TORONTO — Keira Knightley may have been only 19 when she signed on for the coveted role of headstrong Elizabeth Bennet, author Jane Austen's most cherished heroine, in the sprightly new film version of Pride & Prejudice that opens in limited U.S. release Friday. But she was all too aware of what she faced.
Director Joe Wright made his version, with Matthew Macfadyen and Keira Knightley, sexier, livelier and more realistic while staying true to the book.
Focus Features
Constant comparisons. To the 1813 novel. To the 1940 big-screen version. To the hugely popular 1995 BBC miniseries. And to the society-driven world of Austen that exists in the imaginations of those who adore her work.
MY GIRLS WANT TO PARTY ALL THE TIME A sumptuous, sterling addition to the Jane Austen canon
Though often dismissed as chick flicks with manners, middlebrow literary costume dramas of the Merchant Ivory school brought a slate of virtues to the cinematic landscape. At a time when action flicks were taking over, they celebrated the pleasures of rounded storytelling, and even their proverbial theme — the tug-of-war between love and money — was tougher than it looked: At their best (A Room With a View, Persuasion), these films anatomized romance, that dance of the spiritual and the worldly, as few other movies have. Nevertheless, the genre, in recent years, has faded, a casualty of shifting tastes, and that makes it reasonable to ask: What could the dozenth adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice, with lush photography and Keira Knightley, bring to the party?
Pride and Prejudice Revisited Keira Knightley Meets her Match
By Karl Rozemeyer
“I think Pride and Prejudice you can set anywhere. It is about things that are as relevant today as they were two hundred years ago. It is about growing up. It is about making mistakes. It is about falling in love for the first time. It’s about a million different things. You can see that you can set this story anywhere because you have got Bride and Prejudice, the Bollywood version, you’ve got Bridget Jones, you’ve got so many different versions of this story. I think that it doesn’t matter where you are from, we all need a little bit of romance. So, why not.” —Keira Knightley
Matthew Macfadyen is famed for his role in TV's Spooks and an affair with his co-star – will Jane Austen alter his image? Elizabeth Grice meets him
On his way to our interview, Matthew Macfadyen's eye was caught by a headline on the cover of Radio Times, advertising Sir Ben Kingsley's thoughts "on an actor's urgent need to communicate some essence of his soul". He cringed and hurried on.
Matthew Macfadyen: his Darcy will be his own
The hype, the hubris, the possibility that a fellow actor had been made to look foolish by talking about his craft to a journalist, seem to have confirmed his worst fears about his present ordeal.
mistakes. It is about falling in love for the first time. It’s about a million different things. You can see that you can set this story anywhere because you have got Bride and Prejudice, the Bollywood version, you’ve got Bridget Jones, you’ve got so many different versions of this story. I think that it doesn’t matter where you are from, we all need a little bit of romance. So, why not.”
