By the time I closed my laptop after speaking with Sense and Sensibility screenwriter Diana Reid and director Georgia Oakley, I wanted to open it again. Some conversations leave you with more questions than you arrived with – and a renewed appetite for the answers. This was one of them. But let’s start at the beginning.
Earlier in the year, RUSSH hosted a Book Club event with Reid, giving us the opportunity to discuss Jane Austen’s novel before the film’s release. Returning to that conversation after seeing her adaptation felt like a privilege to revisit those first impressions and discover what had shifted along the way. First, though, there was something the writer in me wanted to know. How had an author so close to home landed the adaptation of dreams? “India Flint, our producer, was interested in doing a classic – she'd read my novels, and we'd been talking for a while about maybe doing something for the screen,” Reid explained. They developed the project, pitched it to Working Title and worked on a draft before approaching directors. That was when Oakley came on board.
Her answer offered a glimpse into a process I had been curious about for months. It also set the tone for the conversation that followed, one that was open, generous and full of affection for the work. For Oakley, preserving the integrity of Austen’s novel and, wherever possible, its language was central to the project. “Diana had already done such a brilliant job of bringing certain things to light,” she said.
Every adaptation makes choices about what to highlight. In this film, the pair shared a clear sense that they wanted to focus on the story’s contemporary relevance, the sister’s inner lives, and their relationship with the world around them. For Oakley, that last element – the story's connection with nature – held particular significance. I smiled when she mentioned it, as this was something I had wanted to ask about later, but suddenly it belonged right at the beginning. From the opening scene of Marianne sitting in tall, windswept grass, an eagle in the sunlit distance, the first word that came to mind – obvious as it might seem – was beautiful. That impression stayed with me; the physical intimacy to the film’s natural world with its animals, its earth, the feeling of being exposed to the elements. Alongside it was the intimacy of sisterhood, equally as tender and unruly.
Why, I asked Oakley, had nature been so important to her vision? “I think it comes back to the question of time and how those characters would have perceived time. There's lots of waiting in the book. Waiting for letters and waiting to find out the fate of certain stories – everything moved at a different pace. Different from how it moves now. I really wanted to capture that in the visual language of the story, and one of the ways of doing that was to really focus on nature.” The natural world gives that waiting a rhythm as it allows us to feel the pace of the character's lives, to sit with the uncertainty that fills the space between a letter sent and an answer received. Oakley’s commitment even extended to a dedicated nature unit, with time to wait for the moments the rest of the production might otherwise miss: spider crossing its web, birds taking flight. “You can feel its presence in the final film.”
Another thought had stayed with me from our earlier conversation with Reid. While writing the script, she had initially felt more drawn to Elinor, played by Daisy Edgar-Jones, the Dashwood sister who conceals so much of what she feels. That affinity was never an imbalance I felt while watching the film, but still, I was curious about how Reid had come to understand Marianne, played by Esmé Creed-Miles, whose emotions are so much closer to the surface. “Initially, I think when I first re-read the book, I sort of felt like Marianne was maybe just immature – I couldn't kind of get a grasp on her emotions,” she said. “And then as I reworked successive drafts, and also when Esmé came on board, I came to see how it's not her weakness. It's actually a strength, and it all kind of accords with her philosophy about how to live a good life that's full of integrity.” Over time, Reid came to admire Marianne’s courage, her willingness to know what she wants and pursue it without apology. It's a quality Elinor must also find within herself to move towards her own happiness.
Oakley also felt an affinity with Elinor, but it was her understanding of the sisters together that spoke to something deeply rooted in the film. “I always think that it's about these two parts of ourselves that are sometimes at war,” she said. “Everybody has a bit of both of those qualities, and sometimes they're in competition with each other, which is what the story is about.” There was something reassuring about hearing that. We might recognise Elinor’s restraint in one moment and Marianne’s emotional abandon in the next, moving between the desire to protect ourselves and the longing to be known. Even as we grow to understand ourselves, feeling and reason rarely fall into perfect alignment. The sisters give expression to a tension we all are learning to live with.
Yet for all the tenderness between them, Oakley was equally drawn to their moments of friction. In true Austen fashion, the characters are often feeling one thing, saying another and trying to decipher what everyone else means at the same time. Watching the film, I noticed how much passed between the characters without actually being spoken. An exchange could carry the weight of an argument long before either sister raised her voice. “It's amazing when you let everything simmer and, as you say, it kind of sits beneath the surface for a long time, and then eventually it pops,” Oakley said. “But those moments where it pops between the two sisters wouldn't have any impact at all if you hadn't had quiet moments with them in the lead up.”
For a director drawn to internal dilemmas, Elinor’s restraint offered a lot of territory to explore for Edgar-Jones. “I think actors also love it because it's about communicating so much but attempting to do very little,” she said. “And I could tell the first time I met her that she had that ability.”Alongside Edgar-Jones’s, Creed-Miles too brought an instinct for improvisation that surprised Oakley. Both actors proved brilliant at it, she said, and much of that spontaneity found its way into the finished film.
I think that is what stayed with me most from the film – the care taken to give these familiar characters room to surprise us. In a glance, an exchange or an argument finally allowed to surface that the sisters felt close enough to recognise – in each other, in the people we love, in ourselves.
And by the end of our conversation, I wanted to return to the film as much as I wanted to keep asking them questions. To watch Elinor a little more closely, to give Marianne a little more room, and to spend more time in the silent moments Oakley and Reid had been so careful to preserve, where so much is felt before anyone finds the words.
