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PRACTICALITY
I’d not worked with John Alexander before but we were from similar backgrounds. He’d done documentaries for many years before moving into drama and he scored well
with Life On Mars last year.
He and I had a general conversa-
“tion about Jane Austen, people’s expectations and about different approaches to the story. We only referred to the film in that we wanted to get away from the older characters and make it younger again so it was truer to Austen. That’s why they cast much younger actresses as the Dashwood daughters.
We had lots of discussions about the ‘look’ and we looked in particular at the recent film of Pride & Prejudice which had elements in it that we both really liked. The informal element was really informal and there was a nice contrast between that and the formal society set pieces, as it were.
Working in stately homes [Dorney Court, Ham House, Gaddesden etc] is always extremely difficult especially National Trust homes because you have an awful lot of restrictions, and rightly so. You have to work within those restrictions and be very flexible in your approach for what would often be the ideal thing to do is often simply not allowable.
You couldn’t touch the walls; in fact, you couldn’t even put a lamp with- in a metre of the walls so you’d always have to think laterally about how you’d like things to be. That’s no bad thing either because it’s all too easy just to follow a set pattern and rhythm. Something like this makes you break out of that and really challenges you.
There were huge locations, which were fantastic, and a great designer James Merifield, with whom I’d worked before on Nicholas Nickleby, who was just... well, you couldn’t ask more as a DP. Everywhere you pointed the camera, you had a truth, a reality
tv production
of the period, all done with such con- sideration in terms of colour and fab- ric. It made my job so much easier.
Then there was a matter of get- ting the quality of light from the right direction. Some of the locations, which we were in six or seven days, had long scenes and both East and South facing windows. As a result, we had, with the help of my very good gaffer Brian Beaumont and best boy Ian Glenister, to build in at least two of them enormous black-outs so that we could actually control the sunshine because we had a very early summer at that point.
The exteriors of cottage scenes, which comprise about a third of the production, were at a fantastic but wild location on the North Devon coast. It was logistically extremely difficult to service; a single track road of almost two miles was the only access to the cottage itself which was surrounded by the most amazing cliffs.
A lot of those scenes were shot on the coast round and about and only accessible by foot. My focus puller Ben Battersby and loader Natasha Back came up with a fantastic system of backpacks in which all the camera equipment was packed down so we were very mobile as we ‘yomped’ up and down the track.
When we were doing interiors, the weather was beautiful but as soon as we got to the exteriors in Devon it was horrendous; we had torrential rain for almost the whole time we were there. Fortunately one of the scenes required rain, which we sup- plemented with our own and it turned out very dramatic.
In terms of the story, the bad weath- er adds a whole other angle. So much of Austen tends to be shot in that
beautiful golden light and we
simply didn’t have that all the
time. It was, you could say,
sometimes more Emily Bronte.
Photo: Hattie Morahan and Charity Wakefield
as the Dashwood sisters in Sense And Sensibility; ” left inset: DP Sean Bobbitt BSC
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