![]() And I just loved how much of that story can be communicated without words. Jacque Tati was kind of like the French Charlie Chaplin. I poured over those colors doing the same thing, collecting color combinations for Emma. I went to this place, Andrew Edmonds in London, and he has this enormous collection of caricature and fashion illustrations. A lot of movies were presenting this time period in faded antique creaming yellows and browns. We’d really been looking at faded wallpaper and faded clothing in museums. For the movie, when I was doing my research, I realized how colorful the Georgian period was. Turquoise, yellow and orange, I never thought of that.” I started seeing Van Gogh paintings that way, which is interesting when you’re just collecting color combinations. ![]() I looked specifically at the color combinations that I liked, and I would think to myself, “Oh, that’s interesting. I didn’t look at what the painting might mean or the theme of it. I’d go up to a painting, but I didn’t read who it was or when it was painted. I started playing this game when I was little to collect color combinations. I really wanted to look at every piece of art, and I was so annoyed I was exhausted that I started simplifying what I was looking at. I was so easily visually stimulated, I didn’t realize I would get this fatigue and just wished I could fall asleep on the bench in the middle of the gallery. It happens to people in Florence: there’s so much incredible art they almost become depressed and can’t function. There’s a term for a sort of art fatigue. But I had this fatigue I didn’t identify until later. When I was a kid, I went to museums a lot with my mom, happily. ![]() The screwball comedy was a way of showing both sides of those characters in a way that I wanted to exaggerate. If someone started playing music, the carpet would get rolled up, furniture moved aside, and they would all want to dance. It works well with this Regency period in 1815: there are these rigid social rules and class separation, but they did love to have fun. There is a little bit of a class system in the way the society is presented in Emma, and that’s why that screwball element works, because all the squares are so shocked by the behavior of the wild one. In those comedies like Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday, there’s a set of rules, a formality to the behavior and society. I made the whole cast watch Bringing Up Baby. Screwball comedy is a huge influence on me. They just started doing it as if it was second nature, and in a way, it made the movie a little bit like a ballet with words. The rule was they needed to deal in sincerity always, but there was this sort of artificial to the complex choreography they were all doing physically. There is a lot of choreography in the way the actors move. has a ballet-like quality to it on purpose. There’s a really amazing fight in The Turning Point between Shirley McClain and Anne Bancroft, and Baryshnikov is in it, who I was very hot to trot for. I was so into The Turning Point! To me, that was steaming hot. Then there are few traditional classical pieces in it that really reflect maybe the heightened emotional state of the story, and the maturity that’s coming to Emma. The childlike music encouraged her bad behavior, and then the folk music was this earthy depth to the world around her, and the sort of real people in the town. But she really is the woman of the house from a young age and she doesn’t have a mother. Emma is intelligent beyond her years, except she’s very emotionally stunted. I wanted that in the music in this movie. I’ve always loved the music in - some would probably feel it was too obvious and childlike, but I’m drawn to that. The score is like treating the movie as if it’s an animated film. I have a funny obsession with the early live action Disney movies. When my daughter was born, I bought it, and then she and I watched it. When video stores became a reality when I was 17 or 18 and we had a VHS, I rented Pollyanna. By phone, de Wilde recounted nine artists, ballets, movies, and “sexy ballet movies” that anchored her own offbeat coming of age. For her first feature film, the rock photographer Autumn de Wilde wanted to adapt Jane Austen’s frustrated hero to a period piece dramedy. A heroine’s nosebleed spurts in the middle of a declaration of love a cynical dad doesn’t glide down a stately staircase, he hops down them. with a period at the end - arrives as a confection: ruffles and pastels and sweetly embarrassing ailments. Director Autumn De Wilde on the movies, music, and TV that inspired her own coming of age.
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