Page 549 - Guildhall Coverage Book 2020-21

“Towards the end of making it, I started getting this thing where my heart was beating
so loudly that you could hear it. It’s really scary. All of a sudden, you become very, very
aware of your heartbeat and you can feel it going really fast,” she explains, adding
that Kristin Scott Thomas, who plays her devastating nemesis Mrs Danvers, told her
that she started suffering the same thing at about her age. “And when you look at the
psychological aspect of the book, and the darkness and the twistedness in it, it suddenly
made sense.” Her character, a rich woman’s companion who has been plucked from
service into a romance with a high society man in his creepy mansion, “doesn’t know
whether she’s in a dream or a nightmare”.

‘Towards the end of making Rebecca, I started getting this thing where my heart was beating so
loudly that you could really hear it.’ Photograph: Buzz White at One Represents

Du Maurier’s story leaves itself open to many interpretations, and James plays de
Winter as a shy girl transformed into a bold woman upon discovering information that
would surely destroy someone else. She says that even among the film’s producers and
cast, “people felt differently about it – there were so many readings”; she stresses that
it’s very important that the film must be able to “keep those difficult areas and let
people decide whether it’s a great love story, or whether it’s about an abuser and a
victim.”

The mindset of the character really got under my skin – the insecurities, the paranoia
(She adds, later, that “with art and life, it’s never black and white, is it? Everything
happens in the grey area, and in the colour. I think conversations about things that are
difficult can become very much one side versus the other. We’re in a time where I feel
things become very moralistic, and then it’s very difficult to explore around the edges.”)