Adventures in Austenland #5
Jerusha started with a wide shot, so in the first take they played the four-minute scene through its entirety.
It began with the genius who is Jennifer Coolidge, dressed as Aphrodite (and sporting the same long, redheaded wig Cate Blanchett wore in Elizabeth: The Golden Age), clambering out of a giant clamshell.
And it only got more ridiculous from there.
JJ Feild in a Roman soldier “miniskirt,” James Callis in Kabuki makeup, Ricky Whittle channeling his inner Gladiator, and ending with everyone falling to the ground dead.
As soon as Jerusha called cut, there was an explosion of pent-up laughter from a hundred crew members.
Some straight-up crumpled to the ground.
I, for one, had been laughing in silence—because the laughter shook me so hard I couldn’t even manage a breath. I could see Steph beside me in a similar state of noiseless but burning suppressed convulsions. There were a few seconds when I literally worried I might be dying.
We moved on to the next take, and my laughter only got worse.
It was a violent shaking of my whole torso.
My stomach hurt with the effort to hold it in, my eyes stung.
I worried my brain wasn’t getting enough oxygen.
Marvelous how close laughter is to weeping.
Even though I held both my hands over my mouth and plugged my nose (to keep from snorting), my face probably purple from lack of breathing, my eyes freely running with tears, it was impossible to stay quiet.
I couldn’t help emitting strangled little squeaks and gasps, and from my throat gulping and gurgling sounds when the hysterics led to openly sobbing.
I’ve never tried so hard in my life not to laugh and never failed so miserably.
By the third take, the sound engineer asked the video village to relocate farther from set, and I worried my squeaks and gurgles were to blame, but I could not control it under threat of death.
The crew was much better at holding in the howling till after the take than novice me, but even the most seasoned among us couldn’t contain it indefinitely.
I wonder how these takes must have sounded to any woodland passersby. Each one went like this:
“Action”
Silence
The actors’ dialog
Silence
“Cut”
A BOOM like a laughter bomb exploded
During these two nights of shooting the theatrical, I noticed a heightened camaraderie on set.
“This is FUN!” people seemed to say, some with a little surprise.
“A night shoot! And it’s fun! Who ever would have thought?
” No one was bored. No one complained. It wasn’t until 2:30 A.M. that I began to see people laughing less and looking a little fatigued.
In general, I heard this feedback from the crew: Austenland is a fun set.
This is a relaxed set. I was fascinated with movie-set subculture and ate lunch with crew as often as I could, listening to all the stories, such as nightmare directors who terrorized the crew.
“The mood trickles down from the top,” one costumer told me.
And since Jerusha (director) and Keri (star) both exuded relaxed professionalism, everyone else was free to do the same.
But the night shoots were particularly special, as if it were a good group of friends enjoying their first sleepover.
On break the first night, I was sitting with some of the actors as we ate our dinner. Instead of the usual breaks and food trucks, night shoots ran tighter, and so most everyone got the same takeout-style meals. James Callis was the first to open his dinner container, and JJ asked him what it was.
James prodded the meaty bit with a fork and said, “Not sure, really.” He threw a glance at the dark woods. “Er, has anyone noticed that since we’ve been here, there are fewer squirrels about?”
JJ said simply, “I’ve eaten squirrel.”
James, always a brilliant ad-libber, replied enthusiastically, “Oh, it’s gorgeous, squirrel. I won’t have a word said against it.”
I was so grateful to the actors for sounding just so completely and beautifully British. And also grateful that the meal wasn’t actually squirrel.
Later in our week of night shoots, we did quieter, smaller scenes with only two characters, such as the foal-birthing scene.
I remember sitting by Steph near the stable as the animal handlers led in the mare and what was supposed to be her newborn foal.
Surely it had been a newborn foal at some point in the past .
. . though perhaps not the recent past. That foal was taller than me.
As they filmed, they couldn’t get it to stop eating hay.
With Jerusha tossing ideas to him, Bret McKenzie adlibbed lines like, “That’s a big baby.
The poor mother, she’ll never recover. You should have seen the afterbirth.
” Steph and I leaned into each other, pressing shoulders as if we could support each other through our attempt not to laugh out loud.
The effort gave me cramps of pain and made my eyes stream.
This scene became the only post-wrap reshoot when, months later in Utah, Bret redid part of this scene with a much younger foal. Watching the film, you could never tell that the same scene was shot on two continents. Movie magic.
On some of those nights in England, it rained.
I wore a long down parka and held an umbrella over my head.
The crane light cast an unearthly gray pallor on the trees.
The rain was fine and thin and traced white scratches against the night air.
The pattering sound on my umbrella was as cozy as a fire’s crackle.
I was warm and dry, in the rain at 3 A.M., and completely content.
It’s always astounding when these kinds of moments will creep up on me, announce themselves with a sleepy “mew,” and curl up in my lap.
When all the anxiety melts away and I am not standing alone and aware of every pinprick of living, every raw surface area separating me from the rest of the world, but instead all borders melt, and I am them and they are me and we are rain and night and storytelling, under the glow of a crane light as perfect as a moon.
THE FREEDOM OF SILENCE
All good sets have tight discipline and caution is taken to never ruin a take with unnecessary noise. So the scenes that didn’t require sound were like a great exhale.
Another one of my pet scenes was Jane’s transformation sequence, a montage that would eventually be backed with “Bette Davis Eyes.” I’d visualized it a hundred times: a group of Hot Servants walks across the lawn toward the other characters, they part, and through them strolls Jane, looking like a Regency ten.
A breeze blows off her bonnet and she doesn’t even care, because how can a goddess of Austenian perfection be bothered with bonnets?
We’d hoped for a sunny clear day, but it was gray and drizzling. Somehow through the magic of cameras and lighting, you can’t tell.
Jerusha thought she could use a few more men than the featured extras currently on set, so they recruited four male crew members.
They caused quite a riot when they walked onto set in full costume, complete with gray wigs and stuff ed breeches fronts.
Since there was no sound in the scene to capture, the crew was free to laugh out loud and hoot for their coworkers.
Similarly, the carnival scene was mostly a sound-free day, and since we needed so many extras, the set was full of crew family and friends.
It felt like summer Christmas. Between takes, I went on the giant slide with the production designer’s kids.
I stood in the audience of a stage where Ricky Whittle’s character does a striptease.
Also filmed but cut was a ballroom dance between Ricky and Jane Seymour, both having been contestants on dance competition shows—Dancing with the Stars (Jane) and Strictly Come Dancing (Ricky).
Bret’s character came onstage, played a saxophone terribly, and was booed off .
Another of my favorite filming days was the music video.
While working the screenplay, I relished exploring ways to take advantage of this medium.
In my opinion, a book-based movie shouldn’t just be visual SparkNotes.
I think it works best when you take the concept, characters, and general plot of the book and then ask yourself, if I was building this story from the ground up as a movie, what would I do?
In one draft, I’d proposed to Jerusha three different daydream/fantasy sequences—ways to visually get inside Jane’s head and show how she was feeling.
For example, on her first day in Austenland, Jane wanders the house alone and finds the empty ballroom, and I thought, why not jump into a “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend”–esque daydream sequence where she dances with a room full of imaginary gentlemen?
At some point in the revising process, we got feedback that the fantasy sequences weren’t working, and we cut them. But during the shoot, Jerusha decided to put one of them back in. My favorite one. I was thrilled.
Jane is trying to be a good Regency lady and is pushed to play piano in the evening drawing room, even though she isn’t actually a pianist. In the book, she plucks out a very basic “Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater,” but Jerusha thought it’d be funnier if it was a modern song that juxtaposed even more with the setting.
So Jane picks out a few notes of “Hot in Herre” by Nelly, morphing into a fantasy music video with all the drawing room denizens dancing and lip syncing.
As I recall, Bret McKenzie was supposed to be off that day, but he came back in to contribute to the choreography.
Who better to help with the music video than half of Flight of the Conchords?