LOADER". Welcome to the DVD commentary.
I'm Kevin Loader, the producer of the film.
MICHELL: I'm Roger Michell, the director of the film.
We're sitting here in London.
It's the week that the film is about to open in London
and in the UK, and, indeed, in the US,
and it's very engaging to
watch the film again with you guys, um,
and talk a little bit about it as we go along.
LOADER: So, Roger, maybe we should just start by...
You should just say when you first read the book
that this film's based upon.
MICHELL: Well, I read the book, I think it was about three years ago.
I read the book, which was high on a shelf in my house.
It was a copy of the book that belonged to my mother,
bizarrely, and it was an old paperback copy
with a, sort of, funny picture of a woman
in a low-cut dress on the front.
And I thought, "Oh, I'll give this a read.
"It looks like a bit of fun, it looks like it's a bit of
"50s romantic chick lit,"
and very quickly thought this isn't chick lit at all.
This is really dark and brooding, and really interesting,
and would make a great film.
And I knew there was already a film of the book,
but I'd never seen it.
So, the next thing that happened was I showed it to you.
LOADER: That's right and, I mean, we both were amazed,
really, at the kind of psychological modernity of it
and just the kind of engagement to the story.
But one of the problems it has, of course,
is that it has this quite long preamble before the heroine,
the eponymous heroine, comes into the film.
MICHELL: It's about 60 pages until Rachel
makes her first appearance, which is good and bad.
It's exciting 'cause it's a long, extended drum roll
in preparation for her glorious first appearance,
but it's bad in terms of movies.
You know, you worry that you need to
crack on and start the story.
So, this sequence that we're watching now
took an awful lot of thought and care
in the writing and the shooting,
and the redrafting of the voiceover
that you're listening to now.
I wanted the voiceover to be as short as possible,
but I needed certain key elements of the plot
to be laid out before you, economically, clearly,
and without being too over-confusing
and overburdening the viewer with,
you know, with a load of info.
So, thank God, the voiceover is stopping right now,
and, really, the story is starting right now.
LOADER". And the decision we made, really,
to have Sam Claflin playing both Ambrose...
uh, and Philip was, we never really wavered from that.
We always had that idea, didn't we?
And I think others tried to talk us out of it at one point.
MICHELL: There was some resistance to the idea.
I mean, I think it's... It's not a perfect solution
to a very difficult problem.
And the problem posed by the story,
an interesting problem,
is that he has to look more or less identical
to his cousin-slash-guardian, Ambrose,
and I couldn't think of a better way of doing that
than having the same actor playing both those roles.
If he doesn't look exactly like his cousin,
then there's a moment early on,
in the first scene with Rachel,
which would just never work.
So, I think...
the casting of him in both roles,
with the slight confusion that that might entail,
is the lesser of...
The lesser of two evils,
and I think it was the right choice to make.
Tim Barlow as Seecombe.
LOADER: Yes.
MICHELL: The recalcitrant, grumpy butler,
always with a dewdrop on his nose,
a real scene stealer, if there ever was one.
This is the classic scene in which an actor
meaninglessly moves bales of hay
from one side of the barn to the other.
I don't know why I'm admitting that that's the case,
but it's true.
LOADER". It's true, there's absolutely no reason for that actually,
-except to cover the dialogue. - There's no logic to it at all.
MICHELL: But, um, do you know what, who cares?
It seems to work absolutely fine,
'cause the actor is so marvelous.
He gives it complete conviction
and we buy it, we totally buy it.
So, this is Holliday Grainger,
who spent a lot of time
learning how to ride for this picture.
Actually, I think she already knew how to ride.
But, in fact, I realize
she never actually gets on to a horse in the whole film.
LOADER". I think she's always in the carriage, isn't she?
MICHELL: She's already got off a horse
or is about to get on a horse.
But unfortunately, we never see her riding a horse.
And this is one of the key, several key letters,
in the film.
This is a film that not only predates e-mails,
iPhones, and telephones.
It seems to predate the steam locomotive,
so the letters arrive many weeks, months,
or even years after they've been sent,
which gives a wonderful gearing to the way in which
suspense is kind of dripped into the story.
LOADER". Yes, I mean, the book is not particularly specific
about when it's set, but you always wanted to choose it,
partly as a result of fashion and partly as the result
of the pre-railway moment,
somewhere between the world of Jane Austen and the world of Dickens.
MICHELL: Yes, absolutely. I mean, all we know from the book
is that it takes three weeks to get to Italy.
When the book is set, you still have to get to Italy in a car,
so you don't get to Italy on a train.
So, it must be somewhere around the 1830s that she set it.
You know, the film is an essay in ambiguity,
and she's being,
oddly, you know,
ironically, very clear about the ambiguity of when it's set.
LOADER: Blinding light of Tuscany
comes in.
And this is actually on a hillside,
not above Florence, as it seems to be in that shot,
with rather wonderful CGI,
but it's a hillside about 40 minutes outside Arezzo,
little further away.
MICHELL: This was a special day, wasn't it?
I think this was our first...
This was our last week of the shoot.
We all decamped to Tuscany
with as many of our crew who we could take with us.
And on this day,
I got up and looked at my phone forecast
and saw that it was about to be very sunny
until about three o'clock, and then it was going to cloud over
and rain like mad.
And so, with a lot of running around,
we managed to squeeze a day's work
into those few hours between, I don't know,
eight o'clock and three o'clock,
without breaking for a meal.
And it really did work well, this location.
This location is just outside of Florence, in fact.
LOADER". Yes, this is the villa in which...
MICHELL: Boccaccio allegedly...
LOADER". Right, The Decameron, one of many villas he stayed in.
It's quite a long poem, after all.
And Rainaldi makes his appearance.
MICHELL: Pierfrancesco Favino, wonderful Italian actor.
We were very keen to cast an Italian.
We obviously considered casting non-Italians,
who could do the accent, so to speak,
but there's always something great about casting...
the real thing, and Pierfrancesco is really consummate.
LOADER: Big star in Italy as well.
I mean, of stage as well as screen.
MICHELL: A big star.
LOADER". And absolutely right for this part,
I mean, the right age, the right heft,
the right mix of ambiguity and...
MICHELL: The right complexity as to, yeah, exactly.
It's the truth!
And of course, Sam,
who did such a wonderful job with this role.
Sam, who I think I really saw properly for the first time
in the film of The Riot Club,
that's a film of a play called Posh,
which was done first at the Royal Court.
I watched The Riot Club 'cause it had a whole raft
of promising young British film actors in it,
and I thought Sam absolutely stood out
as a marvelous talent,
then watched him in The Hunger Games.
And then, last year, he had a huge success
in a film called Me Before You.
But even before that film had come out,
in this location, for example,
in the middle of the countryside, 20 miles from Arezzo,
by the lunchtime of shooting here,
there was a little gaggle of Sam Claflin fans
who'd gathered at the bottom of the drive.
Somehow, the bush telegraph had announced,
or social media had announced that Claflin
was in the environs.
And these people had driven hundreds of miles
to catch a glimpse of him.
As always, he was inordinately gracious
and generous with his time.
LOADER". I remember they followed us around
at dinner that evening in Arezzo, didn't they, after...
we'd done our reception with the mayor and local dignitaries?
MICHELL: Oh, that was absolutely wonderful, wasn't it?
Yes, we were very privileged by that piece of, uh...
Here we are.
Here's the shot of the film that actually does take part in Arezzo.
Uh, we flew in the morning, and we...
shot that in the afternoon.
LOADER". This is Florence, of course.
MICHELL: Uh, exactly a year ago, on my birthday,
or the day after my birthday.
It's my birthday today, by the way,
which is why I'm so much enjoying coming in
and doing this commentary.
LOADER: Should only ever be done on your birthday.
MICHELL: Yeah, from now on,
that's all I'm going to do on my birthday, is commentaries.
This was in the palazzo...
Oh, which palazzo is it, Kev?
LOADER: It's not Gandia, it's the other one.
MICHELL: No, it's not Gandia, in Florence itself.
I spent quite a lot of time, in my youth, living in Florence
and never got into buildings like this,
which are still privately owned.
LOADER". I think they were the most expensive locations of the shoot.
MICHELL: Well, they were worth every penny, look at them.
But the decor in this room
full of sculpture wasn't there.
That's the work of the art department,
and more particularly, the brilliant Alice Normington,
who art directed and production designed this film.
So, here's the thing.
I wanted this field to be waist-high in corn,
ripening wheat.
But of course, the seasons don't allow you
to get the crop that you want when you're filming,
and I was faced with two alternatives.
One was to encourage the farmer,
um, he was called Wilf, to leave that little patch of land
without touching it for as long as possible,
and the other would be to introduce, sort of,
the combination of prop wheat and CGI wheat.
The latter prospect filled me with such horror
that I think we kind of got away with...
LOADER". I think the vista behind the...
- MICHELL: Yeah, exactly, you getaway... - The scything takes away...
MICHELL: The scything is...
LOADER". Scything is secondary to the view, really.
It's a homecoming for that character, isn't it?
MICHELL: It's almost plausible that those men would be scything that field.
This is another location altogether near Oxford,
in another house chosen for its beautiful,
um, sort of enlightenment symmetry.
I wanted the idea that this house felt modern
and full of illumination, both rational and otherwise,
compared to Philip's
muddy, dusty, dog shit-strewn,
more Medieval interior.
And here's the marvelous lain Glen.
LOADER: Game of Thrones lain Glen.
MICHELL: Game of Thrones lain Glen, who's made such a great job
of bringing this character to life,
and giving the character real humanity and interest,
and sympathy.
He was like a father.
And here's yet another location, this one...
LOADER". Stocker's.
MICHELL: Yeah, which is near...
LOADER". Near... Not far from Amersham.
- MICHELL: It's near Rickmansworth... - Rickmansworth, that's right.
- Which is in... - Northwest London.
MICHELL: The home county's about half an hour out of London.
So, we assembled this film,
as is now becoming clear,
from a, sort of, mosaic of many, many different locations.
This, for example, is in South Devon,
as it borders Cornwall.
I made a choice not to try and either shoot this film...
in Cornwall, or even actually to set the film in Cornwall,
not because I have any objection to Cornwall,
but I didn't want it to cross over into
a kind of Poldark world.
We've recently, in the UK, had a very successful
TV show set in Cornwall called Poldark.
I thought that would maybe be confusing or unhelpful.
So, this is set in a, sort of, vague West Country,
Dorset-y, Wessex-y, sort of, um,
Hardy-esque world, I guess.
LOADER". And this house, in fact,
which is a very ancient house, but was actually
in the Surrey Hills, wasn't it,
and had recently been inherited by
a historian and former television personality in the UK,
Bamber Gascoigne,
who inherited it from his 99-year-old great aunt,
and then realized that although it's of considerable architectural interest,
it is as dilapidated as this scene gives the impression.
And he had the choice of
try to work out how to rescue the house by spending
several millions of pounds on it
to restore it to its former glory,
and in fact, has set it up as a charity now,
and they've built an opera house in the back garden,
the Opera in the Woods,
which opens, I think, this week.
Part of the challenge of making a film like this
is this, sort of, series of makeovers
that the house goes through.
It's a challenge, really, for scheduling,
but it's a challenge also for production design.
I wanted, oddly, the house
to go from darkness into light
as the story went in the other direction,
and I think that what Alice and her team did was remarkable.
LOADER". We also were very lucky with this house
because, traditionally, when you get these historical properties in England,
they're rather curated and you're surrounded by people
in brown coats and white gloves
whenever you want to move a piece of furniture.
And here, we were very lucky that we were allowed
to paint walls and change things quite a lot,
but, you know, provided that the historical authorities
approved our choice of plasterwork and paint,
materials, et cetera.
So, Alice and the art department really did have
the chance to not only have the genuine
dilapidation at the beginning of the story,
but to show the makeover that Roger's just spoken about
as it went on.
MICHELL: It was pretty remarkable to find this place.
It's about 20 minutes by train from Waterloo Station.
And, Kev, I think you found it very early on on a website,
or you read an article about it, perhaps.
LOADER: I read an article in the Daily Telegraph about it,
and you were rehearsing a play, so you couldn't come down.
And I remember speaking to you on the phone and saying,
"I'll eat my hat if we don't shoot quite a lot of this film here."
MICHELL: And needless to say, we spent months
seeing every other house in England
before circling back and finally
settling on what had seemed
almost inevitable from the very beginning of the process.
LOADER". But I mean, you know, it had this library.
I mean, it's extraordinary,
and all we had to do was, really, rearrange some books...
in here, and a bit of shutter work.
MICHELL: Yeah, I think, maybe, Alice would probably...
- LOADER: She'll probably disagree. - Have a few words to say about that.
But wasn't there something interesting about after we'd finished filming,
these books were all sent to New College, Oxford, or somewhere...
LOADER: Trinity, I believe.
Yes, a lot of them have been given to one of the Oxford College libraries.
MICHELL: And then, in lots of the books were found
sort of strange notes from Lord Byron,
or marginalia from Shelley,
all kinds of priceless literary relics.
LOADER". It was an extraordinary collection.
In fact, when Bamber Gascoigne inherited the house,
one of his first fundraising activities
was to have an auction of the contents of his great aunt's estate,
and that raised several million pounds at Christie's, I believe.
(clock chimes)
What was she like, for God's sake?
MICHELL: So, this is the, sort of, magnificent
rusting silver service
that Seecombe has evidently dug out of the cellars
to impress the mistress of the house who's just arrived.
She, however, has decided to
have a cheese sandwich up the stairs in her bedroom.
LOADER: It's marvelous, the way that
Tim and Bobby, the actor playing John,
the other servant there, just get this whole notion
of starting to act up a bit now there's a woman in the house
in a way that they wouldn't have dreamt of prior.
MICHELL: You feel they've already been nob/ed, haven't they?
They've been seduced by her, they're on her side,
like the dogs have roughed upstairs
to see this new captivating presence.
First time a woman has been in this house
since Great Aunt Phoebe, I assume.
And all the bluster has now left Philip,
and he's frightened.
LOADER". He's nervous.
MICHELL: He's nervous. He's...
unsure of...
LOADER". He's going to have to creep up those steps
any minute, and knock on the door.
Yeah, have a slug of wine.
MICHELL: And here's this great roaring chandelier,
which the sound team have...
picked up and run with in a wonderful way.
And we're now going into scene 67, I think it was.
LOADER: ll' Was.
MICHELL: Uh, which was something we shot pretty early on,
the long, difficult, complicated,
but rather wonderful scene,
where he meets her for the first time.
I mean, the only thing that is tricky is that
when you read the book,
you really don't know what she's going to be like.
When you read the book, he has little fantasies about her
being very fat, being very ugly,
being kind of very legalistic,
being unable to speak English, being very Italian,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,
whereas we all know that he's going to open that door and...
BOTH: Rachel Weisz...
MICHELL: ls going to be in there.
So, we lost a trick in that respect,
but we were so lucky
to cast Rachel that, you know...
LOADER". We always wanted Rachel to play the part.
And as she has said, it's very easy for her.
She doesn't have to remember her character's name on set.
I'm surprised you knew how to do this.
This was one of the scenes that we used, actually,
when we were meeting actors, wasn't it?
MICHELL: We did, we got Sam to do this scene as a screen test, didn't we?
LOADER: Yeah.
MICHELL: Which he did with huge aplomb,
and charm, and skill.
It's obviously shot during the day, this scene,
shot over three days.
The nightmare of dogs, absolute nightmare
of having dogs, so-called trained dogs,
wandering around, shitting all over the place,
barking, whining, demanding meal breaks,
demanding fag breaks.
My God, those dogs were a test of anybody's patience.
But you can imagine that in quite a lot of this coverage,
there were no dogs in the room,
just the sound of dogs, the sensation of dogs.
LOADER". Panting of dogs.
And then she fell in love again at first sight
with another curate.
MICHELL: She makes this rather delightful joke here,
which feels almost shockingly inappropriate.
Supposedly, a penis joke in the middle of a film set in 1830,
and that's kind of one of the appeals to me of this book,
is that she feels like almost an anachronism.
She feels like a character from another age,
a character of modern sensibility,
who's been sort of parachuted into the world of Jane Austen.
She's a character who isn't afraid of talking about sex,
and isn't afraid of expressing herself sexually,
and isn't ashamed of being interested in sex.
She's a character who...
urn, will not be owned
in a world dominated by men and ownership.
And it's hard to get rid of the idea
that in an age, i.e. 1950, when the book was being written,
in an age before, I imagine, the word feminism,
or feminist, was current, let alone,
perhaps, had never even been coined,
that Daphne du Maurier, for reasons of her own,
for reasons that are complex, was very interested in,
beguiled by this very strong independent woman,
who knew her way around the world and was fearless.
I think that's one of the, kind of, structures of the book
and of the film, which make it more than, simply,
a kind of did she do it or didn't she do it.
Here, you get this wonderful sense of...
everybody being fascinated by this woman.
For the first time,
in the history of this estate,
there's this gorgeous-looking woman on a gorgeous big horse.
Kevin, this is one of your shots, isn't it?
LOADER". This is one of my drone shots, yes.
I spent a very happy four or five days with a very accomplished drone unit
when we were on the Flete Estate in South Devon.
So, Roger would be off doing proper work with the actors,
and I would be mucking about with drones and cameras,
and doubles, occasionally,
doing riding shots and cliff shots, and...
MICHELL: You got some really beautiful material,
quite a lot of which has ended up in the film.
So, we've used little judicious bits of CGI, haven't we,
like those ships were put in later.
LOADER: And we did view replacements, obviously,
from the main house,
for Penhale because, as Roger said, it's only 20 minutes from London, really.
So, you will see out of the window that, on occasion,
there's a bit of CGI view replacement.
But this is real, there's nothing, uh...
MICHELL: Everything's real about it except those aren't the actual actors.
LOADER: Yeah, but, uh, there's no CG! in there.
MICHELL: Now, here's another location, which is, again,
hundreds of miles away near Lewes in Sussex.
We found it very difficult to find a church
which filled all the requirements.
I wanted a church which was clearly pre-Victorian,
which meant, for the most part,
a church without stained glass windows.
And this church has real charm and real presence.
LOADER". It also has no electricity.
MICHELL: And has no electricity.
LOADER: I know, it really is in the middle of nowhere.
It's at the end of a country lane
that really ends at the farm just beyond this church.
Wonderful place.
MICHELL: Here, we start to meet some of the supporting cast
who are so important to the film.
Andrew Havill, who plays the Reverend Pascoe.
LOADER". Who we've worked with before in Hyde Park on Hudson.
MICHELL: Vicki Pepperdine, who's playing his wife.
LOADER". Playing Mrs. Pascoe.
MICHELL: And the musical Schubert girls.
LOADER: Yes, Polly and Katherine.
MICHELL: Polly and Katherine singing this really quite
beautiful little piece of German doggerel.
LOADER". Which they reproduced very charmingly
at the cast and crew screening a month or two ago.
(singing in German)
MICHELL: There was, of course, more of these people,
there was more material with these people, um...
in the script and we shot.
But it just was too baggy.
And they are so vivid and so wonderful, in fact,
a little goes a long way.
They look so similar as well, don't they?
Those wonderful, wonderful corkscrew wigs, and those...
Not wigs at all, corkscrew hairdos.
And those brilliant costumes by Dinah.
Dinah really enjoyed herself with all the costumes,
but I think particularly with the Pascoe girls.
LOADER". It's giving them a sort of rather fusty provincialism.
MICHELL: And a costume from an earlier period.
- LOADER: Yeah. - The 1810s.
So, this was the first proper scene that we did with Rachel
on the second day of our shoot,
and I was talking to her about it yesterday.
We were talking about how the complexity of...
lighting these...
candles, in what is quite a long and difficult dialogue scene,
in fact, is kind of liberating.
It kind of makes the acting easier.
It takes some weight off the dialogue, I guess.
And I find it terribly satisfying,
the way she plays the scene with all this action,
and appears to...
thereby throw away the dialogue.
By throw away, I mean she's so natural
in the way that she talks to him and he talks to her.
And of course, that's an important element in the scene.
Not only is she literally lighting up the room,
but we see them, for the first time,
talking to each other as friends and as intimates,
casually,
simply, until it all goes wrong.
It goes wrong in a second.
LOADER". It was incredible that they could do that
on day two of the shoot.
MICHELL: ll' Was, yes.
LOADER". That lift your feet moment,
it felt like they'd known each other for years.
Well, widows remarry as fast as they can,
and if they can't do that, they just...
LOADER: Then the little turn in the scene now,
which Rachel plays so beautifully.
Well,
I think I would prefer to give Italian lessons.
And the first of Rachel's hasty exits,
or shooing him out the room.
And there's often, in the end of a scene,
where poor old Philip is just left wondering
what happened there.
MICHELL: But she plays these moments with such conviction
that you can't, for a moment,
count on the possibility that she's anything
but totally innocent, and that's such a great trick
for the story.
Double it.
If we're going to do this, we have to do it properly,
how Ambrose would have done it.
As you wish.
Write the letter.
Now?
Ah, were we expecting...
LOADER: Again, these scenes with...
MICHELL: Holliday.
LOADER". Holliday, and with lain as well,
you know, you do feel that they've known Philip their whole lives, these two.
PHILIP: Yesterday,
you seemed all down in the dumps.
RACHEL: I'm amazed you noticed.
We all did.
MICHELL: Horses, I never worked quite so exhaustively
with horses as I had on this film.
We had a very, very obliging horse wrangler, didn't we?
We had a number of very good horsemen
and horsewomen who...
never said, "Oh, no, we can't do that, mate."
Or, you know, "Oh, couldn't possibly do that."
Everything, they would endeavor to have a go at,
and that was a huge support
'cause horses ain't easy.
LOADER". Now, Rachel, of course, had to learn to ride sidesaddle,
which is not really a modern skill.
And even in the world of dressage,
I'm not sure the sidesaddle has survived, has it?
Tisane. It's Italian.
Tea infusions made from these herbs here.
MICHELL: So, this is where the whole tisane plot kicks off,
or is introduced, this possibility...
that he's slowly being poisoned
by this charming...
herbalist.
LOADER". She drinks as well, of course, at this point, at least.
Out and about.
You made him write this!
What?
What do you...
I did nothing of the sort.
If you had set out to humiliate me, Philip, you really couldn't...
MICHELL: I took the view with Rachel, in her performance,
that we should believe every moment of it,
as though it was completely convincing,
that we should never, for a second,
suspect that her tears or her anger,
or her...
Don't you understand? It was just...
...expressions of sadness,
or that any of them were calculated or designed to...
manipulate this
rather gauche and naive young man,
although they clearly do have enormous effect on him.
I think if you watch and then re-watch the film,
there won't be a moment where you think
she's just doing that to wind him up,
or she's just doing that 'cause she wants his money,
or she's just doing that to get his sympathy.
I think it's really, really well performed.
So, that little dew drop,
which I wrote into the script,
is just a little bead of Vaseline,
but it's enormously effective, isn't it?
LOADER: It's Wonderful.
Tim was wonderful in this.
He's profoundly deaf.
He's been very deaf since he was in the army, in the '50s,
and you'd never really know.
He's an amazing actor, still does one-man performances,
and leads a very full working life.
But he brought a wonderful, wonderful flavor to this film.
MICHELL: This, again, was quite an early scene,
and I remember, Kev, perhaps you remember too
that there was some disquiet when...
the studio saw these dailies, that it was so dark.
I think, maybe, that was partly a technical issue.
But it's also a slightly high-risk endeavor
to shoot this scene,
almost entirely lighting it with one practical candle.
I mean, there is a little bit of extra fill,
which is coming from above, where Rachel is in bed,
but generally speaking,
it's a one-candlelight scene.
And I think Mike Eley, who, throughout the film,
was utterly inspired and...
uh, full of risk has done such a good job
in pushing this idea and taking it to its nth degree.
I mean, 20 years ago, you would have had to support
a scene like this with loads of ambient light,
but with modern digital IRE cameras,
you really can achieve the most beautiful effects.
LOADER". Mike did a lot of tests, didn't he,
of different versions of the IRE digital camera, and candlelight.
MICHELL: We were going to use the 65-mil,
until we realized that the post requirements
were in excess of our...
LOADER: Data storage.
MICHELL: Budget, really.
LOADER". Yeah, it's just so wonderful here.
(whispering) I don't know anything about you.
All I know is that I like it now you're here.
And I don't want you to go.
Is that complicated?
Var)'-
If you want to go, then go.
It'll cause a little talk, but...
No, but it would cause a lot more talk if I stay.
MICHELL: 'Course, focus pulling in this kind of light is really hard.
LOADER". I think it was a huge challenge, wasn't it, for them?
MICHELL: Yeah.
- LOADER: And the first assistant camera. - Very, very difficult thing to do.
I don't know, of course.
LOADER". Yeah, and very hard for your eye not to be drawn to the candle
and not the actor beyond sometimes.
PHILIP: Please, for a little while.
I'll stay.
LOADER". And Dinah's costumes always had these
rather wonderful focus points that weren't quite...
where you wanted the focus to be.
I think Mike and his team,
the cinematography in this film is just exquisite.
I think it's one of the real, certainly,
the real highlights of the films I've seen in the past few months.
RACHEL: Bend down.
MICHELL: So, here comes the first kiss for the poor little sap.
Now, he goes off thinking, "My God!"
And look at that, that's the one little glimpse
we get of Rachel on her own in this film.
It's the one little moment where we share...
a space with Rachel not being witnessed by Philip.
It's still not clear what she's thinking, but it sure is interesting.
- She's ready. - Yes, I can see.
Anything more for the mail?
Yes.
MICHELL: Now, look, here's an odd mistake,
for those of you who are interested in mistakes.
This letter, which he's about to, rather guiltily, peruse
is addressed to someone who lives in Italy,
whereas, of course, any fool knows that Italy didn't exist
until quite late in the 19th century.
Um, but we thought, do you know what?
Not many people know that.
LOADER". Not many people do know that.
MICHELL: And it's important that the audience know
that Rainaldi is Rainaldi.
RACHEL: This is a tisane made with fennel and rose hips.
LOADER". And I suppose it would have just been Toscana, would it?
MICHELL: It would have been Toscana, I guess so, that province of Tuscany.
Yes, I guess that's right.
PHILIP: They'll call for you in the middle of the night.
LOADER: Back at the Flete Estate.
- RACHEL: There's a tisane for that too. - See?
LOADER". This is a rather wonderful, um,
collection of inlets and coves in South Devon,
as Roger said, which is privately-owned,
although the Southwest coastal path
that goes around a lot of the English coastline,
and goes along the edge of it.
But it's a very, very quick-flooding estuary,
as you can see here.
And so, at high tide, where they're having their picnic,
would be underwater.
MICHELL: You can probably tell that the tide
was not on our side as we shot this scene.
The tide came racing up,
and by the time we came round onto Sam's closeup,
the tide was... the waters were Canute-like,
lapping at the ankles of the Sparks holding lamps,
which we suddenly had to deploy 'cause the light also disappeared.
This scene, in the book, is set in the household,
'cause as you can see, at the end of this scene,
it ends up with the letter being burnt.
And I thought we gotta get out of the house,
but how do I engineer this letter...
being thrown upon a fire at the end of the scene,
so contrived for this, sort of, impromptu...
picnic on an autumn's day.
LOADER: That's the other thing about filmmaking, isn't it,
is trying to go through the seasons
when you're generally shooting in that, sort of,
10-week consecutive period.
And we tried to do that here by starting very late in March
and getting a bit of winter before we went into the spring,
and then, into fuller spring, which, obviously,
was very close to summer.
And then, summer can be made to be autumn by coloring leaves in CGI,
but it's very hard to...
get bare trees if you haven't shot them in camera.
You're not the woman I hated.
If you don't want them, Philip,
do you think we might let the people who live on the estate...
MICHELL: And here's autumn rain,
partly for the mood of the scene,
which, obviously, is something we introduced...
later in the process.
This reminds me of a scene in The Mother, another film that we made, Kev,
where she opens,
and reopens the suitcase of her...
dead husband to find...
a pair of shoes,
on top of a pile of his clothes,
which I found very affecting in that film and then
thought I'd repeat in this film.
LOADER". Well, as she says in the scene, it's like opening his coffin.
MICHELL: These birds were contentious.
I think there was a concern that it would be
seen as a kind of vain homage to Hitchcock's film,
The Ends, based upon another Daphne du Maurier story,
but it's not that at all.
It's really to dramatize what's happening in the foreground.
I think it works very well.
It's all right. Don't cry.
Don't cry. It's all right.
LOADER: And I think there are more crows than seagulls.
MICHELL: So, this was a pre-shoot day.
This was a kind of stolen day on the Friday
before we started shooting on the Monday,
and this is the very first sequence that we shot
of the entire film.
And you can see, it is as Kev says,
it's just the end of winter,
and we just got away with the trees before they burst into leaf.
So, I think there's been some success
in our strategy to...
try and tell the story over a, kind of, calendar year.
There was more swearing in the script than remains in the film,
but we were commanded by our betters
to reduce the swearing to a single expletive.
LOADER". To maximize our audience, obviously.
MICHELL: And I put quite a lot of swearing into the script
because, of course, people did swear in those days.
People swore in the days of Jane Austen,
but it's just that because Jane Austen didn't write
lots of swearing into her novels,
people seem to think that
not only did people not have sex in the 1820s,
they didn't swear either.
25 years.
MICHELL: This is Simon Russell Beale,
one of the most celebrated of British theater actors.
The godparent to my eldest child,
and a remarkable presence in this film.
He only did a day,
but it's amazing what a difference a day can make
with an actor of his stature and caliber.
And this was, where was this, Kev?
This location was somewhere else, again, wasn't it?
LOADER". This was out in the Chiltons somewhere, wasn't it?
MICHELL: Somewhere between Oxford and London.
LOADER: That beautiful necklace
that Dinah had specially commissioned for the film.
Very good, sir.
MICHELL: And this is where it all starts to kick off.
Actually, this was a particularly different, difficult...
focal challenge, wasn't it?
LOADER: Yeah.
MICHELL: We had to go back and shoot this three times,
this shot, it was so important to the film to get this absolutely...
LOADER". Just as he gets up, the focus shifts.
MICHELL: She looks absolutely stunning.
LOADER". And the hand to the throat thing,
that came up on one of the re-takes, didn't it?
MICHELL: Yeah, it came up 'cause I drove home
after shooting this scene the first time,
and I got home and kicked myself 'cause I...
thought that was terribly important that she should...
-indicate this amazing... - Touch the necklace.
MICHELL: Glistening glorious pearls.
We had a device whereby we could raise or lower
the candelabra in the background...
to our advantage.
It's corny, this shot, but my God, it really works.
It has such emotional weight by now.
You're kind of longing for them to kiss,
even though you know it's such a wrong thing to do.
And I think the score here is particularly wonderful
in expressing the wrongness of the act,
as well as its glory and its excitement,
and its passion.
LOADER". There's our Christmas tree.
It's so beautiful.
MICHELL: So, there's another tree,
and we're back in Rickmansworth.
And I really wanted them to eat
and rip meat off bones.
So often, in films, you see people kind of demurely,
sort of, snacking on a carrot in these situations,
and it felt to me like it really should feel like...
the best night of these people's lives,
if you work on these difficult estates,
leading difficult impoverished lives.
On this night, you can drink and eat your fill.
And I think I wrote in the script something about it being,
this part of the scene being, sort of,
Earth feet, loam feet, which is a sort of,
I think a quotation from T.S. Eliot.
And the song that we commissioned,
I wanted to be dark and not playful.
And our musical director,
who's actually the son, I think, of...
- LOADER: Son of Ewan MacColl. -...Ewan MacColl.
LOADER: Neill MacColl.
MICHELL: Neill MacColl did a marvelous job,
not only in helping select that old English folk tune,
but in singing it.
LOADER". And in tutoring these fiddlers as well.
MICHELL: And in tutoring these fiddlers in another great English tune.
(indistinct chattering)
Bye, Belinda and Mary, bye!
Good luck tomorrow, thank you.
LOADER". You can see the house has had a bit of a Rachel makeover now.
It's starting to change.
MICHELL: It's lighter, it's much sparer,
it's less cluttered.
This is another scene I wanted to try and hold...
in one shot for as long as possible,
just to maintain the sense of its flow
and to make the acting free and natural,
to see this poor boy desperately trying to...
avoid the knowledge...
that his...
The object of his...
love and affection and obsession is compromised.
...won't account for an overdraft of this magnitude.
There's all this. The fabrics...
LOADER". He also knows he's been winging it with this necklace,
he's going to get called on that any minute, I'm sure.
MICHELL: Yeah, the necklace issue is just around the corner.
- PHILIP: Increase? - Yes.
Cover the overdraft.
LOADER". The otherness of what goes on abroad,
you know, Italy and the whiff of scandal,
and the sending money out of the country,
and these rumors of what her previous life was.
MICHELL: Yeah, the reek of sex, basically,
and her appetite, as he is about to discuss.
Appetite, in his mouth, becomes an obscenity.
Do you understand?
MICHELL: And at that point, the dancers applaud...
as the dance ends.
And it's a wonderful counterpoint
to this flash of understanding from Philip,
which is then pushed away, repelled.
You had no right to take that necklace.
It's mine, it's from the estate.
The estate is not yet yours, as you well know.
MICHELL: And these two men who've been friends for so long,
all of Philip's life, are now...
almost about to come to blows.
LOADER". It's a terrible moment, isn't it?
And it starts the chain of events in their relationship
that leads to the will that Philip then enforces
his guardian to enact just before his birthday,
witness just before his birthday.
It was quite right that you ask for their return.
- No. - Please.
MICHELL: Holliday's marvelous in this scene.
It was a great honor to wear them on such a special evening, thank you.
I want you to wear them every night.
Do you need wrapping for them?
MICHELL: She says nothing, but she's absolutely marvelous.
- You'll regret this. - Be quiet.
You're a fool.
Thank you for a delightful and successful evening, Philip.
MICHELL: And Rachel too,
trying to normalize, trying to make friends with everyone,
trying to calm everybody down.
And you too, merry, merry Christmas.
- Happy Christmas. - Happy Christmas, Louise.
MICHELL: Holliday just says, "Goodnight, Philip. "
- Happy Christmas, Philip. - Good night.
MICHELL: "Happy Christmas."
Thank you again.
MICHELL: It's terribly touching.
You see all her longing for him.
LOADER". He's unreachable now.
MICHELL: In all of his stubborn unreachableness.
LOADER". And petulant as well.
I think there was a line, once, wasn't it,
where she said to him, "Don't be such a child,"
or something, at this point.
And he said, "Everything's spoiled now," or something.
Everything's ruined. My mother wore those pearls...
MICHELL: I love the way her earrings
capture the light as she leans in that doorway.
And her mother before her.
That's why I was so proud and happy to wear them.
Had I been married here and not in Italy,
I should have worn them, too.
MICHELL: But he realizes what a terrible, terrible
self-deluding error he's made
in thinking that she might ever, ever...
take him as a replacement for Ambrose.
I mean, that whole film is predicated on something
pretty wrong, isn't it?
The idea that he's going to...
marry and have sex with his mother-in-law, basically,
-or his stepmother. - LOADER: Yeah.
MICHELL: I mean, it touches on all those wonderful taboos,
all those kind of toxic wrongs
that make things so interesting in this kind of story.
I lost a child.
LOADER". Well, and her attraction to him is based on his physical resemblance
-to her dead husband as well. - MICHELL: That's right,
and there's something in the wrongness of this situation
that the both of them gives it an extra, sort of, erotic charge.
It's truly transgressive.
Again, this was the pre-shoot day.
LOADER". This was the first scene they shot together.
MICHELL: The very first scene that they shot together.
One day, I woke up and I found myself...
This scene was in a completely different place
in an early cut, and in the script.
And wanted to hurt me.
It just goes to show you think you've written the script,
which is inevitable and linear,
and cannot possibly brook any shuffling,
and you're always proved wrong, aren't you, Kev?
There's always a way of re-engineering
the order of things
to the betterment of story and emotion.
LOADER". There's always a scene that you fight and fight
to keep during the difficulties of the production process,
and then cut on the second week of the edit,
when you realize it's completely unnecessary.
MICHELL: That's always a terrible demeaning shock,
when you see that all that work was pointless,
and that why on Earth didn't you see that before?
But it's something you can never prepare for
because the scenes that people are persuading you to cut
are nearly always the ones that stay in the film,
and the scenes that no one would ever think of cutting
are the ones that, the minute you see a rough assembly,
are the first ones to go.
But I like things being short as well, as you know.
I like to pull stuff out and throw it away.
I find it a huge relief.
I have no sentimental attachments
to the hardships of how we shot the scene.
And indeed, there's a scene early on in the film
in which my four-year-old daughter appeared,
and that was one of the first to go, so,
savage, brutal, slash and burn.
LOADER". And that's just your parenting skills.
MICHELL: That's true. (chuckles)
I remember cutting Rosie out of Notting Hill on the same basis.
She's never forgiven me.
She's grown up to be deeply bitter and twisted about it.
LOADER". Ah, a foreign car has arrived.
MICHELL: It's a Ferrari!
on, Philip.
So, you probably haven't noticed, viewer,
but over the last four or five scenes, we've had to move,
for various plot reasons,
we've had to move from Christmas to spring
without a lot of, you know, narrative, hoo-ha about it.
And I must say I think it's quite effective.
In this scene, she's taken over the kitchen.
In this scene, they're not eating
vast slabs of undercooked beef.
They're eating flowers, they're eating Italian pasta,
they're eating delicate, lovely things off white china bowls.
None of the food in this film is at all accurate
to the period in which it's set.
It's a different story, but it's an important story of its own.
RACHEL: I came to wish you goodnight.
I wish you the same.
LOADER: Rachel did very well with her Italian as well.
He's a very old friend.
MICHELL: Very Well.
Of course.
Well?
Who exactly is Benito Castelluccio,
and why did he bring you flowers?
LOADER: The notion that her life in Italy
was just this round of decadent parties and balls and...
MICHELL: Suspicious liaisons with strange men.
LOADER". Suspicious liaisons with cigar-smoking fatsos.
MICHELL: Yeah, I'm sure she had a marvelous time.
(door closes and locks)
MICHELL: And from what I remember in the book,
her mother is a total slapper,
but I didn't have room for that in the film.
So, where was this?
This was?
- LOADER: This is a manor house, isn't it? - A manor house, yes.
LOADER: Somewhere in the foothills of the Chiltons.
Quite determined?
There is another thing, Mr. Couch, if you don't mind.
And Simon doing his best legalistic acting
in the strong room, where all the necklaces and jewels
of the Ashley collection are kept.
All of them, Master Ashley?
All of them, Mr. Couch.
MICHELL: In the book, I think this is divided
between two different lawyers, which I conflated into one.
(piano playing)
(horse neighing)
(horse hoofs halting to a stop)
LOADER". I think lain is really marvelous in this scene,
you know, when he gets to the end and has to...
actually endorse and witness what Philip's proposing,
with such a heavy heart,
and you really sense the regret.
MICHELL: But with such forbearance and generosity of spirit.
LOADER: Yeah.
MICHELL: It's a wonderful performance.
LOADER". It's proper nobility.
MICHELL: I love the way the light dies in this shot.
I'm willing to take that risk.
And if she marries for a third time?
That's unlikely.
I don't suppose you've thought of asking her yourself?
Why, have you?
MICHELL: I'm sure he has considered marrying her himself.
I'm sure he's considered it quite often,
which is why that rebuke stings so much.
LOADER: Well, and we had more of those lunch scenes
where he and she were,
you know, being very interested in one another.
Well, he was certainly paying her quite a lot of attention.
- Just here. - Mm-hmm.
MICHELL: This was the last copy of the...
document that we had.
Luckily, Sam nailed his signing on the first take.
LOADER". I also seem to remember I had to come up
with some ridiculously appropriate
legalistic authentic text to give the art department
to transcribe, and of course, you can't read it at all.
MICHELL: I can read it.
LOADER: Another wasted three hours, Roger.
MICHELL: It's an outstanding piece of work.
You'll freeze frame the DVD and have another good read one day.
Here's the sadness between them, isn't it?
They both feel a terrible sense of rupture.
Guardianship which ends tomorrow.
Tonight, in fact,
at midnight.
Then Happy Birthday, Philip.
LOADER: Well, the great thing about Dinah's costumes,
which I'm reminded of, looking at Sam here,
is that they really are clothes, aren't they?
They're clothes they wear. They're not...
MICHELL: Yeah, that's always...
LOADER". Properly broken down and...
MICHELL: The rule of thumb is could it be clothes, not costumes?
That's totally her approach.
It should be approached in the way you might approach a modern film.
LOADER". But often, in modern films,
people seem to have just bought their clothes
from the shop that day.
MICHELL: That's absolutely true.
So, here's a difficult little scene,
which, um, took a lot of brain power,
effort, time,
especially money,
and works really well,
but a huge amount of effort went into...
Perhaps you want to talk a bit about that, Kev.
LOADER: Yes, I mean, well, what you wrote, Roger,
was that the horse's back legs start, you know, the cliff starts to crumble
and the horse stumbles, which, of course, horses are pretty good at not stumbling.
So, to get the right movement of the horse's legs,
we had to find a way of shooting a horse and a rider coming off a horse,
where the back legs stumble.
And the way we came to do that was to build a pit
with a kind of trap door that could be triggered to fall in
as the horse came over it.
So, that was shot on top of a hill near Dorking.
MICHELL: Almost a series of trap doors, like a piano keyboard, wasn't it?
LOADER". It was, yeah,
so that the horse went down into a little 18-inch dip.
And then that image, with the drone shot of the horse,
coming over the horse, was put onto...
the cliff, and the sheep were then CGI'd on as well.
We had Andy Knott, who's the shepherd, running across the hill in Dorking,
but the sheep weren't there with us at that point.
(bell chimes)
MICHELL: So, here's that bell again,
the bell that she, that Rachel commented on
in the initial scene
where they met in her boudoir.
And this next little shot is another trick, if you like,
'cause there wasn't actually a bell in this house,
or near this house.
But I wanted a shot to, um...
There, of the bell ringing,
which, again, is a composite.
That's a model bell, a little bell,
probably, sort of, six inches high,
shot on a, kind of, little model stage
on the side of the set one day,
and then comped into a wide shot of the house.
(whispering) I'm a little old for Juliet, don't you think?
This.
MICHELL: This is a scene that went through several iterations in the cut.
I'm still undecided about
whether we ended up with the right iteration,
but it's an iteration which functions.
Urn, I think the actors are both...
really marvelous in this scene.
LOADER: The Aladdin's cave of jewels.
MICHELL: Yeah, it is like Aladdin's cave, isn't it?
Wear this.
She clutches her nightgown to her throat, and then...
she puts this lovely string of pearls on her,
and stands there.
And of course, now, she doesn't clutch her nightgown to her throat.
What does that mean?
Who's seducing who?
Who knows what in this scene?
- Why not? - Because...
He's still like a schoolboy,
and she's like a cross between Mrs. Robinson,
and...
his godmother,
and the kind of...
eminently desirable siren.
Yes.
Are you sure?
I'm sure.
MICHELL: This, for me, was always the...
"Happy Birthday, Mr. President" moment.
LOADER: Yeah.
MICHELL: The ultimate birthday candle blowout...
before...
the great gift that she's about to bestow upon him,
this boy who's, I assume he's a virgin.
We think he's a virgin.
This feels a little coy, I know it's a bit coy,
this soft focus, sort of, they get into bed together.
I'm not sure what I feel about that,
but I didn't want to go into a full sex scene,
'cause I don't know what the story was, really.
I think the story of the next sex scene is clear and wonderful,
but the point of that scene is that they had sex,
and he wakes up,
and he's suddenly...
reborn, in a way.
LOADER". We had a version, didn't we, one iteration,
as you said, which focused on the jewels
while the act of consummation was underway.
MICHELL: Yes, which I liked.
LOADER". Because they'd thrown all the jewels
onto the floor in the longer version of the scene,
in this precious Aladdin cave, and was just in the way.
MICHELL: Yeah.
LOADER". There was something rather marvelous about that.
MICHELL: Yeah, I think I should have dug my heels in about that.
I think that was probably wrong to change that, never mind.
Here is, really, Adam, in the Garden of Eden.
He's just had the apple, and he's starving.
LOADER (laughs): Now he's having the lamb shoulder.
MICHELL: It was last night's dinner.
LOADER: He's also a bit knackered.
MICHELL: And he's utterly exhausted,
and he wakes up and he...
thinks he's missed her, he's late, oh, my God!
And then, no, he's not late.
And he's so happy to think
of the night that he's had.
LOADER". And the lunch he's going to have,
he thinks.
Wellington!
LOADER". Little does he know she's already gone.
What, sir?
The carriage?
Don't you know?
Mistress took it, sir.
Where'd they go?
No idea.
Town?
It's a lovely day for your birthday, Master Ashley.
LOADER". So, that wall in front of the house,
we should say, is something the art department built,
'cause although it's a very beautiful house,
it didn't quite have the feeling of a farmstead
in the way we wanted, and that gave the front of the house
-a bit of a yard. - MICHELL: And obviously, that little
bit of the house there is dropped in later.
So, this is shot some 30 miles away from the house.
I can't remember the name of the common, can you?
LOADER: It's Headley, I think.
MICHELL: Headley Heath.
This is the other moment where we see Rachel all on her own.
I thought it was important to have that little...
over-cranked piece of Rachel...
looking utterly impregnable and unreadable,
as she is here.
She's wearing a veil,
but oddly,
when she puts up her veil,
it becomes even harder to read her face,
which is a fine paradox.
Quite clear.
MICHELL: There was a lot of flack from the studio about that shot,
which I never could understand.
LOADER". I think they wanted the veil to be less veil, veily.
MICHELL: I think it was absolutely iconic.
LOADER Yeah, I know, well, it's become the poster in some places.
RACHEL: I know your godfather disapproves of me.
MICHELL: So, this was a wood just up the hill
from where my digs were when we were shooting down in Surrey,
and I kept walking up here at weekends and seeing this...
really enchanted secret place
off the beaten track, off the road, off the path,
with this strange coppicing effect of these young trees.
And although we'd earmarked another bluebell wood,
and we had teams of people bluebell watching,
so that we wouldn't miss the bluebell season,
I couldn't help but thinking we were missing a trick
by not shooting this scene here.
So, in the end, that's what we did.
It was a lucky and well-prepared,
and much struggled over coincidence
of fine weather and bluebells.
In fact, the bluebells were just on the turn,
but you can't see in the picture
that they're just about to go.
And this is a really important turning point in the story,
and a very important scene, which I don't think is in the...
book at all, this scene, is it?
LOADER". it's certainly not in the original movie either.
MICHELL: No. That's right.
This is a kind of key shot in the film.
What is she thinking?
Who's doing what to who?
Who got what out of that exchange of bodily fluids?
Poor boy.
Let me get up.
MICHELL: He has no idea what's coming down the pike.
LOADER: Then her wonderful, kind of, practical matter-of-factness now.
Here.
Thank you.
If I'd known I was coming into a fortune,
I would have given you a considerably larger pearl.
It's lovely, thank you.
LOADER: Yeah, there's not many people
wiping themselves down in Jane Austen, Roger.
MICHELL: I don't remember that bit of persuasion, I must say.
Shall we go?
LOADER: Shall We go?
He can barely walk.
MICHELL: I remember going up there the next day
with my elder daughter, Rosie,
and seeing the squashed areas where we'd put equipment
and the actors had lain,
and being quite affected by the oddness of it all.
So, here's tisane...
Birthday brew.
...which is now reeking of suspicion.
LOADER: Special brew.
MICHELL: Twig soup.
And then he proceeded to dance around the house,
up and down the stairs, up and down!
And then really...
MICHELL: So,
I wanted him to drink here.
That's my daughter, one of my daughters.
Because I wanted it to be unclear
as to whether he was...
freaking out because of...
fatigue and alcohol or...
because he'd been poisoned.
LOADER: Well, he has drunk a bottle of wine before lunch, after all.
MICHELL: He's drunk a whole bottle of champagne, hasn't he, before lunch?
Yeah.
Mind you, Kev, that wouldn't have any effect on you whatsoever.
LOADER: I do my best.
The happiest of men.
MICHELL: So, we used these tilt lenses here
just to make the focus even more tentative.
Drink to my happiness,
and the reason...
MICHELL: As the poor chap
digs himself further and further into ignominy.
...my wife?
I think Sam is really marvelous in this scene, I must say.
My darling.
Have you gone out of your mind?
Of course not.
Please.
I think the birthday excitement has gone to Philip's head.
We should retire to the next room.
LOADER: This is the second time she comes
back on him after one of these things, isn't it,
after the wash basin scene?
I have known shame in my life,
terrible shame,
but this is the worst.
LOADER". This staircase was an important part of our location search, wasn't it?
It was always going to be a key moment.
Why should I be ashamed of that?
You asked me, you asked me what it was that I...
MICHELL: So, today, on this shooting day,
we had this person that Dinah brought in,
who designed our pearls for us.
And she sat there all afternoon as we shot this scene,
restringing pearl necklaces.
I think we only had three to play with.
So every time we popped one,
she would sit there, nimbly, swiftly,
Preparing if,
a fresh one for the next take.
It was quite hard to make this work because...
I don't think he's trying to strangle her,
and yet, something in what he does
breaks these pearls, and something...
makes her, in a later scene, say,
"I can't go through it again. I can't go through it again,
the hands at my throat."
It's as though she's referencing Ambrose doing something similar...
to her in Italy.
(rain falling)
I've been worried about you for so long.
MICHELL: It's beautiful coming back to this church when it's empty,
and these two forlorn figures sitting so separate.
LOADER". Yeah, with the rain and the light and everything.
MICHELL: The rain on the windows.
And their separation is enhanced
by the appearance of this...
effigy, this tomb.
LOADER: It's like the Arundel Tomb.
MICHELL: Just sort of based on the Larkin Arundel Tomb.
So, I wanted this image of these two people
together forever in eternity,
and the art department knocked out that couple.
LOADER". I think Alice told me it was made by
one of her teachers at Wimbledon Art College.
MICHELL: I think it might even be of the Arundel Tomb,
or very closely modeled upon it.
I asked her to marry me.
MICHELL: Ironically, not far at all from where we shot this.
I shall continue to ask her.
When, exactly, did you ask her?
The moment I came of age.
MICHELL: And here is quite an important bit of plot coming up.
And it's a plot that kind of tie these away,
the rather arcane mechanism
whereby du Maurier explains
why Rachel shouldn't marry Philip.
It's quite complicated.
If you listen really closely, it makes sense,
but I think that most people watching the film
will kind of get the gist of it,
and just accept that it all...
ties up properly.
LOADER". I mean, the wife was basically property at that point.
MICHELL: Yeah.
LOADER". And she had no independence, really,
except in the most aristocratic of circles.
MICHELL: But I was aware, both as a writer and as a director,
that it's a slightly difficult passage in the film,
and leaned heavily on Rae! Jones' score here
to gravitas to what is...
Everything, the house, everything reverts to you.
Plot.
I'd share everything with her,
every penny, she knows that.
A wife can't send money out of the country.
MICHELL: Which is the last thing we did on the day in this church.
We crammed a lot into two days.
And in fact, the coach you can see in the background
is not her coach.
It's his coach.
To save money, we doubled up on coaches.
- Muggins! 'Muggins, Muggins!
Hello, Philip.
I invited Mary Pascoe to stay in the house with me
as my companion.
MICHELL: This vicar's daughter suddenly finds herself
elevated into the most glorious position...
as...
I can teach you if you like.
LOADER". Companion and chaperone.
MICHELL: A companion and chaperone to this
glamorous, well-traveled, sophisticated woman.
But as she leaves the room...
I don't want to be in the way.
...one gets a immediate sense of her servitude
and her humility.
And indeed, she only lasts a couple of days...
before she gets the chop, gets sent back to the Pascoes.
And he's faced with this terrible humiliation,
not being allowed to close a door in his own house...
because she's frightened that he might jump on her.
So, the water tastes funny?
That's interesting.
Why does that water taste funny?
Is there something in it?
Hard to tell.
He's certainly febrile.
LOADER". So, these nightmare images we shot throughout
the course of the shoot, didn't we?
MICHELL: We shot them on a film camera,
a film camera, 35-mil film camera,
which was hand cranked,
which gives it this special quality, and this...
odd sense of...
ends running out, being overexposed.
He wakes up from his fever, and how kind she is,
how devoted she is,
how long suffering she is.
How could we suspect that he's being...
poisoned by her?
LOADER". And you can see the view replacement outside the window there.
MICHELL: Yeah, as opposed to the A-28
covered in heavy goods vehicles,
that's rather a nice landscape.
And the Pascoe girl?
It's a classic case of a clean-shaven man being shaven again.
LOADER: Hence the good lather.
MICHELL: And the nice sound effects.
Glad to see Wellington's cutting back the laburnum.
LOADER: Ah, the laburnum.
If a horse gets a mouthful of that, it would kill them.
Oh, yes.
MICHELL: Again, elderly peasant in background
meaninglessly shoveling sheaves.
RACHEL: Don't expect you to remember everything.
MICHELL: But this is great, look at that.
Who'd have known that a vegetable could be such a source of menace in a film?
Here.
LOADER: Again, it's the difficulty of the compression
of quite a long period of his convalescence here that...
we had to try and achieve.
Whilst he gets a bit stronger, keeps drinking,
gets a bit stronger,
tosses and turns.
MICHELL: Gets iller before he gets stronger.
LOADER: Meanwhile, she's still going out.
Where do you go?
Where?
Are you worried I'll tire the horses?
No, no.
I'm worried you're about to leave.
Are you leaving me?
LOADER". This is his last attempt, really, to try and win her back, isn't it,
this fear of her leaving.
RACHEL: Soon, none of this will seem quite so bad.
You belong here.
In a little while, you'll be strong again,
and everything will be just as it was before I came.
You're at the beginning of everything.
A boy?
How can I live with a boy?
LOADER". What it must have been like to be told what she's now telling him,
with everything he's been through.
Wandering around, miserable and wet-nosed,
looking for its mother.
Drink.
MICHELL: So, this, eventually, came here, this scene, after...
being the second half
of the scene that lands much, much earlier in the film.
Again, it's something which was unpredictably...
much better placed where it is now...
She can't help herself. She'll take every...
...and it's to do with dropping these little...
She'll ruin us. She'll ruin...
...danger points, these activating little letters,
which drive the plot.
Dropping it in a little bit later made a huge difference.
Nothing.
What was it?
Nothing.
MICHELL: And compels him...
to follow her...
to, bizzarely,
Amersham.
Who would have thought that Amersham would yield up
such a wonderful location for...
an 18th century, 19th century town.
LOADER". Although, when we realized,
it must have been first horse change out of London,
didn't we, 'cause it's a town with many, many coaching inns.
MICHELL: Yes, probably exactly one day's
carriage journey with a coach-and-four out of town.
And it rained all day and we just embraced the rain,
we shot in the rain.
That's my other daughter plucking a chicken.
LOADER". And the scene we came to know as the poker scene.
RACHEL: Because I asked him.
Why?
Why not?
I needed advice.
What for?
Not your business.
How long have you been lying to me?
MICHELL: They both did really well in this scene.
LOADER". It's a very difficult scene, isn't it?
If I'd told you he was here, it would have made you sick again.
Send him away.
Send him away!
I can't remember, where were we in the shoot at this point?
- MICHELL: Pretty early. - Week three or something?
MICHELL: Week two, week three.
Pretty early on.
Why not? Why not?
Why shouldn't I have a life of my own
and make a life for myself, and do as I...
MICHELL: Mike operated everything in this film,
and he's so good at this kind of doco approach to a scene,
where he's riding the camera on his shoulder
and he's winging it
and following the rhythm of it,
and it gives this a wonderful immediacy and truth.
LOADER". Has incredible energy, doesn't it?
Go on.
Call for them.
MICHELL: So, this is kind of stalemate.
This is where, if you like,
their marriage, such as it is,
grinds to a terrible...
Beckett-like state of...
AH square, but nothing but misery on both sides.
And we think the film's stuck here now.
He can't but pity her.
He can't but forgive her,
in spite of his suspicions.
And she's genuinely, genuinely...
in despair at the suffering she's caused,
and the repetition of this pattern in her life.
And he comes and sits next to her.
I think I read in the script something like
they grab each other like a pair of drowning people,
holding on desperately to each other.
And it's very affecting, and it's very convincing.
And by convincing, I mean, I believe in Rachel's...
I certainly believe in his misery and his confusion,
but I believe in hers, too.
LOADER". I think it's marvelous,
and that sort of echo of the caress on his hair
in the misery.
MICHELL: And then along comes this final irrefutable
letter from the grave,
a letter that's been hidden in a coat that's been...
distributed to the farm workers.
And there was other stuff here, wasn't there?
There was other stuff in the script. He collected the laburnum seeds.
He then did a kind of experiment with his tisane.
And it worked in the script and it works in the book,
but it felt a little bit labored and unnecessary in the film.
When we are kind of...
We kind of got to the end now.
We've got to the end and...
And all this time, she's been...
Louise hears him finally admit...
that he's been an idiot, that he's been hoodwinked,
that he's been taken in.
And she does this wonderful thing of...
holding his hand, and then, in my mind,
she gives thanks to God for his deliverance.
And then, there's this final hurrah.
It's sunny.
For the first time, there's a tablecloth.
Everything on the table is summery.
Everybody is entranced by this woman,
who, for the first time, is not wearing
the black dress of mourning,
but is starting a new life.
Everyone, that is, apart from Philip,
who's seen through her now.
He's seen all her tricks.
And then, let it stand for a while.
Then, we will go out into the little courtyard,
if it wasn't too hot.
MICHELL: And here she is nattering away, happily,
talking about Ambrose, in the finest of moods...
on this lovely, perfect, summer's day.
Here.
Oh, no, not that one, that's Philip's.
Thank you.
Here.
No, thank you.
But this is a special batch.
LOADER". Such a beautiful color as well, this dress, wasn't it?
Was that always the color you and Dinah talked about?
MICHELL: Well, we wanted it to be blue in the blue room.
LOADER: Yeah.
It's very interesting.
'Cause that room had had a...
AH the wallpaper in that room was hand-painted, wasn't it,
by some associates of Alice Normington's.
Who will come riding with me?
Oh, we could take the carriage if you prefer.
You go.
Louise and I have some business to discuss.
You do?
What a waste, on a day like this.
LOADER: Louise and Philip, definitely co-conspirators going now.
I shall go on my own.
I won't be long!
Finish your tea.
Where are you off to?
I don't know.
Up Martin Hill, perhaps,
or into the woods.
Do you think the bluebells are still there?
The bluebells are long gone, I'm afraid.
You might try the cliff path.
Yeah.
MICHELL: This is a scene full of ambiguity and possibility.
You're looking better.
You look...
MICHELL: He's sending her to her death,
and yet, here,
she apologizes, but we don't really know what for.
Does she know...
where she's being sent?
He runs through those windows, I love that glimpse of him.
Laburnum seeds, letters, I don't know.
MICHELL: And then is this rather crazed search.
She's poisoned me, don't you see?
It's Couch, the lawyer.
Which we ended up into cutting with these shots of her riding.
They came late in the day.
We went out and did a little day's shooting
with a riding double and a horse.
And I think they're really, really good little...
cutaways, really helpful.
This glorious day, this woman riding,
riding, riding to her death.
LOADER". Very different from the book,
where the fatal accident all occurs around a foot bridge
to the garden that Rachel has been landscaping.
Well, translate it for me, please!
LOUISE: "Dearest Rachel, on second thought,
if you really cannot bring yourself..."
LOADER". Again, that's in the Chiltons, isn't it?
Long way from Devon.
"I still don't think it's a good idea,
but then again, Italy and some sunshine
may be the making of him."
Is that it?
Philip, inquiries were made.
My father...
What inquiries?
In matters of the heart, it seems that
Enrico Rainaldi is more Greek than he is Italian.
He likes boys, Philip.
MICHELL: That's not in the book either.
LOADER: No. "More Greek than Italian."
MICHELL: So, here's a little piece of magic switching rider.
So, that's the stunt rider going off on the horse bareback.
In a early cut,
he got to the cliff edge and she was still hanging there,
but it felt terribly stage-y, and terrible contrived,
almost as though she'd been hanging on, waiting for him to turn up.
And it seemed,
on reflection, in the hard light of the cutting room,
much more sensible to have her already...
a dead parrot.
LOADER". With the ghastly injured horse beside her.
MICHELL: And in a way, that is so eloquent here, isn't it?
LOADER: Yeah.
MICHELL: She's been covered up by a sack.
- And the horse is... - LOADER: Puff of smoke.
MICHELL: The horse is getting humanely disposed of.
And we're back where we started,
still really not knowing...
did she,
didn't she?
Same little child, Corinne.
But now,
a new family.
PHILIP: What can I teach them?
What can I tell them?
MICHELL: And if you look carefully and you want to...
be a viewer of a suspicious nature...
you might notice...
that the very final frames of this film...
hold a suggestion...
of even more complexity.
PHILIP: Rachel, my torment.