Sense and sensibility soundtrack 1995
In particular, he was not prepared to deal with actors who questioned direction and even made suggestions about shots. At the audition, she pretended her agent had told her she was reading for Marianne, then she nailed the part and won it based on a single reading.ĭuring filming, Lee had some problems adjusting to the Western approach to filmmaking. Kate Winslet wanted the role, but had only been asked to read for a supporting part because Lee had not cared for her work in her previous film, Heavenly Creatures (1994). They had more trouble finding the right actress for Elinor's younger, more romantic sister, Marianne. Thompson had written the role of her love interest, Edward, with Hugh Grant in mind, and he agreed to play the role for lower than his usual fee since the film was only budgeted at $15 million. When she tried to argue that at 36 she was too old to play the 19-year-old character, he suggested raising her age to 27, which would make her more believable to modern audiences as a spinster. He also suggested that Thompson would be perfect to play the older sister, Elinor.
Lee made his own suggestions on the script, often replacing lengthy dialogue scenes with visuals. At first that seemed an odd choice, but she felt that films like The Weddingīanquet (1993) and Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) combined complex family relationships with social comedy much as Austen's novels did. Meanwhile, Doran decided to offer the directing job to Taiwan-based Ang Lee. At the time, she hoped Doran would cast real-life sisters Natasha and Joely Richardson, the daughters of Vanessa Redgrave. Gradually, she focused her story as much on the relationship between the two older Dashwood sisters as on their romantic dreams. Thompson spent four years on the screenplay, going through countless story conferences and revisions.
#Sense and sensibility soundtrack 1995 series#
When Los Angeles public television aired Thompson, a sketch comedy series the actress had written as well as starred in, Doran felt she had found the perfect person to adapt Sense and Sensibility to the screen. Doran was impressed with Thompson's wit on the set. After scoring with This Is Spinal Tap (1984) and Ghost (1990), she won a place with director Sydney Pollack's production company, Mirage Enterprises, where she worked on Dead Again (1991), co-starring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson. A child of Hollywood, Doran knew a good story when she saw it, but it took two decades for her to rise to a position as a producer that would allow her to shop the property around.
Producer Lindsay Doran had first fallen in love with Austen's novel when she had briefly lived in England 25 years earlier. Not only did the film land on more than 100ġ0-best lists, but it helped propel Kate Winslet to stardom and made Emma Thompson the first person ever to follow an Oscar® for acting (for Howard's End in 1992) with one for writing. But Austen's greatest hit of 1995 was Sense and Sensibility, an adaptation of her often-forgotten first novel. Also that year, a television miniseries based on Pride and Prejudice, starring Colin Firth, scored in Great Britain (it would prove an equal success in the U.S. A film adaptation of Persuasion won critical claim earlier in 1995, while Clueless, a modernized version of Emma, made Alicia Silverstone a star the same year. Romantic comedy made a comeback in the mid-'90s, thanks largely to the re-discovery of Jane Austen, the British novelist famous for her stories of romance and manners.