Films

You can catch Jan’s weekly movie reviews and gossip with Antonia Brickell on Drive between 4 and 6pm on 95.7, 96FM and 1026 MW

Taking a well-loved novel from a white page to the silver screen is never easy. First, there are the legions of loyal fans never backward in coming forward with their opinions on the celluloid version of their favourite tome. And what if you're not the first to give that prized paperback a movie makeover? Then it’s not just the literature lovers you have to contend with, but also fans of the first (or fiftieth, depending just how popular that book is) film version.

Brideshead Revisited

Fortunately when director Julian Jarrold took on the challenge of turning Evelyn Waugh’s words in Brideshead Revisited into pictures, he already had plenty of experience working his visual magic on literary gems from Chaucer (The Canterbury Tales), through Dickens (Great Expectations), to Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment). But while Waugh’s classic had never made it to the big screen before this autumn, its small-screen adaptation with Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews, although nearly 30 years old, is still fondly remembered.

So, what was it like bringing the story of middle-class undergraduate Charles Ryder and the aristocratic Marchmain family to the cinema screen? “It was very daunting,” admits Jarrold. “But when you go back to the novel, you realise how rich it is and that it does bear repeated readings. Just talking to people, everyone seems to get different aspects from the novel. And the television series was in the 80s, a very different time from now, and I think it’s ripe for a new interpretation.”

While Jarrold avoided watching the television adaptation before shooting the film, preferring to concentrate on Waugh’s original work and the new script, the pull of Yorkshire’s Castle Howard, the Marchmain’s ancestral home in the small-screen series, was too great to ignore.

Thompson used to perform with Footlights

“I was very cautious about going there,” confesses the director, “but we wanted somewhere that had this Catholic architectural feel to it and the description in the book is very similar to Castle Howard. It has this great fountain which is a real centrepiece for the film, and also it’s able to provide the two aspects of the film: initially it’s very attractive and alluring and later on it becomes sinister and claustrophobic.”

As for the film’s cast, youth meets experience with Matthew Goode (Match Point), Ben Whishaw (Perfume: The Story of a Murderer), and Hayley Atwell (The Duchess) starring alongside Michael Gambon, Greta Scacchi, and Oscar-winning Cambridge graduate Emma Thompson.

“I'd never worked with any of the cast before, so it was really interesting for me,” says Jarrold. “Emma Thompson was incredibly helpful in bonding with the younger actors and making it feel like a real family. She very much played mother to the younger cast.”

Filming at Castle Howard

Just like the film’s director, Thompson, who started her career alongside Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry while studying at Cambridge, had never watched the 80's version of Brideshead. “Emma did a lot of research – she was fascinated by the whole script,’ recalls Jarrold. “She hadn't seen the TV series, I think she was abroad when it was out, so she was very much coming from a fresh point of view, and she brings a great humanity to the role of Lady Marchmain.”

Even with a great cast and beautiful locations, the shoot wasn't all plain sailing. “The crew thought I was cursed,” laughs Jarrold. “In York we had floods and rain nearly all the time. Then we moved to Oxford and it rained. We had light drizzle in Morocco. We even had downpours in Venice! The moment the sun came out we'd dash outside and do a bit of filming. It gave the film some very moody atmospheres.”

After travelling far and wide to shoot the film, previewing his latest work at this year’s Cambridge Film Festival was doubly significant for the East Anglian director. “It’s nice to go back to one’s roots; a bit like the characters in Brideshead, one is constantly drawn back. And I think film festivals are very important. You get people who are really passionate about film and who want to engage in the serious and more intricate themes of a film like Brideshead, which is a complex, rich story. It’s not a simple love story by any stretch of the imagination.”

But what does the director think the book’s author would have made of the film? “Waugh hated a lot of aspects of the modern world and he called Hollywood ‘Californian savages’ when they tried to make a film of the novel in the late 1940s. Hopefully we've been true enough in spirit to the book and he'd approve of the cast, but knowing him I'm sure he'd have a few grumbles,” says Jarrold laughing.