“It’s funny. With hindsight, there were no challenges. It was all a dream. But that’s clearly not true,” Joe Wright said, reflecting on his feature film debut directing the 2005 adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Pride & Prejudice.” The movie and ensemble piece led by Oscar-nominated actress Keira Knightley was the first of several films for which Wright leaned into period drama. On Sunday, “Pride & Prejudice” returned to theaters for a limited run to commemorate the film’s 20th anniversary.
Wright’s background prior to production of the 2005 film, however, was nearly antithetical to the marriage of romance and realism on which he’s built his career. “I’d been making, kind of, gritty British realist dramas. And, to my absolute amazement, Working Title, the producers, came to me and said, would I like to pitch on doing ‘Pride & Prejudice,’” Wright recalled of the process leading up to his appointment as director for the 2005 film iteration of Austen’s seminal novel. “I thought, what a funny choice.”
Joe Wright on the set of “Pride & Prejudice” (2005).
Focus Features/courtesy Everett Collection
Austen wasn’t particularly front-of-mind for Wright. “I was reading Charles Bukowski and people like that at the time, William Burrows. I had never read ‘Pride & Prejudice,’” he admitted. “I felt that Jane Austen was part of the establishment. And I was a bit counter-establishment,” Wright explained.
“I’d been involved in the rave scene…my natural tastes were toward something a bit more culturally edgy. Period movies, you got a sense of either kind of BBC period dramas or dusty period movies with posh people. It was a class thing, as well, for me,” said Wright, who comes from a self-described working class background. The filmmaker was “embarrassed to admit” what he described as “a case of contempt prior to investigation.”
Wright confronted the source material. “I was kind of shocked by it,” he said, musing on memories of reading Austen’s 1813 work. “It felt so new and modern and fresh and alive and psychologically true.” Wright was determined to cast true-to-age, returning to Working Title with the idea of casting an 18-year-old leading actress to portray Elizabeth Bennet, who’s roughly 20 years old in the novel.
Keira Knightley and Joe Wright on the set of “Pride & Prejudice” (2005).
Courtesy of Focus Features
“The story is about very young people falling in love for the first time. If you miss that, then you miss the whole point of the book,” Wright explained. “I had lots of other ideas about colors and reality, authenticity and dirt and mess and all the rest of it. But the main idea [was] that we cast an 18-year-old in that role. [Working Title] embraced that, so I got the job and set about trying to figure out how to do it.”
Knightley, who plays Austen’s heroine in the 2005 adaptation, was roughly 18 years old during production and turned 20 by the film’s release.
To execute the vision Wright shared with his creative team, the filmmaker set the adaptation in the late 18th century rather than the early 19th century when “Pride & Prejudice” was published. Austen began drafting her novel in the late 1790s. “It was really kind of the life of that period, that kind of Napoleonic excitement of what was going on” that intrigued Wright, he explained.
Joe Wright on the set of “Pride & Prejudice” (2005).
Focus Features/courtesy Everett Collection
“The challenges facing the aristocracy, the social change that was happening at the time. It felt like a much more exciting time to set the piece than the early 19th century when everything had sort of settled down a bit. It was about Napoleon; it was about the influence of France, culturally. And also this sense of shifting social mores,” he said. Subtle cues to that cultural shift came about through costumes designed by Jacqueline Durran, who focused on the provinciality of the Bennet family in contrast to the likes of Caroline Bingely’s, played by Kelly Reilly, sophisticated 19th-century wardrobe.
The filmmaker also wanted to highlight “the mess of the family” in the Bennets, particularly the kinetic energy between the five sisters. This “battle of attrition, whoever was talking longest was the one who got heard,” was the reality Wright wanted to convey. “The past is not treated with this reverence but actually is far more similar than different,” he said.
Crafting the lived-in world of Wright’s “Pride & Prejudice” meant embracing spontaneity, like geese fluttering their wings and honking their nasally tones as Brenda Blethyn’s Mrs. Bennet runs after Knightley’s Elizabeth upon rejecting Mr. Collins’ (Tom Hollander) dubious proposal. The production “felt like a blessed time,” Wright said. “We were just this funny sort of family of oddities. I felt like I’d found my home. It was a really lovely time.”
Keira Knightley and Joe Wright on the set of “Pride & Prejudice” (2005).
Focus Features/courtesy Everett Collection
As far as the 2005 film’s longevity and continued cultural preoccupation, Wright still can’t believe the film’s staying power. “It’s lovely. I would have never imagined it. As far as I was concerned, it was my first film, and I just wanted to make sure that I got to make another one afterward,” he said. The early to mid-2000s were, per Wright, “a different world, and it was a much smaller world,” when it came to filmmaking. “To see the film travel over such a long time period feels kind of wonderful and sort of miraculous.”
The root of the film’s relevance and constancy is, of course, owed to Austen. “Her stories are psychologically true,” Wright said of the beloved author. “Just as Homer’s stories are psychologically true, [like] many other fairytales or myths. She was honest about her experience, and she managed to articulate her inner life with clarity,” Wright explained.
“We need those stories to be told. In a way, there’s something very reassuring about the fact that, sure the circumstances of the world change, but our souls are eternal and connected.”
