Becoming Jane Panel

On July 16, the Tribeca Cinemas Series hosted a collection of Jane Austen scholars and actress Anne Hathaway for a preview screening of Becoming Jane. In anticipation of the film's release, Hathaway, who plays Austen, and director Julian Jarrold, shared their thoughts at a recent roundtable about the great author's life, her work, her love interests and the formidable task of re-creating one of literature’s greatest and most beloved icons.

Julian, Anne is an interesting – and some would say unusual – choice to play Jane Austen. How did you come to the decision to cast her?

Julian Jarrold : It’s very hard to get that balance between the comedy—the sort of feisty, fresh kind of feeling—and someone who’s very young, who’s 21. You’ve got to be quite a good actress to pull it off. I was deliberately looking to cast people who hadn’t done English period dramas before, because I think there’s a sort of secondhand way of falling into those things that feels a bit dry -- a bit like museum pieces. So we ended up casting a Scot [actor James McAvoy who plays Tom Lefroy] and an American in the two leading roles … which seems crazy, but I did want to parachute somebody into this sleepy English community, this community of English thespian actors; somebody to sort of spark off them, really.

In England there is this perception of Jane Austen as being a 40-year-old spinster who sat on the sofa making very clever, rather forbidding kinds of pronouncements, and one really wants to go for the 21-, 22-year old, before she becomes this great genius, just this short period in her life where maybe she had this romance with Tom Lefroy. So there was this massive pressure about playing a genius.

Anne, did you feel that pressure?

Anne Hathaway : The terror was incalculable. The pressure was intense during all of filming, but I really held fast to what drew me to the project to the first place, which was what an amazing chance to play this woman who has only ever been seen as an icon, and try to make her real-- make sure she’s seen as flesh and blood. That greatly appealed to me as an artist trying to suss out what her artistic influences might have been.

From what I understand, there was resistance [from Jane Austen fans] to me being cast. Based on the work that they had available to judge me on, I mean, who would have thought that the girl from The Princess Diaries would have been able to play Jane Austen? It’s a fair question. That being said, I have done work since then that established me as a more credible actress, and hopefully this movie will continue to do so. We’ll see. I’ve realized this so far now: between this film and other movies that I’ve done, you’re never going to be able to make everyone happy, particularly when people have a long-standing, deeply-rooted love for the subject matter. So you want to be respectful of everyone, but at the end of the day you also want to make a good movie and do your job well. It was kind of a hybrid of trying to make them happy, trying to make myself happy and trying to make the picture as good as it could be. I’ve been really pleased with the reaction of Jane Austen fans. A lot of them seemed to appreciate what we did. A lot of them seemed to like the film. Some don’t, but like I said, we knew that going in.

On that note, the relationship between Jane and Tom is probably the most controversial aspect of the film for hard-core Jane Austen fans. What do we really know about their relationship? How much was true and how much “filling in the blanks” did you do for the film?

Hathaway: We came up with a plausible argument based on fact.  We have 160 letters that Jane Austen wrote, but there is evidence to suggest that she wrote over 4,000.  [Most] evidence different parts of her life—her reactions to the world around her, different events—all of it is lost, and as a result, she is going to be an enigma for as long as people are interested in her.

Jarrlod : More recently, a couple of biographies have sort of honed in on this romance with Tom Lefroy because it’s the older bios that tend to say she didn’t have this romance; that somehow, out of her imagination, she was able to portray these amazing characters, which I never thought was completely believable. Straight after [the alleged romance], she started writing First Impressions—and then Sense and Sensibility, and Northanger Abbey—quite quickly afterwards, and apparently this was her first proper romance. It seems more than reasonable to believe that there was a connection between the two. So in terms of the facts around that are known, we’ve followed those as closely as possible. Her sister Cassandra, who was a lot more conservative character, burnt most of the letters, so only a few reference this romance. We’ve taken the facts that we know, and then we’ve imagined to a degree with this film with reference to the characters in her novels which connect to her life.

Does anyone know why Cassandra burned the letters?

Jarrold: Well, [Jane] was quite rude about people in her letters. Cassandra was quite a conservative character, and no one knows exactly, but there are guesses that Cassandra wanted to keep a very safe record of her life. It’s just a terrible thing that’s happened, because it would have been fascinating. Of the ones that exist, there is a quite sharp commentary about people and things that happened and these references to the Tom Lefroy romance. It’s a great tragedy that they’ve gone. We would know a whole lot more about her life if we had them.

How has this film changed your perception of Jane Austen? Are you both “Jane-ites” now? Were you fans of her work before?

Hathaway : Jane Austen was a lot more fun, a lot more mischievous than people ever give her credit for. We think of her as a very proper spinster, and a lot more happened than her standard biography, which was that she lived in Hampshire, never married, wrote five books. In making this film, I felt that it was a chance to learn a lot more about someone who meant a lot in my life-- about books that meant a lot in my life.

Jarrold : I love Sense and Sensibility, actually. I don’t think I’m a “Jane-ite.” I see things slightly differently. I think Sense and Sensibility is a slightly under-rated novel, actually, and obviously it’s quite a big influence on this, in terms of Marianne, and her virtue and sensibility, and the consequences of that, really.

And what about you, Anne? You’ve said that her books meant a lot in your life – when were you introduced to Jane Austen?

Hathaway : I first read Jane Austen when I was fourteen years old. We had to pick an author who had written more than one book and compare them. I don’t remember the exact parameters of the assignment. All I remember is that my brother was looking at colleges. We took a road trip from New Jersey to Vermont, and I had a lot of time to read, and it was nice to feel transported. That’s what Jane Austen did: she became my friend. Her books became my friends, and when I was in college, she seemed to come up in every single English class. She’s a wonderful author because her work does transport. It's fantastic entertainment. There is so much going on -- so many layers to it -- that you can’t help but analyze the characters and try to understand them intellectually as opposed to only for entertainment value. So it’s wonderful, and for this project, I really had to be analytic when I was studying it. Persuasion, which I had never read before, became my favorite book.

Your next project, Julian, is a film adaptation of the classic novel and television series Brideshead Revisited. Are you nervous about taking on yet another iconoclastic period story and bringing it to life on film?

Jarrold: I was very nervous about it at first because I thought, “Why do this again?” But you know, that was a 14-hour TV series. It’s quite a slow-moving, languorous thing, and I think that the [new script] concentrates on different aspects of a really wonderful, classic novel. I think to do a film version, there’s nothing wrong with that.

It’s always a challenge when people know the books. They bring their own expectations to it, and when you change things, you have to be very sure that you’re changing them for very good reasons. What’s interesting is that they don’t often conform to the rules of filmmaking in terms of where the climax should happen or whether the heroes should get together or have happy endings., They go off in slightly strange and different directions, which makes it quite an interesting—difficult, but interesting—thing to do, and does allow for sometimes more fresh ways of telling a story than if you were doing an original, contemporary piece.

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