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That is until Catherine accepts an invitation to Northanger Abbey from Henry’s grave and severe father, General Tilney (Cunningham). Her passion for the dark and mysterious feeds her imagination, as tyrannical fathers and diabolical villains work their evil on forlorn heroines trapped in isolated castles, much like Northanger….
Northanger Abbey will be shown alongside Emma, Persuasion and Mansfield Park as part of ITV’s Jane Austen Season for 2007.
Andrew Davies writing credits include Bleak House, In The Line of Beauty, Tipping The Velvet, Daniel Deronda, The Chatterley Affair and He Knew He Was Right for the BBC and Dr Zhivago, Othello and Falling for ITV. He also co-wrote both feature film adaptations of Bridget Jones’s Diary.
Jon Jones (A Very Social Secretary, Archangel, The Alan Clarke Diaries, Cold Feet) directs Northanger Abbey. Keith Thompson (Foyle’s War, Oliver Twist, Malice Aforethought) is producer and Charles Elton (Pollyanna, The Railway Children, Malice Aforethought, Secret Smile) and Controller of ITV Drama Andy Harries are executive producers.
ITV1’s Jane Austen Season…Behind the Scenes
Jane Austen Season…Behind The Scenes is brand new and exclusive to ITV3.
Jane Austen Season…Behind The Scenes is a peek behind the cameras on ITV1’s unprecedented three film adaptation series of Jane Austen’s most celebrated novels, offering exclusive access to the sets of Mansfield Park, Persuasion and Northanger Abbey.
This one hour documentary is being shown to coincide with the premiere of these lavish costume dramas. Combining footage from location filming and interviews with cast and crew Jane Austen Season…Behind The Scenes will reveal in compelling detail how these classic novels are transformed into stunning television drama.
The ITV3 show reveals the untold tales behind some of the most dramatic and challenging scenes in the Austen season plus selected highlights from across the three films.
With exclusive on set access we’ll find out about the challenges of period drama first hand. Cast and crew will share the secrets of the sumptuous locations, rails of costumes and amazing hair pieces.
Viewers will see how a huge ballroom scene is brought vividly to life from the pages of Northanger Abbey. We discover the behind the scenes story of Fanny Price and Edmund Bertram’s wedding in Mansfield Park and the dramatic location filming on the wave-lashed Cobb at Lyme for Persuasion.
Jane Austen Season…Behind The Scenes features an array of interviews with the stars of these three films. From Persuasion we get the inside story from Anthony Head (Little Britain), Julia Davis (Nighty Night) and Rupert Penry Jones (Spooks); Northanger Abbey is represented by Felicity Jones (Cape Wrath), JJ Feild (The Ruby In The Smoke) and Carey Mulligan (Bleak House); and from the set of Mansfield Park we speak to National Television Awards Actress of the Year, Billie Piper.
King of costume drama Andrew Davies (Pride & Prejudice, Tipping The Velvet) is also on hand to explain how he has made Northanger Abbey leap from page to screen and also why he believes Austen’s literary classics make such compelling television. Andrew also talks about his 1997 adaptation of Emma(starring Kate Beckinsale, Mark Strong and Samantha Morton) which ITV1 viewers have the chance to see again as part of the season.
Jane Austen Season…Behind The Scenes visits the incredible locations that provide the backdrop for these dramas. We see how a 21st century Dublin street doubles for an early 19th century Bath avenue on Northanger Abbey. We join the cast and crew of Persuasion in the real Bath as they take over the stunning Royal Crescent. Finally we discover the amazing country house which for four weeks became the Regency period mansion Mansfield Park.
Jane Austen Season…Behind The Scenes is produced and
directed by Richard Makinson for ITV3. The executive producer is Sarah
Murch.
INTERVIEWS
FELICITY JONES PLAYS CATHERINE MORLAND
“Catherine Morland is the young heroine of Northanger Abbey. The film follows her from her home in the country to Bath and eventually to Northanger Abbey.”
Felicity Jones was convinced she hadn’t got the coveted role of Catherine…
“Jon Jones, the director, is very specific and very intense. When I went to the audition I had to learn about seven scenes, where normally you would do about two or three. He just whips through them and sits there looking at you very intensely, so you come away thinking “oh, that didn’t work”. I did about three auditions before I got the part. And I was so pleased when I finally got it!
Filming was great, but very intense because I was in every scene bar two! I was in one costume and then out and into another in record time!”
Yet Catherine isn’t the first Austen heroine in Felicity’s repertoire…
“A couple of years ago I did a Radio 4 adaptation of Mansfield Park, where I played Fanny Price, who is very different from Catherine Morland. Northanger Abbey is about Catherine’s entrance into society and meeting new people and dealing with men for the first time – the main focus of the story is seeing this young girl develop. On the other hand, Fanny Price’s personality is very set from the beginning.”
The other difference – in fact, the main one between Northanger Abbey and all other Austen novels – is the Gothic thread which runs through the story, illustrated largely through dream sequences.
“Because Catherine reads Gothic novels and goes to stay in this scary Gothic house, Andrew Davies has introduced these fantasies, which is a very modern take on the story because you are looking at her subconscious, which gives it a sexy element. And she’s getting quite confused about what they all mean, which is also lovely.
I love the dream sequences! There are about four of them and they happen after Catherine has been reading Gothic literature, which she is crazy about and talks to her best friend Isabella about all the time. And it prompts these weird fantasies. There is a great scene where I am in a bath and there’s this amazing background of weird woodland wallpaper. And, through the use of CGI, the wallpaper turns into the woodland. So I’m sitting there in the bath outside in this sort of Japanese style make-up and Henry Tilney (JJ Feild) comes trotting along and starts talking to me. Then I get out of the bath and drop my towel accidentally – although there is no nudity! It was filmed in the middle of a field just outside Dublin with a back-drop, and there were these three horses looking at me quizzically in this boiling hot bath at eight o’clock at night! It was absolutely one of the strangest scenes I’ve ever done!”
The dream sequences are Felicity’s only favourite scenes…
“I love the scene where Catherine goes to her first ball. Austen says that, before this point, she has never spoken to any boy who has been at all interested in her. She meets Henry Tilney for the first time at the ball and there’s a frisson between them. Catherine is a bit more of a country bumpkin than everyone else – everyone else is very well-to-do and has been going to balls for years, whereas she’s been in the country rolling around with pigs and so on! She also meets John Thorpe, who is more of the silent type who lingers in the background. Catherine is very shy of him because he won’t take his eyes off her - later on they go on this carriage ride and he is very confident and bombastic. Eventually she starts to think that he’s not quite right but at first it’s very much “is it Henry she likes or John?
We all had to learn the dances from scratch for the ball scenes, so we spent about a week going through them over and over again. But what happens is as soon as you put the dialogue in, the dancing just goes to pot! So it’s all about putting the movement and the dialogue together AND remembering what your character is supposed to be thinking at the same time – that’s quite tricky! We had an excellent dance teacher and she was constantly reminding us to relax into it and remember that your character has been doing this for years and years and years. The characters will have learnt to dance at such an early age that they are completely fluid by this age – the novelty for us with three weeks of dancing is not quite the same! It’s difficult to maintain that kind of energy all day when you are filming, especially with Catherine, as she’s so lively and enthusiastic and energetic and life-loving – it can get quite tiring!
There’s also a lovely scene at the start where I’m playing rounders, which shows Catherine from when she is a young girl and then gradually growing up. A young actress hits the ball and, as she runs around, she gets older and older and older. So it ends with me for the rest of the film. So there was one day where I was playing rounders, had a dance lesson, went horse riding and then did something totally ridiculous for a dream sequence!”
Felicity has always been a fan of Austen, particularly of her well drawn and complex characters…
“I really like Austen. People think she is a lot more romantic and straight forward than she actually is. She is quite practical about love and relationships - she’s very measured about who people should marry. What’s quite interesting with Henry Tilney is that he doesn’t necessarily fall madly in love with Catherine straight away. It’s a very gradual development, and it’s her enthusiasm for him that prompts him to return her affections. It’s very subtle how she draws her characters, which is what I like. The sex in Austen is not explicit, but it is there. She is a very passionate writer. She says about Catherine that her love of life is what makes her so attractive. I think Austen is a fan of people being passionate – she’s not Victorian in any way.
The appeal of Austen is, I think, a combination of the costumes and the fact that they are all about character. People are quite nosey, especially with shows like Big Brother around - we just love to people watch. Austen is brilliant at allowing the audience to spy on these wonderful, sometimes eccentric, characters. And I think anything to do with relationships and love is always going to be popular. Andrew Davies is so good because he really brings those novels to life and gives them a freshness and a pace that makes them great television. And he’s done a great job on Northanger Abbey.
I think the Gothic element is definitely one of the film’s selling points - it makes it very different from the other Austens. But also it is a very young novel. It sometimes feels like a high-school novel. Jon was constantly saying there is something very high school about the whole thing, because they are all young, inexperienced characters, especially Catherine and Isabella.
I think it’s a really good idea bringing the four Austens together for a season – it’s nice to see how they all compliment or differ from each other. You do get similar Jane Austen traits but I think the main heroines in all four of the books [in the season] have very different attitudes to life and living. They come across in very different ways.”
JJ FEILD PLAYS HENRY TILNEY
“The story starts in Bath, where all of society go to find a bride. Henry Tilney is a man who doesn’t really want any part in that society. He’s the unexpected bachelor. And then he meets Catherine.”
Henry and Catherine’s love story is not a classic one, particularly as the heroine’s view of the handsome vicar is somewhat distorted by her love of Gothic literature…
“The first time we meet Henry he is not as we expect him to be because he has a very strange reputation. There are rumours about the Tilney family, particularly that the mother died under strange circumstances, and we don’t know if it’s all bred in Catherine’s imagination or not. Was it foul play or negligence or a strange Gothic murder?
Throughout the story, as it’s seen through Catherine’s eyes, we see her young, exaggerated imagination unfold. She is always reading Gothic horror stories, so her perception of the Tilneys is in the perspective of what she reads. That is one of the underlying themes of the piece – how much fiction can you live and read and digest before it starts distorting your view of reality?
Having good guys and bad guys in Austen is perhaps a bit simplistic, but Henry is the guy who gets the girl at the end. I don’t think John Thorpe is necessarily bad. Even Henry isn’t necessarily all good - he’s a bit of a snob at first and he comes with an awful lot of baggage. It’s about Henry overcoming the issues he has with his family to find love, and John is a man who is looking for love for social and financial reasons. But we are telling, primarily, Catherine’s story.
One of the key developments in the relationship between Catherine and Henry is when she’s invited to Northanger Abbey, because our father has assumed she is a rich heiress and wants her money. Her imagination has run wild about the death of my mother and she accuses my father, through me, of some foul play. Henry, who has fallen in love with her, suddenly realises that she is just like all the other girls, or so he thinks. He leaps in and destroys her by telling her she is just a silly little girl like the rest of them. All of this idyllic, natural growth to the relationship is destroyed in one scene, on one simple misunderstanding and an act of imagination.”
JJ was flattered to be asked to play the lead in Jon Jones’ next drama, shortly after completing another of the acclaimed director’s films…
“I’ve worked with Jon Jones before (on The Secret Life of Mrs Beeton) so he already knew how to put up with me! I have to say, Jon is by far and away one of the best television directors I’ve ever worked with. I was so flattered to be asked to do this because, as an actor, I think the best compliment you can receive is to be asked back by the same director. And to be asked back within six months was beyond my expectations.
It was a terrifically short filming schedule, so we really had to jump in at the deep end and get stuck in. We started with the final scene – the first scene we shot was “will you marry me Catherine”! It can be a little bit strange shooting the last scene first but all filming is shot out of order, so you should know where you character is supposed to be at any time. But you do usually get to know people before you say you love them and ask them to spend the rest of their life with you!”
Proposing to a stranger was the least of JJ’s worries. Learning to dance was far more nerve-wracking…
“The first time Henry and Catherine meet is at a Bath ball. I get to prance around and pretend I’m a good dancer! They get on very well and she soon finds out that there are all sorts of mysteries about his family. The character of Henry Tilney was based on Jane Austen’s unrequited love - on which she based a lot of her work - called Thomas Lefroy. We filmed the ballroom scenes in the King’s Inns’ Hall of Judges in Dublin, in which hangs a giant portrait of the Chief Justice of Ireland – Thomas Lefroy. So we were dancing underneath me!
To prepare for the dances I had to fly backwards and forwards to Dublin and be told off viciously for my posture, my arms, my legs, my chin, where I look, where I breathe! Maybe I should have taken more note of movement at drama school! It was fantastic fun though. The Movement Director Sue Mythen was an absolute perfectionist - it’s like she’s been transported from that time to here. She was very structured and precise which is great, because at the end of the day I’m never going to be able to do 100%, but if I can get 50% of what she wants then I think I’ll get away with it.”
As well as dancing, JJ also had to undertake his fair share of stunts…
The strangest scenes I’ve ever had to shoot were the fantasy scenes, which involved sword fighting, being airbrushed with white make-up to look gothic, running around in a cow field with horses - which seem to dislike me - and slipping in cow pats all night in the rain! And all whilst trying to look ‘dashing’! We spent some time with a stunt man called Phillipe Zone, who was convinced that as long as we try to kill each other then it will look convincing!! We also spent a lot of time training on the horses – I had a beautiful gray called Smirnoff who liked to bolt at the sight of a camera. So I managed to gallop around most of the Wicklow countryside, unintentionally, to try to get control of her.”
As a fan of costume drama, JJ enjoys each element that goes into starring in one…
“I seem to do a lot of costume dramas – Northanger Abbey was my fourth of the year. I did three Victorian ones and then Regency. Sometimes it can be easier to play something which is so alien to yourself, although you do get odd costumes, which pinch in very strange places. And lots of frilly sleeves which get in your lunch! The costume department got very bored of me coming back from lunch with my frilly sleeves covered in ketchup!
It’s been nice to go back and watch as many Jane Austens adaptations as possible. To be honest, I hadn’t read any Jane Austen before this. Strangely enough, after reading Northanger Abbey, I have noticed more and more layers to her writing which I didn’t necessarily appreciate before. It’s been really nice getting into one of our classic writers as a result of getting a part. Although we don’t have a society now where you have to marry for money, the themes in Austen are pretty universal. We are all searching for a partner and love and hoping that we can throw out all of our issues and backgrounds and simply be with the person we love. Whether it’s in Austen’s time and it’s about throwing away your inheritance or it’s in modern times and it’s about throwing away the baggage we have with our past, it’s a very universal thing. That’s maybe why people keep going back to Austen.
Andrew Davies brings an awful lot of pace to Jane Austen’s writing. Her books were huge with a lot of chapters simply about a dance or a meal. In order to keep it ticking along, you need to pick the right bits and keep it alive and fresh. Andrew is incredible at keeping the emotion and the humour while tightening the pace.”
LIAM CUNNINGHAM PLAYS GENERAL TILNEY
“General Tilney is the father of our hero, Henry, the long-suffering Eleanor and Frederick ‘the rake’! Northanger Abbey is named after his home, as it is Tilney and his Abbey which stir up a lot of the drama in the story. Catherine, who is having a sexual awakening, is invited to this Gothic place, a place of terrible tales and possible murder. The General’s wife has died a little while before, in what we think are suspicious circumstances – or certainly Catherine thinks because she’s been reading too many racy novels. He’s a hugely overbearing presence on his children. Although when I got the wig and mutton chops on, I did think I looked like Wolverine’s dad as well!
It’s a hugely different part for me - I’ve never done a Jane Austen before. For want of a better phrase, there is a heightened reality to it. There have been so many girls and women for whom these novels have been a huge part of their youth, and a lot of women go back and get as much enjoyment out of them as they did the first time. Austen is a national treasure; she’s up there with Shakespeare. It was an honour to be asked - you’d be a foolish man to turn it down! It’s an interesting role as well, because Tilney actually comes across a lot more in what people perceive him as, rather than what he actually is. He’s not particularly friendly or romantic and he’s very dogmatic and overbearing. The easy thing would have been to go for the moustache-twirling evil guy, and there’s a bit of that to him, but he has got complexities to him. He’s got to be, for want of a better word, nice enough for Catherine to say “ok, I quite want to go to this Northanger Abbey”.
Austens are magnificent stories…the story is everything. That’s why Shakespeare has lasted so long as well – a lot of his language is impenetrable, and yet people keep going back to it, and not because of heritage. It’s because the stories are magnificently told, with great characters. Austen, too, has wonderful characters, particularly the leading ladies. And they are seen from the perspective of a woman, which doesn’t happen too often in drama. And yet the vast majority of people who watch drama are women. Nobody can write stories like Ms Austen. And the themes are just eternal.
It’s great to do costume in Dublin (Liam’s home town). Costume drama is becoming increasingly rare because of the expense. Yet they look magnificent on screen and they take you away and they give you a suspension of disbelief. This is the sort of drama that should be done. It’s wonderful to make the effort. People who hold Austen dear to their heart will be watching this with a hugely critical eye. Our job is to capture the spirit of the book and the spirit of the characters. When you’ve got someone like Andrew Davies, who is regarded as the master and takes the spirit of what the author intended, you feel honoured to be a part of it.”
CAREY MULLIGAN PLAYS ISABELLA THORPE
“Catherine becomes Isabella’s protégé when she comes to Bath. Isabella is very fashionable, and she knows all the places to be seen. She knows who in society one should talk to, and who one should avoid. She knows all the balls to go to and all the gossip. So Catherine looks up to her and wants to learn how to be this fashionable grown-up woman in society. Isabella is automatically the adult in the relationship – like Catherine’s older sister.
Isabella’s a great character to play because she’s got such a game plan - everything she says and thinks is very strategic. She knows exactly what she needs out of life. People assume that Isabella is an evil or bad person because she manipulates people to get what she wants. But in that time, if you didn’t get married then you were in a lot of trouble – you needed to secure your future or fortune. What she is doing is perfectly acceptable. Marrying for money was normal. Marrying for love was abnormal.
Luckily we didn’t have full corsets - Empire line dresses are just structured at the top so you can eat whatever you like for lunch! In other things I’ve done, like Pride and Prejudice and Bleak House, we had full corsets. But Empire line is all about your bust anyway, so you can eat even more because a bigger bust looks nicer!
Andrew Davies brings out all of the fizz of a novel in his scripts. I think you can tell by the little stage directions he writes in that it’s an ‘Andrew Davies script’ – they are very funny! I’ve done a lot of costume drama, and I wasn’t entirely sure if I wanted to do another one quite yet. But Isabella was such a different part and I didn’t look at it as a costume drama, because there’s no costume drama stiffness about it. It’s very free and the words don’t sound false coming out of our mouths.
I think everything that Jane Austen wrote is timeless. I mean, Darcy – who doesn’t want a Darcy?! Who doesn’t want a Henry Tilney? Women go for the bad boy for their first experience and then realise that the Darcy or the Tilney is the one they really want. It’s kind of like a teen movie, if I’m allowed to say that!
I think the Gothic dream sequences are just amazing. There’s a scene where I’m tied to a bed and Captain Tilney is leaning over me. You come in to do a costume drama and suddenly you are tied to the bed, looking down a lens and hyper-ventilating!! It’s so surreal and you never get to do anything surreal when you are in a costume drama.”
WILLIAM BECK PLAYS JOHN THORPE
“In every costume drama there are essentially two love interests - and my character is the guy who doesn’t get the girl. I’m in full smoulder mode, whatever that means! Catherine should know better, but there is an interest there. It just so happens that Henry Tilney suits her better than John Thorpe does. I think John, once he’s done a little bit of growing up, would make an ideal husband for someone. That is the thing to avoid – the good V bad thing – Henry and John are just playing the parts they play in Catherine’s life. They’ve all got issues – in fact, John has less issues than most of the other characters, particularly Henry.
In today’s society, going to Bath for the tea-dances and courting would be, I suppose, something like going to Glastonbury! It was something kids could do away from their parents. I think John was someone who had been to Glastonbury once or twice before and probably hasn’t really done anything but likes to pretend he has. So he has a way with the debutantes and that’s what Catherine is. John is essentially a guiding hand, but he’s a bit ham-fisted.
There are very, very obvious modern parallels, which is why these adaptations continue to be made, and why Andrew Davies is able to write them in such a way that people can understand them. But, of course, you can’t see it entirely from a modern point of view. You can’t say that, because this guy is in his twenties and has been around, he would automatically have experienced some of the things that a modern twenty-one year old would have experienced. That’s the challenge – trying to get the idea of a kid, emotionally under-developed in modern terms, who nevertheless thinks he’s enormously well developed. The real challenge is to understand and communicate these characters without modernising it or taking the easy route, which is to make it seem as though the character could have walked out of last Wednesday. They do need to be different people, people were all round different from you or I – but the feelings and internal struggles they had weren’t different.
I have a theory that throughout the ages, people have continued to have sex! I really struggle to understand that people think tea-dances and relationships between men and women have anything other than sex involved. If hardcore Austen fans get offended by that, then I have a certain degree of sympathy, but I can’t say I have empathy. And it’s done in a way that is never gratuitous. It leaves room for personal interpretation.
I enjoy the bits where I’m not speaking, particularly fighting and carriage driving and horse riding. I’ve developed a bit of a fetish about things like that – I really, really enjoy them. It gives you a way into the character. I’m hankering after more and more action parts after this. It’s great fun to be flown out somewhere to do an hour or so sword fighting – it’s very glam! Of course it was for a dream sequence - there’s a strong Gothic thread that runs through the novel and that’s there in the dream sequences. They provide the opportunity to see into how Catherine’s imagination is informed by the books she is reading. That’s where the broader Gothic strokes of the drama are able to be painted. It’s part of the fun of making a drama which has, at its heart, a spoof-ish quality. I think it’s very important to make dramas that don’t look straight down the camera and wink at you. It’s important to let the audience do that for themselves.
I’m not the biggest fan of Jane Austen, not because I dislike anything in particular about her writing. In common with a lot of people who were compelled to study her in school – it’s very difficult to break away from that endless analysis of, say, the role of windows or the repetition of a particular theme. But I like drama and this is good drama. And, more than anything else, we have a central character who is female – there aren’t that many of those on telly, no matter how many times we try and think we’ve changed things. Even if I do end up having to play the sh*t!”
CAST BIOGRAPHIES
FELICITY JONES
Television
Cape Wrath, Servants, Weirdsister College, Victorians Uncovered, The Worst Witch, The Preston Front, Middle English Poetry Programme, The Treasure Seekers
Radio
The Archers, Watership Down, What A Drag, Mansfield Park
JJ FEILD
Film
Last Orders, O Jerusalem, To the Ends of the Earth, Love Actually, Tulse Luper Suitcase, The Intended, K19 – The Widow Maker,
Television
The Ruby In The Smoke, The Secret Life of Mrs Beeton, Poirot: Death on the Nile, Waking the Dead, Jack & the Beanstalk, The Real Story, Perfect Strangers, Nicholas Nickleby, The Railway Children
Theatre
Six Degrees of Separation
CAREY MULLIGAN
Film
And When Did You Last See Your Father?, Pride and Prejudice
Television
Bleak House, The Amazing Mrs Pritchard, Waking the Dead, Marple: The Sittaford Mystery , Trial and Retribution
Theatre
The Hypochondriac, Forty Winks, Tower Block Dreams, The Seagull
LIAM CUNNINGHAM
Film
The Wind That Shakes the Barley, Breakfast on Pluto, League of Gentlemen’s Apocolypse, The Card Player, Mystics, Dog Soldiers, Revelation, The Abduction Club, Island of the Mapmakers Wife, A Love Divided, Though The Sky Falls, Tale of Sweety Barrett, Life of Stuff, Jude, First Knight, The Little Princess, War of the Buttons, Into the West
Television
Murphy’s Law, Hotel Babylon, Showbands, The Clinic, Prime Suspect, Messiah, Final Demand, Crooked Man, Stranded, Rebel Heart, Atilla The Hun, A Likeness in Stone, Doris Duke Story, RKO281, Shooting the Past, Falling For A Dancer, 20/20, Cracker, Roughnecks
Theatre
Poor Beast in the Rain, The Cavalcaders, A Streetcar Named Desire, As You Like It, The Herbal Bed, A Handful of Stars, Away Alone, One Last White Horse, Lament For Arthur Cleary, Wasters, Studs, Good Night Siobhan, Under Milk Wood
WILLIAM BECK
Film
Goal!, The Truth, Quicksand, Stutter, Gypsy Woman, Snatch
Television
Robin Hood, Vital Signs, Johnny and the Bomb, The Murder Rooms, Guardian, The Pardoner’s Tale, Suspicion, Second Generation, Serious & Organised, Redcaps, Attachments, The Bill
Theatre
Festen, Kes, They Shoot Horses Don’t They?
CATHERINE WALKER
Television
Perfect Day, Waking The Dead, Animals, Holby City
Theatre
Blackbird, Play, Blackwater Angel, What Happened Bridgie Cleary, Twelfth Night, The Night Season, John Bull’s Other Island, Wild Orchids, Stairs to the Roof, Richard II, Henry V, A Month In The Country, Troilus & Cressida, Sive, King Lear, Diary of a New York Lady, Blood
SYLVESTRA LE TOUZEL
Television
Bonkers, The Amazing Mrs Pritchard, Housewife 49, Amazing Grace, Judge John Deed, L.S. Lowry, Maria Marten, Family Affair, Hard Times, Life of DH Lawrence, This Year Next Year, The Saturday Party, Million Dollar Children, Donal & Sally, Crimes, Mansfield Park, Naming the Names, There Was an Old Woman, A Vote for Hitler, Making Out, The Dog it was That Died, Seeing in the Dark, Ticket To Ride, Lovejoy, Between the Lines, Harry Enfield, Smith and Jones, Kiss Me Kate, Vanity Fair, Midsomer Murders, My Family, Hearts and Bones
Theatre
Wild East, The Crucible, The Merchant Of Venice, Strange Fruit, Glasshouses, Harvest, The Understanding, Unity, The War At Home, The Fall, The Alchemist, Dracula, Ourselves Alone, The Wandering Jew, Hamlet, The Fairy Queen, Henry IV – part I, An Inspector Calls, Les Enfants Du Paradis, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Benefactors
DESMOND BARRITT
Film
Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, Alice Through the Looking Glass, Rebecca’s Daughters, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, All For Love, Daylight Robbery
Television
Young King Arthur, Midsomer Murders, The Bill Christmas Special, Follow The Star, Poirot, Madam Bovary, Maxwell’s House, The Old Devil’s, Homer and the Pidgeons, Boon, Pirates, Dalziel and Pascoe, Miracles Extra, True Tilda
Theatre
She Stoops To Conquer, The History Boys, Stuff Happens, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Mountain Giants, The Recruiting Officer, The Wind in the Willows, Three Men on a Horse, Jacobowsky and the Colonel, The Magistrate, Henry IV parts 1&2, A Midsummer Nights Dream, Twelfth Night, Comedy of Errors, King Lear, The Man Who Came to Dinner, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, Macbeth, The Constant Couple, HMS Pinafore, Accidental Death of an Anarchist, Dubarry, Eurydice, Real Inspector Hound, Black Comedy, Three Men On A Horse, The Liar
HUGH O’CONNOR
Film
Thirteen, Speed Dating, Ulysses, The American Comrade, Blueberry, Deathwatch, Submerged, Chocolat, Hotel Splendide, Sawdust Tales, The Boy From Mercury, The Young Poisoner’s Handbook, The Three Musketeers, Red Hot, My Left Foot, Da, Rawhead Rex, Lamb
Television
Showbands
Theatre
The Home Place, The Wexford Trilogy, The Breadman
MARK DYMOND
Film
Till Death, The Harvester, Dungeons and Dragons, Land of the Blind, Die Another Day, Blackball, The House of Mirth, Revelation, Miss Sparks, Room 32, At First Sight, A Fatal Game, Imagine, Fairy, Conversations, Interference
Television
Life Begins, Sinbad, Mysteries, Corner Café
Theatre
Improlab, Southern Born, Skyf, Pickups, Hypercomedy, Lovborg’s Woman, Darkle, Noises Off, Total Eclipse, Bagasie, Hamlet, Scum, Deathwatch, The Possibilities, Blood on a Cat’s Neck, Cowboy Mouth, Twelfth Night, Wuthering Heights
ANDREW DAVIES INTERVIEW
Andrew’s fondness for Northanger Abbey and its heroine Catherine Morland made adapting the novel – one of Austen’s lesser known works – a real pleasure…
“Northanger Abbey is a charming story and I think it is maybe the lightest and happiest of Jane Austen’s novels. I was keen on doing this novel because I’ve always been fond of it and I’ve never tackled it before. I’ve been very faithful to the book, but one of the differences has been writing the scenes showing Catherine’s fantasies.”
The Gothic element to the story gave Andrew scope to invent dream sequences and fantasies which normally have no place in a costume drama…
“Catherine is a great reader of horror fiction - the Gothic novel was fairly popular in those days, like a young girl today who would read a lot of rather steamy romances. In fact, a lot of Northanger Abbey is a satire on the Gothic novels of those times. Catherine imagines she is going to have all sorts of scary adventures. And she does have some adventures, but they are not quite the sort she thinks she is going to have.
In this production, we see some of Catherine’s fantasies, some of which are quite steamy for a young girl! As well as reading the books about all these extraordinary things, she is also meeting all of these new people. So in her dreams and fantasies the two things come together. Some of the things she imagines are fairly standard romantic stuff, like she imagines the two young men she’s met duelling for her hand. But rather more strangely because she’s read this extraordinary book called The Monk - in which this rather randy Monk gets a magic branch which enables him to walk through walls and into ladies’ bedchambers. So when she is having a bath she imagines what it would be like if Henry actually walked through the wall while she was naked in the bath and - by golly – he does, in her imagination at least!
Udolpho was the first of that genre of Gothic horror novels and I would say today that we wouldn’t find it that horrifying. It is a very old adventure story and it’s got lots of secret cupboards and skeletons and that sort of thing. The Monk is a different thing altogether and, in fact, is one of the steamiest books I’ve ever read. It was written by a young guy who was only 19 when he wrote it and is basically about a monk in the 15th century who gets seduced by one of his acolytes, who turns out to be a girl who dressed up as a boy. They are both virgins but he becomes absolutely addicted to sex and having got started, can’t stop. He goes around seducing and raping people left, right and centre and finishes up raping a virgin on a pile of skulls in a catacomb. You can’t really get more extreme than that, even nowadays. The idea of a sweet little innocent girl like Catherine reading a book like this is quite titillating. And Felicity Jones is so good at doing that wide-eyed thing and explaining “can people really do such things”!”
Austen is one of Andrew’s favourite authors to adapt…
“I just love working with Jane Austen. I suppose one of the challenges is that, for so many people, Austen is the greatest writer of all time and one doesn’t want to let her fans down. On the other hand, I always think I’m more interested in attracting an audience of people who have never seen one before and who would never read the books. Austen is such a good writer and she constructs a novel so well, that it’s actually easier to adapt her than it is to adapt a lot of more modern writers. She really knew what she was doing and I’m sure she would have been a very good dramatist herself if she had chosen to be.
I think Austen is timeless. Her novels are particularly well suited to a season because they will reinforce each other. Austen only wrote six major novels and none of them are particularly long. A Dickens season would have to last about five years I should think, because his novels are so huge and baggy – yet you’d have to do them justice. I can’t think of anybody else who you could “sell” a season of in that sort of way.”
Andrew has a reputation for “sexing up” the classics, something he prides himself on…
“It’s not too bad to have a reputation for sexing up the classics! In fact, most people when they actually see the thing will say that none of the scenes are gratuitous. I feel I’m bringing out the sexual content which is inherent in the material. It’s just that in the 19th century, it was the convention never to write directly about sexual matters. I’m just giving it a bit of a nudge. I don’t mind about that reputation at all – there are worse things to have said about you!
One of the things that I’ve always thought was a drag in so many period adaptations is that they are always buttoned up to the neck in so many clothes all the time - I’m always looking for excuses to get them out of their clothes! I think those things help to remind people that the stories are about real people with bodies as well as minds.
When I’m writing a script one of the things I want most to do is to not make people think all the time “oh, I’m watching a great English classic” or “I’m watching a period drama”. I just want them to think “oh, I’m watching a really exciting drama about people like me having adventures”.
Sometimes I’ll take liberties and write scenes that don’t take place in the book. With one of the subplots in the book, we never find out what happens between Isabella and Captain Tilney. I thought it would be interesting to write a scene in which we do see exactly what happened, which is not the kind of thing Austen would write a scene about herself. She implies it so I thought “well, come on – let’s actually do it.” Isabella jilts Catherine’s brother in order to go off with the rather more glamorous Captain Tilney, who is more or less a professional seducer of young girls. So I’ve put a scene in where he is hurrying her into a cheap boarding house and then we get a scene afterwards where she is laying about in bed without anything very much on and says “are we engaged then?” and he says “get dressed quickly, I must return you to your friends.” You think “poor girl – she’s been had”. That sort of stuff was going on all the time but Austen always keeps it slightly removed. It’s interesting to sometimes bring that slightly seedy background into the foreground so that people can see what that world was all about.”
Andrew is particularly fond of the colourful characters in Northanger Abbey, not to mention the actors who embody them in the production…
“Catherine is the heroine; I think she is a delightful character. She’s grown up as a bit of a tomboy and is only just beginning to get interested in this world of men and love and sex. She’s the youngest of all Jane Austen’s heroines so she’s very delightful to write about. She’s very innocent and very naïve and you feel quite anxious about her because she’s the sort of girl who could quite easily be taken in by some villain.
Henry Tilney is a good deal older than Catherine, although at the beginning he feels he is rather too old for her and it’s a bit of a teacher/pupil relationship in a way. Gradually he becomes more and more involved with her. Then there is John Thorpe, his rival, who is a very dashing young man who drives a very fast carriage. The equivalent of a “hooray Henry” with a big fast sports car I guess - very much of a boy racer with the equivalent of a souped-up Subaru! He’d do lots of handbrake turns and burn a lot of rubber! He seems very nice, but in fact he has no conscience whatsoever, especially when it comes to girls. All that sort of thing is very appealing to Catherine at the beginning but then she finds herself more and more drawn to Henry.
There has been some very interesting casting on this one. The best surprise is just how wonderful Felicity Jones is – she has to carry the whole show as Catherine and she’s always spot on. She always seems to get just the right mood and look and speaks her lines so beautifully. I think I’ve been extraordinarily lucky getting her.
I think JJ Feild is very, very nice casting for Henry too. It’s not the easiest part because, at the beginning, you could think he’s being a bit patronising and teasing towards Catherine. It’s a very difficult, delicate line to play and he plays it very well. Also he’s tall, handsome and very, very sexy. I mean, I’m probably not the one to judge, but the women who have seen it tell me he’s very satisfactory! William Beck as John Thorpe has really caught that quality of being attractive but slightly grotesque in a way. John is one of those guys who always goes a step too far. He’s very, very funny and I think William has just captured that perfectly.”
The ‘finished product’ is something Andrew always awaits with baited breath, and is rarely disappointed…
“I love seeing the finished product, and touch wood, very rarely have I had any nasty surprises. Sometimes I get some very nice surprises, and that’s the best, when they do it in a way that is different from the way I’d imagined, but just as good or better. I suppose that’s what you look for – a director and cast who can look at what you’ve done and do something surprising and interesting with it.
Also, Northanger Abbey, the physical place, has to be very important in the film because it’s called Northanger Abbey yet we spend the first half of the film just having lots of references to it. So it can’t be a disappointment. Lismore Castle is a wonderful, splendid, rather scary building. It delivers all the promise of creaking ghosts in the corridors and strange things hidden in the dungeons. All the things you expect with a romantic castle.”
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