Adventures in Austenland #4
I am sitting in a chair in the shade of a large tree.
I’m wearing comfy running shoes, one of three pairs of pants that fit this post-twins body, a T-shirt under a wool cardigan I bought at a thrift store here after realizing how chilly an English summer can be, and a hat, because I’ve been getting more sun than my freckled skin can handle.
We’re sitting beside a pond wriggling with trout and smoothed by swans.
In the distance I can hear the bucolic bleats of happy little sheep.
A breeze shakes the leaves and brings the scent of water and trees.
Fifty feet from me, two actors are dressed as characters I made up and speaking lines I wrote.
I just had a sausage bun for “elevenses,” followed by a mint KitKat.
I’m wearing headphones to hear those lines and watching the scene play out on a tiny monitor, because there are thirty crew members between me and the actors.
My older two children are home in Utah in the care of their father and grandparents.
My younger two are at the flat with their loving nanny.
No one needs me at the moment. I am strangely and abnormally relaxed.
In the dictionary in my head, the definition of idyllic would read: “the state of watching Austenland being made into a movie in the English countryside on a temperate day post–sausage bun.”
I need to stop talking about sausage buns.
They are just one of those unexpected marvels I never anticipated when I imagined this experience, like the tiny daisies and frogs in the grass, the crew coffee cart that makes hot chocolate with steamed and frothy milk, the charming crew members, like Andy the production assistant with his endless tales of Africa, Scotland, and everything in between.
And how I would feel to see my story play out before my eyes. I’m in awe of all this unexpectedness.
Anxiety Brain perks up to declare: “You don’t deserve this.”
I nod in complete agreement. I’m a mom, and healthy or not, I’m accustomed to measuring my worth by my capacity to work hard and take care of everyone else. In between takes, I’m editing my current novel-in-progress on my laptop, so I can tell Anxiety Brain—see, I’m productive!
Still, I am here, surrounded by accents as diverse as the different flavors of coffee cart syrups, my skin welcoming this shifting breeze, my whole self merging so completely with this place that my own delight becomes just one of the unexpected marvels.
ON SET WITH THE GENTLEMEN
The day we shot the hunting scene, we were set up on a hill, exposed to sun and wind.
Worried that my sun hat wasn’t enough, I applied sunscreen to my face.
When the crew was resetting, JJ Feild and I both headed to craft services at the same time, so we stood chatting for a few minutes.
And then I went to use the “honey wagon” portable facilities.
After washing my hands, I glanced in the mirror and immediately noticed that something was very weird and wrong with my face.
Upon closer inspection, I discovered that I’d managed an extraordinary feat that I couldn’t repeat if I tried: I had rubbed the sunscreen in completely everywhere except around my nostrils.
Both of my nostrils—and only my nostrils—were clearly outlined with perfect white circles.
There was no way JJ hadn’t noticed. Well, at least the white nostril circles had distracted from my haystack hair.
You’d think after that I’d be careful not to humiliate myself in front of JJ.
You’d of course be wrong. Another time, my publisher, Bloomsbury, kindly sent me a big box of my books to give away on set.
Most of my books are for kids and teens, so I gave them to crew and cast who had children.
Giving them to their kids helped me get over my phobia of pressing my books onto others.
You see, it’s not me vainly assuming you’d actually like my stuff—it’s for the children!
I was signing some for James Callis’s family, when JJ came out of his trailer.
I hadn’t set any aside to off er JJ, because at the time he didn’t have kids.
But now it seemed rude to be giving books to others but not to him.
There was only one book left in the box, a novel I’d written for adults called The Actor and the Housewife.
“Hey, JJ, I have one of my books here . . .” I off ered to sign it to his partner, Neve Campbell.
She’d visited set recently (actually on the sunscreen-nostril day), and it felt less embarrassing to off er it for her than to give it to him—more like a gift and less like an unrequested reading assignment.
It was only as I was signing it that I recalled this particular book was about a mom of four from Utah who writes a screenplay and develops a deep and significant friendship with a handsome British actor.
Since writing it, I had become a mom of four from Utah who wrote a screenplay, and here I was signing my book to the girlfriend of a handsome British actor.
I fervently prayed that she would never read it.
Neve, if you did, I’d like to assure you that I’m not a weirdo freak. But if you’ve been reading all of this, then I fear the gig is up.
The surreal moments continued coming at me like ninja stars, and I’d have to pause and remind myself—this isn’t normal; this is special.
For example, the lunch break when I found myself sitting in Jerusha’s trailer with Bret McKenzie, brainstorming what power ballads might be funny for his character, Martin, to have playing.
I suggested one. Bret said, “How does that go?” and so I started to sing it.
Friends, I am not a singer. I cannot carry a simple tune.
So it was with some mortification—but also, surreal delight?
—that I made myself realize, I am singing a power ballad to Bret McKenzie.
We were both scrolling through our music libraries on our phones, and he saw that I had a lot of Muppets songs.
“You like the Muppets?” he asked. I said I adored the Muppets.
He added, so casually, “I’m working on some songs for them right now.
” A couple of years later, he’d win an Oscar for one of those songs.
Before filming Austenland, Bret was not an Academy Award winner. After Austenland, he was.
Coincidence? Definitely.
THOSE NIGHT SHOOTS
One of my favorite experiences on set—and easily a top-five career experience—happened during our night shoots: the theatrical.
Any time in a movie when you see a minute or two of an outside night scene, know that the cast and crew spent an entire night filming it. (For extra points, when the actors exhale, can you see their breath? Then it was A LOT colder than they’re letting on!)
During an English summer, it’s tricky getting in those hours, because nights are pretty short, the sun rising around 4:30 A.M. Unit call was 8 P.M. It took an hour or two to set up the first shot, and by the time filming began, it was completely dark, giving us only six or so hours to get in a full day’s work.
The theatrical is about four minutes long and so would take two full nights to shoot all the coverage.
I was looking forward to this scene more than any other.
I adore a play-within-a-play, like in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Noises Off .
When initially writing the novel, I’d believed the story would work best if the book was slim and brisk.
But I’d always regretted not writing an expanded theatrical scene.
I even wrote out what I wished I’d done, but I resisted asking my publisher to insert it into the existing novel.
There’s this feeling that once a book is published, it may as well be set in stone. (Ha! 2026 got me over that!)
While working on the screenplay, I was excited to finally blow up the theatrical from how it worked in the novel, making it the centerpiece of the movie, where all the characters take a role in a little drama and only while acting reveal their truest selves.
In the book it was a small production put on in the drawing room, but Jerusha and our inspired production designer, James, instead chose to set it up at night on the grounds.
It was so much more than my own imagination had been able to conjure.
Again, the magic of collaborative storytelling.
I walked onto set at dusk and followed the crew to a different part of the estate than we’d filmed on before.
Over a bridge, through trees, and then suddenly ahead, thousands of glints of light.
The trees opened, and in a clearing below a hilltop gazebo, the design department had set up paper lanterns, string lights, and candles, all illuminating an outdoor stage and intricately designed proscenium arch and red velvet curtains.
They opened to a garishly colored set and outrageously painted props.
It’s the closest I’ve ever experienced to entering a woods and finding myself in Faerie.
I felt so giddy, so euphoric, I literally sniff ed my beverage-cart hot chocolate to make sure it wasn’t spiked. Filming one’s favorite scene in the woods of England is a natural high, kids.
And then the actors came on set. I’d guess that for comedic actors, there’s no more joyous direction than “pretend to be actors who are bad at acting.” Nobody excels at being entertainingly terrible at something like those who are genuinely skilled at it.
And everybody was in a playful mood, delighted by their costumes that night and eager to jump in.
Usually, the video village was near the set but not in direct sight of it. For all the indoor scenes, I sat by Steph and others on camp chairs just outside the house. But tonight, the huge stage production was laid out before us, as if we were the live theater audience.