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Features
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Pride & Dyslexia
Despite a childhood during which dyslexia kept him from most reading assignments, Joe Wright has gone on to adapt a most famous novel, with a fellow dyslexic in the lead.
Thursday, November 17, 2005
By Pam Grady
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Dimitrios Kambouris/Wireimage.com
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Dashing director Wright
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When the producers at Working Title approached Joe Wright to see if he might be willing to direct the first big screen adaptation of Jane Austen's beloved novel Pride & Prejudice since Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier played Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy in 1940, he was reluctant to even consider it. "I wasn't interested in period films, really," he reveals to FilmStew during a stopover in San Francisco. "I didn't watch them, either."
He has to admit, though, it was a period drama that brought him to Working Title's attention. He helmed the 2003 BBC miniseries Charles II: The Power and the Glory (known to American audiences as The Last King), about the 17th century British monarch. Wright received glowing notices for his work, as well as a BAFTA, and that was enough to convince the company that produced Four Weddings and a Funeral and Bridget Jones's Diary and has become synonymous with romance, that Wright was the man for this delicate new job.
At the time he was given Deborah Moggach's screenplay to mull over, Wright was completely unfamiliar with the book. He is dyslexic, so he never read much in school, and thus missed the obligatory study of the text that has introduced countless teenagers to Austen's prose. Not only that, he was completely unfamiliar with that 1940 movie and every other adaptation, including the 1995 miniseries in which Colin Firth so completely inhabited the role of Mr. Darcy that it made him not only a star, but the object of countless women's fantasies.
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Dimitrios Kambouris/Wireimage.com
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Britain's version of Audrey Hepburn
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Wright had none of the pressure that a director familiar with 1995 edition might feel about having a hard act to follow. Still, he had little initial interest in the project and only reluctantly brought Moggach's script with him to the pub one Sunday afternoon. His reaction when he started reading surprised him. "I was very moved by it really," he confesses.
“And so I went and read the book and was stunned to find something so beautifully observed and written with such incredible joy and energy."
It was reading Austen that finally sold Wright on taking the job, as he began to envision the film he could make. "It was almost like I had a secret," he says. "I knew that I wanted to do it and how I wanted to do it."
One thing he was insistent on was in casting-age appropriate actors to play Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy. In the novel, she is 20 and he is 28. Previous versions have generally gone older. Olivier was 33 and Garson 36 in the last feature film edition, and Firth was 34 when he made the 1995 series, while his Lizzie, Jennifer Ehle, was 25.
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Dimitrios Kambouris/Wireimage.com
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MacFadyen, a dead ringer for Brent Spiner
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Wright is not amused. “I felt that the story only made sense if you cast people at the ages that Jane Austen wrote them. It's a story about very young people falling in love for the first time and experiencing these feelings for the first time," he insists. "It struck me that the story only really made sense if they were those ages, that if you had older people not understanding what they were feeling then it wouldn't have the same effect."
He had Matthew MacFadyen in mind from the start to play Mr. Darcy. He had been searching for an opportunity to work with MacFadyen, who Wright considers to be one of the finest actors of his generation, for quite some time and was excited by this new prospect.
“I knew that if I cast an actor who came on to play Mr. Darcy feeling like they were coming to play a sex god, if they felt they were coming to play an icon, then that would just be the death of it," he observes. "Matthew has no vanity about his acting. He is not interested in being a big, old sexy movie star kind of sex symbol. He's interested in his craft. For all of those reasons, [plus] he's the right age, and I wanted a manly man. I didn't want a pretty boy."
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Dimitrios Kambouris/Wireimage.com
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Everywhere, more than ever before
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One of the things that struck him was the difference between the initially aloof Darcy and Wickham, the charming but dissolute soldier who Elizabeth briefly fancies. To Wright, the gulf between the characters represents Lizzie maturing into an adult. He laughs, "You know how young women stop fancying - because there's change? Boys that look like girls and are therefore more comfortable, and start being attracted to men for being men."
So he had his Mr. Darcy, but he still lacked an Elizabeth. He very nearly dismissed any thoughts of casting Keira Knightley, feeling that she was too beautiful for the part. But then he met her late one night in a bar in Montreal. He found the Pirates of the Caribbean star sitting in a dark corner and as they began talking, he spied qualities in the young actress he hadn't expected.
"She was, frankly, kind of a scruffy tomboy kid who's kind of spiky elbows and knees and is quite boyish," he recalls. "That surprised me and I suddenly thought that makes perfect sense for Elizabeth. She's someone who doesn't conform to the period or even this period's idea of what a woman should be and that works."
He was finally sold completely on Knightley when he had her in to test with MacFadyen with the pair performing a scene where Elizabeth and Darcy nearly kiss. "It was extraordinary," Wright remembers. "Something happened when they screen-tested together."
Wright laughs that the role actually made Knightley somewhat nervous. Like her director, she is dyslexic and first encountered Pride & Prejudice on an audiotape when she was seven and then read the book on her own in her teens. Her own love of the novel gave her the sense that every woman who reads it projects herself into the role of Elizabeth. "She was terrified that she was going to get accosted in the street by all these women saying, 'You're not Elizabeth Bennett, I am.'"
With a cast in hand that, in addition to Knightley and MacFadyen, included Dame Judi Dench as Darcy's aunt Lady Catherine, Donald Sutherland and Brenda Blethyn as Elizabeth's parents, and Jena Malone, as Lydia, the most scatterbrained of the Bennet sisters, Wright was ready to make his movie. He was adamant about shooting on location in the rural countryside, in spaces the Bennets, Darcy, and his friends, the Bingleys, might actually have inhabited.
He took his ideas about the location directly from Austen's text, he says. "The story felt to me almost as if it was the first piece of British realism," he notes. "I had an idea that I really wanted to get that across, to feel as if we were right in that world and that world isn't kind of a pretty, proscenium arch version of bucolic England, but is actually muddy and dirty and earthbound so that Elizabeth Bennett's aspiration for romantic love feels all the more heroic, because she is earthbound."
| The Londoner found shooting in those old manors in the English countryside something of a revelation. "I don't get out much, so to go and see these places and discover these houses and the culture that's held there was extraordinary," he marvels, adding. "I'm not a royalist and I think I'm kind of fairly disrespectful of the aristocracy and the landed gentry. But what I will say for them is that they did inspire the arts and architecture and landscape gardening and all these great aspects of British cultural life that wouldn't be there without them, and so hats off to them for that."
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Pride & Prejudice is not without a political dimension, something Wright immediately realized when he read the story. "People charge Austen with being a very unpolitical writer, but I disagree," he avers. "She was an incredibly political writer, but those kinds of politics and social issues are implicit in the novel rather than explicitly talked about.”
“We are dealing with a point in time where women had had the right to inherit from their fathers, [but] that had been taken away from them,” he adds. “This meant that a lot of young women throughout the country were facing very dire prospects unless they did marry successfully, financially."
| That is the dilemma facing Lizzie and her siblings, but her alchemical reaction to Darcy has nothing to do with finding a husband to save her from ruin. Theirs is a true love match and that, Wright believes, is why the story endures. "It's a story about the triumph of the imagination. It's about this couple who had the audacity to imagine a different kind of world, a world in which romantic love was paramount."
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Wright muses on that most perennial of genres, the romance. "There are so many clichés, aren't there? Why is every song a love song? There are just so many clichés, really, so many pratfalls," he asserts. "But I think Austen didn't fall into those clichés somehow. It's difficult to be true about them, you have to be quite honest. That's what we're trying to do with this film. We're trying to make it as honest as possible; we're trying to make it true. Then, hopefully, if it's true to us, it'll be true to other people."
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