The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘My first thought? You guys are crazy!’
How Ang Lee’s ‘Sense and Sensibility’ took a recipe for disaster and made a masterpiece, 25 years ago
Sense and Sensibility, the first English language film ever made by Taiwanese director Ang Lee, based on a screenplay by Emma Thompson, from Jane Austen’s novel, was released 25 years ago this month. Starring Kate Winslet, Hugh Grant, Greg Wise and Alan Rickman, alongside Thompson herself, it would win seven Academy Awards nominations and make £100 million worldwide.
‘AUSTEN’S WORST BOOK’
Hollywood producer Lindsay Doran had already spent a decade trying to find someone to adapt her favourite Austen novel for the big screen. Then in 1990, while working on the film Dead Again, she met British actress Emma Thompson.
Lindsay Doran: I first read Sense and Sensibility when I was 22, and I decided right then and there that if I ever went into the movie business, I would try to make it into a film. Emma Thompson: I had written a sketch based on an Edith Wharton short story, which was shown on American TV at about three o’clock in the morning. Lindsay saw it and said, this is the woman I want to adapt Sense and Sensibility. My first response was, why Sense and Sensibility? The writing is quite arcane. LD: It just struck me as such an obvious movie. It’s got a twist ending: you’re convinced that Edward is married, then all of a sudden he shows up, in love with Elinor, with an explanation for everything. I thought that was on a level with Hitchcock. It was also hilarious. And it had a theme that was universal and timeless, in the question of: who are we supposed to marry? Should it be the person that we feel these grand emotional feelings for, or should it be our best friend?
ET: It took five years to write and a lot of crying. The first draft was 500 pages. I wrote another while we were shooting Much Ado About Nothing in Tuscany and Lindsay sent it back saying, “It’s a little sundrenched.” I literally had to throw it away and start again.
LD: It wasn’t easy to find a studio that would put up the money for a 200-year-old English novel to be adapted by an untried screenwriter. One executive asked me why I wanted to make a movie out of Jane Austen’s worst book. Then Amy Pascal, at Columbia Pictures, called. Ang Lee: I had just finished making my second film Eat Drink Man Woman when I heard from Lindsay. It was curious because I spoke quite broken English back then.
LD: After all the years that we had spent developing that screenplay, I didn’t want to turn it into a nice English movie. I wanted a director who saw the script as hilarious and romantic, and who would give it visual sweep. Another executive, Geoff Stier, saw Ang’s film, The Wedding Banquet, and said it had all of the things I was looking for. It just happened to be in another language. When I told Emma, she said, “Ang Lee… isn’t he desperately foreign?” AL: When I opened the script and saw Jane Austen’s name on the title page, I thought: “You guys are crazy. What do I know about any of this?” Then I read it and realised, it’s about social obligation versus personal desire. That’s what I’d been making films about.
LD: Our meeting with Ang was what we’d been dreaming of: not only did he appreciate the script’s humour, but he said, “I want this film to break people’s hearts so badly, they’ll still be recovering from it two months later.”
Kate Winslet: They wouldn’t consider me for [Elinor’s sister] Marianne
because of the age difference with Emma but my agent told me to just go in and pretend that she’d given me the wrong information, relying on the fact they’d be too embarrassed to correct me.
AL: Kate came in and blew our minds. She was so bold and intuitive. She was also 19.
KW: I was working at a delicatessen in Primrose Hill when I got a call: “Ang Lee wants to meet you with Emma.” I was nervous but I also had this feeling of quiet determination, like “I’m going to get this job.”
ET: I remember her turning up for her audition, and she found me in the corridor and said, “I know how to play this.” And I just looked at her and thought, “Yep.”
Greg Wise: We had to do the scene where Willoughby turns up with flowers, and I got there and thought: “Oh, I should have brought some flowers, what a fool!” There was a planter on the street that was full of laurels so, rather naughtily, I just grabbed a whole pile of leaves, pushed them into my bag, and when we got to that bit of the scene, I whipped out my laurel, as it were. ET: So many of the young men who came to audition for Willoughby wanted to be cool, and Greg just wasn’t. He was beautiful, very energised, but not knowing or smooth. That’s not who Willoughby is.
GW: I was on a walk in the countryside when the phone went and I couldn’t get a signal, so I had to stand on a little hump to get the message that I’d got the part. I realised too late that it was actually a pile of manure that I was slowly sinking into, whooping away. I went straight back to London to see Ang in his apartment, covered in s---.
ANG’S SENSIBILITY
The film went into production in April 1994. Lee had been living in London for six months, taking trips to the National Gallery, with Doran as his guide, to absorb as much of the culture of the period – and the country – as possible.
AL: The first three weeks of shooting was rough. They didn’t know if I knew what I was doing.
KW: At the end of the first day, Ang had hardly spoken to me, so I went up to him and said the polite equivalent of “Was I any good?” He just put his hand on my shoulder and said very calmly, “You’ll get better.” And I thought “Great, that’s great, they’re going to f------ fire me.”
AL: Western actors expect to be praised a lot, but back then, when my English wasn’t very fluent, all they saw was my innocent face, struggling to tell them something… GW: His English was a lot better than he pretended, so he was able to get away with stuff that other folks wouldn’t. At one point, he wanted Emma to stop being so knowing, but it came out as “Don’t be so old.” AL: Alan [Rickman] got the worst one. He did one take and I went up
to him and said “Less”. And then another and I went back to him and said “Less”. And then the third time I didn’t have the heart to tell him the same thing, so I said “More”. And he got irritated and said “Which way do you want me to go? More or less?” So I said “Do more, less.”
KW: We all spent quite a long time trying to understand Ang’s sensibility. It wasn’t that he was ever openly unkind, but just very direct, and yet quiet, so it was even more alarming. You would get these quite blunt directions from a man who was otherwise wordless.
GW: He would wander up with his hand pressed against his cheek, looking worried, and just mumble something then wander off, and I’d be too polite to say: “Ang, sorry, I didn’t understand a f------ word.” ET: It was just the way he would stand around, going “You know, in China and Taiwan, director is God.” And then he would look at me.
AL: The way I was taught to make movies was: you take orders, until one day you’re old enough to give orders. I had never had to explain myself before. The crew would jokingly ask me “What’s the biggest difference between directing in Taiwan and in England?” I said, “I was the emperor before and now I’m just the president.” That’s literally how it felt.
GW: He was wonderful for me; I tended to throw the kitchen sink at stuff, and he just said, “Less, less, less.” He was a director of energies more than anything.
AL: With English actors, sometimes they play it too big, and my inclination was to be more repressed; I think it’s funnier that way.
KW: He did tai chi with me on the back lots at Shepperton. I think he had seen in me, quite rightly, a sort of slightly hysterical, heady, teenage energy.
AL: I think the actors needed to close down a little, and I needed to open up. Somehow we hit a sweet spot.
‘THAT’S SO WEIRD, ELINOR’S DANCING WITH WILLOUGHBY’
The shoot lasted nine weeks, beginning at Shepperton Studios, in Surrey, and then moving on to location in Devon. Most of the cast and crew spent six weeks living together in Alston Hall, a country house. Fittingly, given the subject of the film, romance was in the air.
GW: I had to learn to drive a phaeton, which was pulled by two amazing black stallions, and once I just took the bend way too fast and we came up on one wheel, millimetres from tipping the bugger over. I think that’s the take they use in the film, when Winslet just screams. AL: The most beautiful scene to make was the final one with Emma and Hugh Grant. Before we shot it, I went up to her and said, “All I want is to not see more than your profile” and she got my point right away. She’s ashamed of her affection so she wants to get away from the camera, but her impulse is also to go towards the camera where he’s standing. So she has to struggle, and ends up in that middle spot, which is profile.
ET: The point is that Elinor cries all the way through and it’s so funny! So I did that and Hugh just looked at me and said, “You’re crying all the way through my speech.” But that’s what’s funny – this very controlled person involuntarily and uncontrollably weeping.
AL: She got it right away, she gave me a look like “Don’t say one more word, I’m ready to roll the f-----camera.” That was a beautiful moment for the director-actor’s relationship, I felt like a Zen master. After that, I had a feeling that this was going to be a good movie, and that it was my movie, that I was more than a work-for-hire craftsman who had done a good job. It taught me that anything in movies is possible, if you have the heart. It was like the best film school I ever attended.
ET: It really was the happiest of films.
AL: For the wrap party, I threw everyone a Chinese banquet in Chinatown.
LD: I remember seeing Emma dancing with Greg and thinking “That’s so weird, Elinor’s dancing with Willoughby.”
GW: A lovely old mate of mine who’s a little bit witchy had called me just before I started filming and said “You are absolutely going to find your wife on this film” and at first all I could think of was Winslet, who’s obviously gorgeous, but not for me.
ET: I was sort of crushed at the time, I wasn’t really a whole person, but Greg’s presence was a fantastic fillip and an extraordinary sort of medicine.
GW: It was a gentle, gentle thing. We had to be very quiet during the filming. I don’t think it was publicly known that we were an item until around the time of the premiere. ET: I was grateful for the fact that my friends on set – Imelda, and Hugh, and Laurie and all that lot – were just very relieved for me. It wasn’t a horrible, baleful secret. GW: Everyone bloody knew. You can’t keep anything private on a film set.
ET: It was, nonetheless, incredibly romantic.
REMEMBERING RICKMAN
Alan Rickman, the acclaimed British actor best known for husky, languid delivery, was 49 when he played Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility. He died in 2016,
from pancreatic cancer, six weeks before his 70th birthday.
LD: I fought very hard for Alan. I had seen Truly Madly Deeply, but everyone else had seen Die Hard, so they were trying to understand how the villain was supposed to be this romantic figure.
ET: Rarely had he got to play the romantic hero and I think he loved that.
KW: When I met Alan, I remember feeling as though he was the size of the BFG, and I was this tiny person looking up at him, quaking. I swear to God, it is the only time in my life I really thought I might fall over on meeting someone famous.
LD: Everyone loved Alan. He was continually taking people out to brunch.
ET: He was just so lovely and so sort of Eeyore-ish. Once I overheard Kate saying “Oh God, my knickers have gone up my arse.” And Alan replied, “Ah. Feminine mystique strikes again.”
LD: Men really rooted for Colonel Brandon. In one preview screening in New Jersey, they cheered like it was a football game when he got the girl.
OSCARS
The film was released in the US in December 1995, and in the UK in February 1996, to overwhelmingly admiring reviews. From seven Oscar nominations, Emma Thompson was the sole winner, for Best Adapted Screenplay. She remains the only person ever to have won Oscars for both acting and screenwriting.
LD: When Emma won the Oscar for Best Screenplay, it just felt like the fairytale ending of the whole thing. ET: It was just too astonishing for words.
GW: I was watching it on telly with Rickman, eating pizza, and when she won, we got dressed up and went to one of those strange Oscar parties. There was a little roped off bit for the really posh people, and when I went off to the loo, they wouldn’t let me back in.
ET: I was suddenly found by somebody saying, “There’s this guy here who claims to know you” and it was Greg. I was going, “He’s in the movie! He’s in the movie!”
LD: It’s not a great feeling to not win if you’re nominated, but as I was leaving that night, a member of the public stopped me, and said, “I just want you to know how much this movie means to me. And you may not have won the Oscar tonight, but you’ve won my heart.”
‘I want to break hearts so badly, people will still be recovering in the morning’