“And then he met me, and said, 'Oh no, you’re fine,'" Knightley recalled on The Graham Norton Show.
She was also a lifelong Pride and Prejudice superfan, having grown up listening to the book on tape and playing with dollhouse replicas of Pemberley and Longbourn.īut Wright was worried that Knightley's beauty might overshadow Elizabeth’s more important characteristics. Keira Knightley was almost deemed too beautiful to play Elizabeth Bennet in Pride & Prejudice.Īt 20 years old, Keira Knightley was both the right age to play Elizabeth Bennet-which Wright considered a crucial casting factor-and famous enough from 2003’s Pirates of the Caribbean to satisfy producers’ desire to cast someone with name recognition. “So we used the fashions of the earlier period, where the waist on dresses was lower and more flattering.” Caroline Bingley was the exception, since she’d have been wealthy and fashionable enough to adopt certain styles before everyone else. “I find empire line dresses are very ugly,” he said. It was a whole new era for society,” Wright explained.Īnd lastly, Wright just really hated dresses with empire silhouettes, which were all the rage during the Regency era. There, they would mingle with people they wouldn’t previously have ever met socially. “Hence, the Assembly Rooms dances in village halls, which people of Darcy and Bingley’s class would now attend.
It also allowed him to explore the French Revolution’s aftershocks in British society 1797 was just a few years after the Reign of Terror, and highborn Brits started thinking it might be a good idea to ingratiate themselves with the masses and defuse any rebellious sentiment. For one thing, it helped separate his version from previous adaptations. But Austen wrote the initial draft, then titled First Impressions, around 1797-and that’s the year in which Wright chose to set his film. Since Pride and Prejudice was published in 1813, following a substantial revision, it’s often considered a quintessential novel of the Regency period (which technically lasted from 1811 to 1820). Pride & Prejudice purposely isn’t set during the Regency period. Instead, he studied other Austen film adaptations, including Sense and Sensibility (1995), Emma (1996), and Mansfield Park (1999), as well as some other period dramas. Once he accepted the job, Wright still refrained from watching the BBC miniseries, just so that he wouldn’t be too influenced by it.
"I took the script to the pub and by about page 60, I was weeping into my pint of lager," Wright told The Harvard Crimson. He also didn’t think he’d care much for the story. In fact, the only adaptation he’d watched was the 1940 movie starring Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson. When production company Working Title Films first offered Wright the director’s chair for Pride & Prejudice-his first feature film-he’d neither read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice nor seen the BBC’s beloved 1995 miniseries based on it.
0 kommentar(er)
