How do you breathe new life into a story, hundreds of years old, that’s already had its fair share of adaptations? That’s the challenge Georgia Oakley faced when bringing Jane Austen’s “Sense & Sensibility” back to the big screen — a challenge she overcame pretty handily, turning the centuries-old story into an emotional, swooning, yearn-filled achievement.
“It felt to me that there was an intimacy between this family, the Dashwoods, and the fact that we’re allowed to observe them in their own home when they’re not expecting visitors and all of that, I questioned whether everything would be quite so formal and rigid as it often is in Austen adaptations,” Oakley told TheWrap. “I spoke a lot about that with my heads of department, just trying to lean into this sort of intimacy and this sort of human aspect about the story. I wanted audiences to be able to feel like they could reach through the screen and touch the characters as opposed to kind of being kept at arm’s length.”
This sense of remove from period adaptations is a feeling Oakley has struggled with herself in the past. In her own take on “Sense & Sensibility,” Oakley sought to remove this barrier for the audience, portraying a timeless story of love and sisterhood.
“I think she really wanted to dissolve the barriers you can sometimes feel when you watch a period piece because it can be so ornate and the language is a lot more poetic,” Daisy Edgar-Jones told TheWrap. “Obviously we no longer wear bonnets and ride in carriages. But for me, the earthiness that she wanted to bring into the story and the themes of nature, and to see the Dashwoods a little undone — I mean, even our clothes were naturally dyed. My dress was dyed with Logwood and Marianne’s with elderberries. I mean, it just made the whole thing feel so a part of the Earth, I suppose because Austen’s themes are so about humanity and our human existence. For it to be a story about nature — human nature, to fall in love, to feel heartbreak and connect — and then nature around us, I thought, was really special.”
This earthiness permeates every inch of Oakley’s adaptation — the intricate costumes, the immaculate production design, the gorgeous nature photography. It helps the story feel tangible and immediate, heightening the emotions of the classic piece.
“I get afraid of saying this because this is not not an enjoyable family fun movie, but Georgia is like an arthouse filmmaker,” Esmé Creed-Miles told TheWrap. “I think that it feels, for me, like she’s a Terrence (Malick).”
Finding sense and sensibility
Oakley expressed surprise at being asked by Working Title to tackle “Sense & Sensibility” in 2024, helming a screenplay penned by Diana Reid. At that point, she had only directed one feature (“Blue Jean,” which she also wrote) and was working on a handful of other projects.
“It felt kind of like a bit of a curveball, honestly, at the time,” Oakley said. “But when I read Diana’s screenplay, I was immediately taken back to the feeling that I’d had when I first read the book, and I just fell in love with the witty dialogue of her script and the fact that she’d been able to really foreground the relationship between Elinor and Marianne, which spoke to the experience that I’d had as a young person reading this book. That got me really excited. I think there was something in the relationship between the two sisters and their dynamic that felt very relatable to me. I was just excited to see what might happen if I tried my hand at it.”
Those sisters, Elinor and Marianne, were played by Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esmé Creed-Miles respectively. Edgar-Jones was an early add to the project, one Oakley had immense faith in following her performance in the critically acclaimed miniseries “Normal People.”
“Daisy has such a kind of powerful poise to her, and also an ability to kind of keep everything simmering below the surface. She’s one of those actors who communicates so much by doing — or seemingly doing — very little, so I knew she would be perfect as Elinor,” Oakley said. “But I was really concerned about finding the right relationship between those two sisters, and I knew that the whole film would kind of live or die by that dynamic and the believability of their relationship.”
This concern launched an extensive casting search for Marianne, one that eventually brought Oakley to Creed-Miles. During the audition process, the actress wowed Oakley with her ability to strip away some of the larger and, in some respects, sillier elements of the character to portray the emotional truth of Marianne’s arc.
“(She) just was unlike anyone else that I met for the role,” Oakley confessed. “I wanted Marianne to be someone that we can really root for and that we really understand why she makes the mistakes that she makes rather than just kind of writing it off as something a little bit naive or silly. So I was really moved by Esmé’s audition and wanted to get her together with Daisy.”
Of course, it helps that Edgar-Jones and Creed-Miles had worked together before, collaborating Bill Buckhurst’s film “Pond Life” when they were around their late teens. Oakley said this history helped open up an “intimacy and tenderness to their relationship that you just can’t fake.”
These characters each represent half of the film’s title. Elinor, never one to fall too quickly in love or give herself to fully over to emotion, becomes the embodiment of sensibility. Marianne, who forms deep attachments and declares, “If I were to fall, I would rather it be from a great height,” fully captures sense. It’s an idea central to both the original text and Oakley and Reid’s interpretation.
“I was really interested in how much, like in romantic relationships, they need each other. They need the aspects of each other’s personality that they don’t possess, and they feed off it. There’s a sort of parasitic relationship there of taking from the other and not even realizing that they’re doing it,” Oakley said. “I think that’s very common in lots of relationships.”
A timeless tale
Oakley may come from an indie background, but she still pulled out all the stops for some fancy balls.
“Sense & Sensibility” features two dance set pieces, each coming at crucial moments in Elinor and Marianne’s respective relationships. The first, a countryside dance the crew referred to as “The Hop,” was completed across only two filming days, while the latter, larger London ball took four. Oakley worked with choreographer Holly Blakey to ensure that, for as ostentatious and showy as these set pieces could be (so big, in fact, that Oakley sometimes struggled to reach her actors through the chaotic crowd of dancers), they still got across the central emotions necessary.
“We spoke a lot about how it was the only time when men and women were allowed to kind of touch each other and be kind of free with each other in a way that they just weren’t able to in the privacy of their homes even,” she said. “So that feeling of time kind of standing still is definitely a big part of the motivation for that choreography between Edward and Elinor, and also the fact that their dance is almost a farewell because they know that they can’t be together at that point, so there’s a sort of bittersweetness to it from the beginning.”
The concept of time is integral to both “Sense & Sensibility” and Oakley’s take on the material. From the very first scene (a change from the opening in the book), the filmmaker wanted audiences to understand how much the Dashwoods’ lives would simply be spent waiting for the days to pass and news to arrive.
“The time just sort of stretches out in front of them in ways that we can’t possibly imagine now, and so that whole element — of kind of like at the beginning of the story, she’s lying in a field waiting for a letter, but we have no idea how many days she’s been waiting in that same field,” Oakley said. “That all kind of serves this idea of something a little bit more wild. There’s like a languorous feeling to open it that I was trying to achieve.”
The filmmaker wanted to drive this feeling into her actors as well. Early in the story, the Dashwoods move from their family home in Sussex to a new residence in Devonshire — a four-day journey by carriage, Oakley figured. During rehearsals, Oakley had the idea of using carriages she’d gathered for test shoots to actually send her actors on a days-long carriage ride to instill the feeling of their journey (“For obvious reasons, we weren’t allowed to do that,” she remarked).
“Ultimately, the emotional journeys of the characters are relatable, and as a result, aspects like the travel and balls and things like that are still relatable. For instance, with the ball, the whole point is that they’re so desperate to go, they’ve dreamt of this moment, and then they get there and it’s not what they imagined and they feel alienated,” Oakley said. “I think everyone can relate to that feeling.”
The post ‘Sense & Sensibility’: How Georgia Oakley Made an Emotional, Earthy Austen Adaptation for the Yearners appeared first on TheWrap.
