Some stories refuse to stay on the page. The Hollywood Reporter’s Beyond the Book column explores what happens when books make the leap to screen and beyond — unpacking what stayed, changed, how it was done and why it matters with the creatives who made it.
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There are no chandeliers blazing at the ball in the new Sense and Sensibility movie. Instead, the sprawling room is lit only by candles. Sisters Marianne (Esmé Creed-Miles) and Elinor (Daisy Edgar-Jones) arrive wearing complementary gold and silver dresses, but they come unadorned, minus any of the traditional trappings, like feathers in their hair, found on other guests. They’re each small but inescapable signs of how far the Dashwood sisters have fallen since their father’s death.
Previous Jane Austen adaptations have leaned on luxury: perfectly starched muslin, glittering ballrooms, “cottages” the size of manors. Focus Features’ version, which was released in theaters on Oct. 16, goes the other way. The gowns go unpressed, and the youngest sister’s hems are stained from eating berries. The family’s cottage is so small that someone has to give up their room when guests arrive. “We definitely wanted it to feel real,” cinematographer Arnaud Potier tells The Hollywood Reporter.
That realism was a deliberate answer to a hard question: what’s left to say about a novel already adapted into a beloved screen version? Despite being released 30 years ago, Ang Lee’s 1995 film, starring Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet, still looms large amid the arrival of director Georgia Oakley’s adaptation, starring Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esmé Creed-Miles. Like its predecessor, it follows the sisters after their father’s death plunges the family into financial uncertainty, as they navigate romance, heartbreak and social pressure together.
In conversations with THR, cinematographer Potier, screenwriter Diana Reid, costume designer Grace Snell and production designer Francesca Di Mottola explain how they built their modern, lived-in and moody version of Austen’s world.
“Respect Rather Than Reverence”
Courtesy of Focus Features
A self-described Jane Austen aficionado and published author of three novels, Reid grew up reading the literary classic and watching the film. So when the screenwriter was asked to tackle Sense and Sensibility, she had just one question: “Whether I felt I had anything to say that was different?” she tells THR. “To be honest, when I approached it, I assumed the answer would be no, because I love that film so much. But after I looked at the book and then the movie again, I did feel I had a different take, and that there was something new to say.”
For her take with Oakley, she set out to make the sisters “the spine of the narrative” and their personal relationship the true love story. “I wanted Elinor to become a bit more like Marianne, and Marianne to become a bit more like Elinor,” she says. “It’s almost like the romances are the reward for the journey they go on as sisters.”
Oakley’s framing, meanwhile, gave every department the same brief. “Early on with Georgia, it was clear this is a coming-of-age story,” Di Mottola says. “It was very important to her that the sisters felt really young — that feeling of loving for the first time, discovering love, the yearning. How do you show that in a fresh way that audiences today can connect to?”
To do this, the screenwriter approached the text with “respect rather than reverence.” In addition to lifting some lines straight from the book, she matched Austen’s cadence in the ones she invented. She also reshaped the men, aging down Colonel Brandon (Herbert Nordrum) to make him “less of a father figure.” She rewrote Edward Ferrars’ (George MacKay) backstory so he shares Elinor’s sense of duty. That left two people who, as Reid puts it, “will never put their own happiness first — and that’s also the reason they’re perfect for each other.”
Most importantly for the film’s look, Reid wrote the Dashwoods as slightly out of step with their era. “They’re a bit unconformist, a bit less uptight, and they sit at odds with the conventions of the time,” she says. “Romance is the one place where they can express their true selves without feeling they need to conform.”
Costumes: Self-Styled, Unpressed and a Little Muddy
For Snell, the job required leaning into that sister bond rather than the history books. “I looked at my friends and family and how we communicate through clothing — how clothing is shared, loved and passed on,” she says.
She chose a muted palette and naturally dyed fabrics so the costumes would “tie in with the landscapes a lot more“ and feel relatable. She also let go of everything looking coordinated. Polished characters such as Fanny Dashwood “would be immaculate.” Meanwhile, the sisters “sometimes make funny choices,” Snell says. “They look more self-styled and functional, with the pieces treated as interchangeable.”
Marianne leans toward “the frills or the sashes,” while Elinor is “more structured, with more tailoring.” The two are always dressed to balance each other onscreen, as in complementary lavender and yellow, or that aforementioned ball’s gold and silver. “I wanted their lines to feel slightly more blurred,” the costume designer says. “By the end of the film, both sisters have borrowed qualities from each other to become more rounded individuals.”
The silhouettes, fabrics and hand sewing are true to the period, but the upkeep isn’t pristine — and that’s intentional. Snell skipped the steamer on most of the dresses. “Men’s shirts are [pressed]. But some of these dresses might have been on the floor, picked up and worn the next day,” she says. After all, the Dashwoods no longer have a “household of maids to do all this for them.”
Young Margaret, an “adventurous, playful child,” was expected by period custom to wear white but spends her time wanting to eat berries and climb trees. “There are a lot of times they’re wet or dirty, and I didn’t necessarily want to clean the costumes up afterward,” Snell says.
Snell is aware not everyone may want an Austen film this muted in color. “But that’s who I am as a designer, it’s what I chose to do, and it’s what Georgia wanted,” she says. “Period costume is sometimes on a pedestal of escapism, but this isn’t really escapism. This is hitting home. You are in that room with them.”
Cinematography: By Candlelight
When taking on this film, Potier, who is French, knew the stakes. “So many people love Jane Austen. It’s a monument in the U.K., and the last movie was a big hit,” he says. “I knew I would be judged.”
His benchmark was Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, a period film that was candlelit and possessed a “super natural” look that has never become dated. “If people look at this movie in 15 years,” he says, “it hasn’t changed.” For this new take, he shot on film and largely avoided LEDs in favor of real tungsten, filament light and “enhancing the candlelight where I had to.” Like Snell, he steered away from oversaturation. “It’s about being as painterly as possible.”
The result is a film that is often dark, and Potier argues that’s the point. “What those girls were living through was super hard and harsh,” he says. “The darkness through the movie brings something heavy in you, and you’re liberated at the end, way more than if everything were happy, bright and shiny.”
He also let the film’s setting dictate the camera. “I was very specific that it should be more location-driven than character-driven,” he says. While at Norland, Potier’s camera operated at its liveliest: “more fresh, more bright, more warm.”
And in places like their cottage, the camera naturally settled in with its surroundings. “[It] becomes way more static, but with a little breathing, handheld, to keep a bit of freshness with the girls while feeling the heaviness of where they live,” he explains.
Ultimately, Potier says they “wanted the audience to feel like they are in the room” with the characters. “That’s why we would never use a weird lens. It was always like a 35 or 50 [millimeter] to work with the space that we have … We wanted to shoot everything on location and not on stage.”
Production Design: Homes That Feel Lived In
That all made Di Mottola’s locations the backbone of the film’s visual language. The production designer had a rule for a film shot on location rather than on a soundstage: Every house “always had to feel like a family home.”
The grandest location is Norland Park, the estate the Dashwoods must leave after their father dies. It was filmed at a private, still-inhabited house in Dorset that had never been used in a movie.
It “wasn’t in a pristine state when we found it,” Di Mottola says. But it suited the story. “We find this family mourning the loss of their dad, who had been sick for at least two years, so we wanted to show they’re not in quite the position of wealth they might have been. The drapes and curtains are frayed. In one of the sitting rooms, the walls are covered in a beautiful terracotta, peachy velvet with sun-bleached marks on it.” The family later moves to Barton Cottage, which was filmed at Ditsworthy Warren House in south Devon. This location took far more work, Di Mottola says.
“It gave us a shell within a landscape, but we had to redo all the walls, the ceiling and the roof, and put in windows,” the production designer explains. Though she briefly considered building the interior on a stage, instead, the team carved bedrooms out of the single open space upstairs and used flying walls to make room for the camera. The transformation took weeks.
At first, the cottage is “pretty much an abandoned shelter“ that leaves the family “completely shocked in having to adapt to their new life.“ The home is later furnished with makeshift touches like scraps of fabric for curtains. Small details that showcase the family‘s new life include the home being filled with objects the girls would‘ve made themselves with driftwood like mobiles and painted shells. Over the course of the film, it “slowly becomes a really lived-in, cozy family home,” she says.
The build won over the farmer who rents the cottage property and even helped the crew rebuild collapsed stone walls. “Normally, everything goes back to the original when you’re done filming,” Di Mottola says. “But in this case he signed something and kept it, because he loved it.”
A Thread Back to 1995
For all the effort to make something new, the team didn’t ignore Lee’s film. “We watched the Ang Lee movie as well, because it’s a masterpiece, and we wanted to look at it with a fresh eye,” Potier says. “We wanted to not be similar in the look — more grounded, more earthy.”
Snell even made some costumes with Cosprop, the costume house behind Jenny Beavan and John Bright’s designs for the 1995 film. She calls it “almost a changing of the guard.”
Reid, for her part, is glad to be “one in a long line” of Austen adaptations. “On the one hand, it’s an honor,” she says, “but on the other, it takes the pressure off.”
“I was trying to make a film where the romances feel really potent and satisfying, and the women get the men they deserve after they’ve become their full selves. But it’s through the female relationships, and learning from each other, that the actual growth happens,” she says.
What she hopes for most is that viewers go back to the book. She’d like the film to “make Austen and the classics feel less intimidating, and encourage people to see themselves in it.”
Sense and Sensibility is in theaters now.