One of the hallmarks of your style is that you tend to prefer to use editing to propel the audience through a scene instead of camera moves. Period pieces rarely have scenes as short and fast as the ones in “Love & Friendship.” Where does that impulse come from, to cut so quickly?
Well, it’s a way of giving everything velocity. Not boring the audience, and also not boring the writer. Sometimes you get into these long, involved, complex scenes, and I love in the editing room when we take one of those and just lop off the first half. I love the freedom of editing. It’s amazing, the amount of trickery. It amuses me when people want to do vérité films, because cinema’s all trickery. Good movies are all trickery.
One of the cool things that happens is that just with certain images and threatening music, you really can up the tension level, when nothing much is happening. [Laughs] It’s amazing! If you have birds flying in a night sky, and then Catherine Vernon comes in and says, “I fear for Reginald,” and then you see Reginald riding on his horse to London, it works. Because otherwise, what’s happening may matter a lot to these characters, but to the audience it’s not exactly “Die Hard.”
Style-wise, the closest analogue to “Love & Friendship” as a period-piece might be “Daisy Miller.”
Oh no.
In terms of the pacing. Peter Bogdanovich also likes everything quick-quick-quick.
Oh really? No, no… That’s a very bad memory. [Laughs] Actually, I’m not sure if I saw the film or if I just saw it when he did “The Tonight Show” with Cybill Shepherd. That was so embarrassing. I like Peter Bogdanovich, I like a lot of the stuff he’s done, but there was a period there when something crazy was going on. Johnny Carson turned over the show to him for a week, or a night, or something like that, and it was legendary. So awful. But we went to the same grammar school, so I have to be loyal.
I’m not sure if I’m a Henry James guy, honestly. I like the James Ivory films when he adapts E.M. Forster more than when he adapts Henry James.
What about the various screen adaptations of Jane Austen?
I’ve watched them. There are two I consider as “in the library.” One is the Emma Thompson/Ang Lee “Sense And Sensibility.” James Schamus, who collaborated on that, was just at our screening last night. And I had something to do with their conversations with producers when they were getting off the ground. I think I gave them one idea, but it was the kind of idea that someone else would’ve given them — or even 10 other people. The producer said it affected the draft, but I don’t know. I love that version because I think it’s very respectful. And the Colin Firth/Jennifer Ehle miniseries [“Pride And Prejudice“] that everyone talks about, that was a good job too. Those are two I feel a relationship with.
You mentioned docu-realism versus movie trickery. What did you think of the mid-’90s version of “Persuasion,” that was more gritty and down-to-earth?
Yeah, I hated it. [Laughs] No, that’s not true. I was really more angry that “Sense And Sensibility” was not put on a pedestal at the level it deserved. “Persuasion”? Okay, acceptable, decent. But I had a lot of problems with it. And Mary McGrory, who loved the novel, had a very eloquent attack on it. I don’t want to be dissing other people’s films, but I do think that when there’s a triumph it should be acknowledged as a triumph, and so when “Clueless” and “Persuasion” and “Sense And Sensibility”came out at the same time, I thought one was clearly better than the others.
“Persuasion”was gritty? I mean, gimme a break. Every single BBC Jane Austen adaptation now is just ugly-stick, ugly-stick, ugly-stick. They think that they’re being cool… I don’t know. One of the many problems in the film business is that we all want to work, so a lot of people who basically don’t like something get the job to adapt it, and they think they’ll make it cooler by making it something that is not intrinsic to whatever it is. They change it for no really good reason. Like, “Oh, to make it relevant we’ve got to bring in something very political and very today.” Or, “We’ll make all the people look really ugly because that’s more authentic.” Or there’s going to be a lot of mud, because in the past there was a lot of mud. I don’t know. I think there are a lot of mistaken ideas of what makes something cool.
That’s interesting in relationship to your own work, because even films of yours that are set in the “modern day” are always pushed back a little further into the past, like by a decade or so.
It’s hard to get a romantic, dramatic impression of something if it’s right now. I think you need a little time, distance, and hazy memory to make things dramatic and romantic. And if they’re not dramatic and romantic, then why show them? Why waste people’s time?
One effect of that is that those first three films you made feel timeless. The work collected in that Criterion box set helped define the independent cinema of the ’90s, but it doesn’t feel like a product of that decade, necessarily.
That was what I hoped for. Some of those films weren’t massive releases in their day, but I thought, “Okay, well, I hope they’ll last a little bit, and won’t be totally ephemeral.” We may not have had a thousand prints out there at the time, but they do last, and another generation can discover them.
