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IN HER OWN WRITE
How source material provided an inspiration for the BBC One drama Miss Austen Regrets
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early 200 years after her death, the Jane Austen screen indus- try shows absolutely no sign of abating. Since the success of Joe Wright’s Pride &
Edmondson, Jack Huston and Phyllida Law.
Produced by Anne Pivcevic (Sense And Sensibility), the proj- ect reunited director Jeremy Lovering (Spooks, Vincent) with cinematographer David Katznelson for the first time since they’d worked together on the BBC’s Sex And Lies in 2004.
According to Katznelson (The Queen’s Sister, Driving Lessons, Shoot The Messenger): “We shot the production last August and September, but I got the script from Anne at quite an early stage before even the director was attached. That’s quite rare, and rather nice.
“I thought it was a fine piece of writing. When it then turned out that Jeremy was going to be the director, that made it an even more attractive project as I’d enjoyed working with him before.”
Danish-born Katznelson was committed to the project when he took an intriguing time out to join a non-work expedition to cross the Greenland inland ice. “When I returned, the start date had been pushed back by about amonthandahalfsoIhada good long time for ‘prep’ and recce-ing the locations.”
Shot on a fairly tight five- week shoot – “our criteria had to be that everything was basi- cally within the M25” – Miss Austen Regrets had, said Katznelson, “three main loca- tions where we shot pretty much a week each. Jane’s
cottage was quite hard to find as it needed big enough rooms to shoot in yet also retain the right atmosphere. We ended up piecing that together from five or six different locations.”
As far as the ‘look’ was con- cerned? “We looked at a lot of period dramas, from Pride & Prejudice to Marie Antoinette, and probably stolen a little bit here and there. We’ve tried to give it an energy that’s maybe different to, say, Becoming Jane, which was very polished. This is a bit rougher round the edges; quite a bit of it was hand-held so maybe it’s a bit more intimate.
“As far as choosing Fujifilm was concerned, it just felt it suit- ed the texture of the film. The stock seemed to give you a sense of being ‘in’ there as a period piece with those charac- ters; it just appears to ‘live’ so much more and also has a grain structure that especially appealed to me on this occasion.
“We were,” Katznelson added, “ incredibly lucky with the weath- er. We shot all our exteriors dur- ing a period of about three weeks when there was almost an Indian summer: lots of lovely sunlight and backlit scenes, just as we wanted them.
“The only place where we didn’t want sun was for one of the early scenes when we had this huge rain machine outside Wrotham Park. The sky was blue and it was a real chal- lenge to make it look
reasonably dark. In the end the rain looked a bit like in a Ridley or Tony Scott movie where you have these huge lights backlight- ing it, looking likes flashes going through the screen.”
Other challenges included, inevitably, the business of shoot- ing dance and party scenes in stately homes. “They have these amazing paintings hanging on the walls and, of course, you can’t touch anything, can’t put a rig up, or do anything, basically. Yet you want to have reasonable flexibility in terms of moving the camera around.
“I put a balloon up in the ceil- ing,buttotryandgetabitof shape into it you need lights from other places than just the top. It was a challenge to make that work. We shot those hand-held with two cameras and had quite a few stands on the floor, keeping our fingers crossed all the time that the editor would cut out all the bits where you saw the light stands. And he did!”
For Katznelson, a “fun loca- tion” proved to be the famous turf maze at Chenies Manor in Buckinghamshire.
“Fanny is there with one of her admirers and has a little
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Prejudice in 2005, the cinema has offered Becoming Jane and, more peripherally, The Jane Austen Book Club, while televi- sion has gone into overdrive delivering new adaptations of Persuasion, Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park and, most recent- ly, Sense And Sensibility.
Currently completing pro- duction is ITV’s Lost In Austen, a time warp romantic comedy set between present day London and the period world of Pride And Prejudice.
Meanwhile, BBC One has, imminently, Miss Austen Regrets, a one-off drama, which, based on her life and letters, imagines the story of the novelist’s final years up to her death in 1817.
Written by Gwyneth Hughes, the drama provides an insight into Austen’s own romantic life, examining why, despite setting the standard for romantic fic- tion, she died never having mar- ried or met her own Mr Darcy. Or did she?
Miss Austen Regrets co-stars Olivia Williams, as Jane, Greta Scacchi, as her older sister Cassandra, and Imogen Poots, as her young niece Fanny, along- side a cast that also includes Hugh Bonneville, Adrian
Photo: Olivia Williams as Jane Austen in Miss Austen Regrets (Photo: Otto Stenov and David Katznelson)
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