I don’t want to film here. I just want to have a look.’ So of course, we go there, and it’s absolutely stunning. It’s the most beautiful house. And Joe goes, ‘I want to film here,’” she says.
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Wright then wrote a letter to the resident, the Duchess of Devonshire, after which she extended an invitation to meet in person. Greenwood says the director was persuasive enough that the production could not just use Chatsworth, but to modify one of its rooms. The sculpture gallery in which Elizabeth admires a bust of Darcy originally had red velvet drapes, and the production was allowed to remove them. “To this day, these drapes have stayed down because the statuary looks so much better against the stone walls than the red velvet. The Victorians put the red velvet up, and we went in and took it down, and it never went back up,” Greenwood says.
Most of the interactions at Darcy’s home were filmed in another location called Wilton House Salisbury.
Collaboration was key to making the film. Wright remembers working with Emma Thompson, who wrote and starred in an adaptation of “Sense and Sensibility,” on the dialogue. “I remember a day when we went up onto Hampstead Heath together, and she started improvising Charlotte’s scene. “I’m 27,” that scene, and I was writing notes on her improvisations. And so she also gave me a sense of confidence in what we were trying to do,” Wright says.
Greenwood similarly discussed artistic choices with Spencer and Durran. “It’s a very considered, joint effort, that everybody communicates so that nothing jars or stands out. The only pure primary color was the red of the soldiers, it’s things like that,” she says.
She thinks back to how English weather could be a challenge throughout the production and how everyone had to work together to find a solution. The scene in which Mrs. Bennet, cross with Elizabeth refusing Mr. Collins’s marriage offer, chases after her daughter and then goes back to get Mr. Bennet’s help in changing her mind.
“She’s running across the bridge, and her dresses are all flapping, and the geese are going like that. That wasn’t planned. That happened because the light was coming in so low, and Roman [Osin], our DP, couldn’t balance the light for inside, and we didn’t have any time. And it was like, ‘What should we do?’ And Joe said, ‘Right, let’s send that scene outside to the lake because it’s so beautiful,’ and we had, I don’t know, five minutes to get it before the sun went down,” Greenwood says.
“Everybody was gathering all the geese up and corralling them. And, ‘Okay, we’ve got one go at this!’ And it was like, bang, Brenda runs across the bridge with [her dress] flapping like this, and that is one of the most beautiful scenes. And you couldn’t have planned it,” she adds.
Looking back on the film, Wright finds it jarring to mark 20 years, comparing the feeling to a time loop scene in the film, “The Man Who Wasn’t There.”
“There’s a kind of time loop, and I’m sitting doing press for a movie, that is, as if it was made by someone else, and at the same time, as if it only happened yesterday,” Wright says.
He’s pleased to know that some of the young cast members went on to have fruitful careers. “I was going to say proud, but I’ve no right to be proud. I’m just so excited to see what’s happened to their careers and their personal lives. It’s a lovely thing,” Wright says.
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It is a truth universally acknowledged that the interest in adapting Jane Austen continues, with Netflix’s own “Pride and Prejudice” TV series in the works. But the interest in the 2005 film isn’t fading anytime soon, as audience members venture to theaters to revisit this particular version of the famous love story.
“It still is incredible and fresh and lovely today as it was then, which is really great to see because some films really age,” Greenwood says. “But yeah, this one doesn’t seem to.”
