Gigantic pig’s testicles. Mucky hemlines. Lots of shouting. Huh? There are moments during director Joe Wright’s adaptation of
when one might be forgiven for mistaking the rumbunctious onscreen action for a hitherto undiscovered Austen manuscript about hen parties. The chocolate box refinement of previous BBC versions has given way to a pleasing earthiness, happily devoid of rose petals and hideously unflattering empire line dresses.
“Well, I felt the pig testicles were necessary to the plotline,” explains the director. “They presented themselves on the day and we couldn’t help being impressed by them. The truth is that the Bennett family were country people surrounded by animals. Their existence really wouldn’t have been all that dainty. I wanted to take Austen out of that genteel drawing-room setting. We decided early on, for example, that we’d have the five Bennett daughters all competing for airspace throughout. I just don’t see how there wouldn’t be over-lapping dialogue with this big gaggle of girls under the same roof. More generally, I wanted the film to be earthbound. I think you need that contrast because that’s what makes Lizzie and Darcy’s quest for romantic love so beautiful and so divine. If their environment is all prissy and clean and romantic, it’s just not so wonderful anymore. I like that they’re in the mud but reaching for the stars.”
To facilitate his vision, Mr. Wright (surely a brilliant handle in the circumstances) returned to the period of Austen’s original unpublished version of the novel First Impressions. Though it’s widely held that this initial draft took the form of a series of correspondence, there’s no real way of knowing how the published Pride And Prejudice of 1812 differed from this earlier 1796 manuscript. Still, Wright saw the embers of the 18th century as the way to go, and decided to guess his way into it.
“I preferred the earlier age,” he admits. “I just couldn’t have done the empire dresses. They make people look like balloons. But I liked that the world was in a state of flux. You had the Napoleonic Wars and it fits with the ideas of post-rationalisation in the book.”
Unquestionably, the 33 year-old filmmaker, who hails from a proud tradition of British social realism, has given the Austen oeuvre an unlikely shot in the arm. Though the harsh, hazy beauty of his landscapes recall Roman Polanski’s Tess and John Schlesinger’s Far From The Madding Crowd, he admits that his primary aesthetic inspiration came from an unlikely marriage of Austen’s prose and Scum director Alan Clarke.
“I’ve come to think of Austen as the first British realist,” says Wright. “I suspect she didn’t receive as much of the male gaze as most of her peers, and that enabled her to sit back and observe. Her clarity of observation is staggering. So it seemed fitting to draw on the traditions of social realism in British film. It is what we do best. And the idea of throwing wish-fulfilment and five virgins on an island into the mix really intrigued me.”
This unglamorous approach provides the intriguingly disconcerting spectacle of name actresses, including Rosamund Pike (who became the director’s girlfriend during the shoot) and cover girl Keira Knightley in the central role of Elizabeth, with absolutely no make-up.
“I did think Keira was far too pretty for the role at first,” admits Wright. “I imagined Elizabeth as sort of plain. It’s the liveliness of her intellect that gets Darcy. But when I met her I realised she was perfect. She’s so tomboyish and angular and sparky. She’s all elbows and thumbs.”
Though Wright’s gritty interpretation is the first film of the book since the curious 1940 version with Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier, there have been countless adaptations of Pride And Prejudice, most notably the swooning, regency cliché-reliant 1995 BBC series with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth. Remarkably, Joe Wright has managed to avoid them all.
“I was dyslexic and I went to a really crappy London comprehensive, so I had never even read the book,” he says. “I mean, I ended up in art school because I realised it was the only place I could go with no O-levels. So anything I do in film, I do because I can actually learn something. I did Charles II for TV because I thought I could learn about history and I did Pride And Prejudice because it’s the only way I’ll ever know anything about literature. It was probably just as well that I didn’t feel the baggage of this great heritage. And I did end up crying in the pub when I read it.”