Andrew Davies et les adaptations de Jane Austen

Le site de PBS sur "The Complete Jane Austen Masterpiece" est très intéressant. Vous y trouverez beaucoup de vidéos. Certains sont des interviews d'Andrew Davies qui explique son travail sur les adaptations.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/austen/davies.html

Je vous laisser apprécier.

L'article vers lequel mène le lien présente la saison Austen mais donne surtout la parole à Andrew Davies qui pour une fois ne se montre pas trop provocateur. Même s'il utilise les mots conte de fée qui vont faire monter Damien au créneau , Davies tient aussi quelques propos intéressants sur l'universalité et la modernité de l'oeuvre de notre chère Jane. Je n'ai pas encore écouté les interviews dans le site Masterpiece, du coup je ne sais pas si ce sont les même thèmes (ou les mêmes propos), mais je peux imaginer que oui.

http://www.mercurynews.com/opinion/ci_7959858?nclick_check=1

La Complete Jane Austen Season a les honneurs du Washington Post:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/11/AR2008011103496.html

Le Washington post ne se trompe jamais^^

merci pour l'article!

Je continue à poster mes liens sur la diffusion PBS ici, même si le titre du sujet n'est pas tout à fait adéquat.

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/entertainment/20080113_Wonderfully_welcome_Jane.html

Je poste ici une interview d'Andrew Davis (pas sûre qu'elle n'ai pas été mise en lien ailleurs) où il s'exprime sur ses choix pour Sense & Sensibility. On apprend aussi que "Little Dorrit" sera fait dans le même format que "Bleak House"

Citation :

A sense of adventure
Dec 29 2007 by Our Correspondent, Western Mail source http://icwales.icnetwork.co.uk
Wales’ prince of period adaptations Andrew Davies is tempting us with a new BBC TV version of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility starting on New Year’s Day. Rob Driscoll reports

NOT for the first time, Andrew Davies has been “sexing up” Jane Austen. In Pride and Prejudice, of course, the renowned Welsh-born screenwriter managed to get Darcy into a soaking-wet shirt and reduced female viewers across the land to quivering wrecks.

And now, with Sense and Sensibility, his latest Austen adaptation for BBC1, Davies really doesn’t hang about at all, delivering a tantalising opening scene where an innocent schoolgirl is being undressed and seduced by a mystery admirer.

“Oh, it’s just a little tease at the beginning,” laughs Davies, about a scene that may well get members of the Jane Austen Society unnecessarily hot and bothered.

Meanwhile, if you’re looking for an equivalent of Colin Firth’s iconic drip-dry moment, how about Dan Stevens minus a few layers of clothing, and chopping logs in the pouring rain?

There’s no sign of that in the original book, just in case you’re wondering. Neither is a duel between male rivals-in-love Willoughby and Colonel Brandon – but there is on your television screen very soon.

For 71-year-old Davies, who was born and grew up in Rhiwbina, Cardiff, such moments of liberty are far from heresy in the sensitive world of Eng Lit but a plausible way of bringing to life certain characters who, on the printed page, might come across as just a little dusty. And these days, he’s not scared to conjure up new scenes for classic period adaptations.

Davies concedes that when he adapted 1995’s Pride and Prejudice, he was far more nervous about tinkering with a much-loved novel.

“It was my first attempt at writing a script for a major classic, although Middlemarch was shown first,” he recalls.

“I was much more excited and in trepidation – thinking, ‘Do I dare write scenes that aren’t in the book?’ Whereas doing Sense and Sensibility, I felt far more confident about that.

“I’m glad I didn’t come to Sense and Sensibility earlier, though, because I think Pride and Prejudice is pretty near perfect as a narrative. There’s nothing wrong with it, nothing very much you want to change. I just wanted to show a little bit more of Darcy.

“With Sense and Sensibility, you can’t help feeling that the guys who get the girls just aren’t good enough in the book.

“Edward is dull, he’s hesitant. And Colonel Brandon just seems old, serious, and not very glamorous. Jane Austen doesn’t really convince us that Marianne would move from being so crazy about the young Willoughby to suddenly being in love with Brandon.

“So those two guys needed a lot of work, they both needed to be made to look much sexier, really. We needed to butch them up! Otherwise you’ll never believe that our lovely young heroines would fall for them.”

Indeed, David Morrissey has never looked so glamorous and romantic as he does here, on horseback, as enigmatic war hero Colonel Brandon; while playing eligible young society bachelor Edward Ferrars (and chopping those logs) is floppy-haired Dan Stevens, so striking in Davies’ own 2006 dramatisation of The Line of Beauty. Davies himself suggested Stevens for the part. And as the dashing-but-dastardly stranger Willoughby, step forward Dominic Cooper, the heart-throb Dakin from The History Boys, who will surely sweep more than just young heroine Marianne Dashwood off her feet, in one of Austen’s most memorable swoon-and-simper encounters.

Filmed for the big screen 12 years ago by director Ang Lee in an adaptation by its star Emma Thompson (who won an Oscar for her screenwriting efforts), Sense and Sensibility is the story of the two young Dashwood sisters on a voyage of burgeoning sexual and romantic discovery.

Restrained and rational Elinor, and the wildly romantic, impulsive Marianne are respectively played by newcomers Hattie Morahan and Charity Wakefield.

“It’s thrilling to have such young, vibrant talent as the Dashwood sisters – and to have actresses much nearer their ages,” enthuses Davies.

“The sisters are 16 and 18 in the book, and 17 and 19 by the finish. Now Emma Thompson gave a great performance in the movie, but she was too old. And I think it was really just hope that casting Alan Rickman would do the trick for Colonel Brandon.

“Again, it’s a complete surprise when Marianne (as played by Kate Winslet in the film) turns to him.”

Despite such reservations, Davies admits to being a great admirer of Ang Lee’s film, “but I thought there are things that the film doesn’t do that I want to do. For example, there’s this really interesting, dark back story in the book about Brandon’s lost love who is dead, and her illegitimate daughter who he’s brought up, who Willoughby has seduced, got pregnant and abandoned, so I wanted to put that story up front, in the sense that there’s an enmity between Brandon and Willoughby right from the start, and it intensifies during the story.

“Nobody who reads the book ever remembers that this schoolgirl gets seduced and has a baby. For me, the thing to do was put it on the screen – put it on as a teaser at the beginning, so you don’t know who’s seducing her.

“In this back story, there are other goodies. Brandon refers to fighting a duel with Willoughby, so I thought, ‘Let’s put it on the screen!’ Having the experience of doing a lot of adaptations gives you the confidence to take those sort of risks. If I think, ‘This is a better way of telling the story,’ I’ll do it, without thinking, ‘Jane Austen wouldn’t like it’.”

Davies is clearly happy with the space afforded by a three-part adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, the first episode of which transmits on New Year’s Day – perfect chocolate-box telly after all the festive exertions of late.

“Jane Tranter, the head of BBC Drama, asked me if I could get four hours out of it, and I said I’d try, but it makes a very natural three hours, in truth,” says Davies. “We did six 50-minute episodes for Pride and Prejudice, but there’s more story there. And the speed of narration gets quicker on television, almost every year.”

2007 has been an exceptionally busy and successful year for Davies, “the prince of period adaptations” as he’s been previously dubbed. His inevitably controversial adaptation of Fanny Hill for BBC4 delivered the digital channel’s highest-ever ratings, while ITV1’s A Room with a View achieved favourable critical and audience reaction. Earlier in the year he adapted another Austen novel, Northanger Abbey, for ITV1, and George Grossmith’s Diary of a Nobody for BBC2, starring Hugh Bonneville as Victorian Everyman James Pooter.

Davies is rightly proud of the overall success of Fanny Hill in particular. “I’ve had wonderful feedback, much better than I thought it would have – especially when it was coinciding with Diary of a Call Girl, the Billy Piper series on ITV2,” he says. “People might say, ‘Enough of these things, glamorising prostitution, which is such a sad trade,’ but Fanny Hill was beautifully directed, and it had such an endearing and engaging performance by Rebecca Knight. It was in a way like telling any of these stories about young girls struggling their way towards self-realisation and trying to find happiness – that was the way I structured the narrative. Except it was a girl who through no fault of her own finds herself working as a prostitute. Everyone’s really pleased with it – and of course we got the biggest audience ever for BBC4.”

And what of the notion of unexpected sex scenes in a far more demure tale like Sense and Sensibility? Davies is quick to stress there is nothing as remotely explicit as shown in Fanny Hill – but he also reveals that “we do see more of that opening seduction scene.

“I wanted to bring home the dark reality of the back story.

“The man doing the seducing is Willoughby – that’s no secret to anyone who’s read the book. And I did consider the idea of letting the audience see that it’s Willoughby, in the opening scene. But that would be telling the story in a completely different way, so that when Willoughby next appears, all the audience would go, ‘No, no, don’t go there! He’s a bad guy!’ In a way, I suppose we slightly chickened out of that.

“Willoughby’s not a total villain, he’s just a bit of a sociopath really – if he can’t see them, they’re not there, and he forgets about the girls he’s gone through. We’ve got a scene where Brandon goes to see her, and there she is with her baby and she’s still in love with Willoughby, and she’s saying ‘Do you think if he could see his little son, he’d come back to me?’ and Brandon of course says, ‘I’m afraid not.’ So I’m afraid this is a very anti-Willoughby version!

“The Ang Lee film seemed very sympathetic and let him off lightly – and in fact left out a good scene in the book, where Willoughby hears that Marianne is very ill, and comes to visit, and Elinor won’t let him see her, but he pours his heart out, and offers a lot of very lame excuses for his conduct, and rather shows himself up as a bit of a s**t. We’ve got all that.”

Get Davies started on the intricacies of plot and character in classic English literature, and he’s off, like an excited librarian – albeit one with a healthy penchant for red wine. Right now, he’s immersed in Dickens again, as he is adapting Little Dorrit for BBC1, on the same scale as his acclaimed version of Bleak House two years ago.

“It’ll be eight hours of television in half hour episodes, with a one-hour opener, to be shown next autumn,” he reveals. “I think they’re aiming for the post-EastEnders slot – which worked very well last time for Bleak House. I’ve finished the first drafts, and they’re very near to getting a director. I have a dream cast in mind – but I couldn’t possibly let you in on that, because if we get different actors, they’ll think they’re second best!”

Davies has also been involved in the much-mooted film version of Brideshead Revisited, due for release in cinemas next year, although he is no longer actively involved in its production. “I wasn’t the only writer on it,” he explains. “I was the first writer. It’s now a screenplay by Andrew Davies and Jeremy Brock, but as he took over, I drew back, and they haven’t asked me back.”

As if all this wasn’t enough, Davies is also in the process of adapting Speak for England, the most recent novel by Cardiff writer James Hawes, author of Rancid Aluminium and A White Merc with Fins. “I love James’ writing, and this one is a very jolly, Evelyn Waugh-ish satire set slightly in the future.” This is again for the BBC, as a one-off drama.

It’s period drama that has become Davies’ particular forte, and he’d be foolish to ignore that. Years ago, ITV never touched costume dramas, but now they’re popular on all channels.

“Pride and Prejudice changed everything,” he says, though not immodestly.

“ITV thought, ‘Hello, 12 million viewers? We’d better have a go!” Ah yes, 12 million viewers, those were the days.

Then ITV did Moll Flanders with me, and that did really well, and ever since then, they’ve thought, if it’s popular, they’ll do them – hence their own Austen season earlier this year.

“In a way, in these difficult times, there’s something about period drama that gives everyone a bit more confidence, if you’ve got a famous book to start with.

“This is partly why I continue to do so well. The producers go, ‘This is a famous book, we’ve got Andrew Davies, that’s two parts of the equation – get a sexy-looking cast and we’re on our way’!”

Sense and Sensibility begins on BBC1 on Tuesday (New Year’s Day) at 9.10pm.

Encore un article sur les adaptations qui seront diffusées dans le cadre de Masterpiece Theatre et sur les nouveautés apportées au programme.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/tv/la-et-masterpiece11jan11,1,6490699.story?coll=la-entnews-tv

Ah, Frederick!