"I wanted to emphasise the men in this story, especially Darcy himself." "And didn't make it all a girlie thing so..." "So I started off with these men on great, big horses, kicking up the dirt and galloping into this area and creating a bit of a stir." "You know, tried to get into the story in a way that anybody who's read a girl's romance in a comic can respond to it." "I mean, I wasn't trying to dumb it down, but I wanted to emphasise that there is all this in jane Austen as well as a beautiful literary style and so on." "Jane Austen made rather too strict rules for herself." "She would never write a scene with a man on his own or two men without a woman present because she said, "I've never been present at such a scene" ""and I wouldn't presume to imagine how they would talk."" "Of course, she would have been able to do it." "She was a terrific dramatist." "But I thought what that means is that we never really get to understand anything very much about the men." "'Cause we see them so much from the girls' point of view so a lot of it is speculation." "Plus, of course, the times when they're with the women." "So I thought it would be interesting to take these opportunities." "And also, as I've said, I wanted to remind the audience of the physicality of these people." "So I quite shamelessly took every opportunity to get them out of their kit whenever I could see a valid excuse for it." "So I did have Mr Darcy taking a bath in one of those tin baths on the ﬂoor with the servant pouring water over him." "He's the perfect romantic hero because he's mysterious enough and stand-offish enough and arrogant enough to, er..." "To give women a little bit of a tremor of fear as well as attraction." "In a strange way, I think that's important." "I also think he's a very misunderstood character because Elizabeth at first sees him as impossibly proud, arrogant and snobbish." "The cast, assembled by Simon Langton and Sue Birtwistle, was a dream cast." "But, of course, you don't know that at the time." "Colin Firth was Darcy." "He does brooding and looking down his nose in a way that few other actors can and yet he's sexy at the same time." "It's that extraordinary ability to be so aloof and withdrawn and yet he is so hot as well." "I think it was the casting that really got to me." "Jennifer Ehle, I mean, she is what I call a proper actress." "And Colin Firth." "Alison Steadman, David Bamber." "All those kind of people." "Anna Chancellor." "Simon Langton directing." "So this was top notch stuff." "It wasn't going to be what I call low-life in any sense." "So I got very excited." "And, you know, I had people, readers, writing to me saying, you know, "Does Baz Bamigboye have shares in this production?"" "He writes about it every week, but my sense was that it was going to be something important." "And also around that time, there's other stuff going on in the world." "The OJ Simpson trial was going on, so people were hooked on stuff." "The Diana-Charles marriage was unravelling." "People were hooked on to that." "I'm not saying that this was a replacement, but it was something else to get hooked on to." "When you look at the sort of frenzy that surrounds programmes like Big Brother now, this was the Big Brother of 1995." "Everyone was talking about it." "And the broadsheets became tabloid in their response to it." "You had The Times talking about Darcy's trousers being so tight you could see the small change in his pocket." "You know, it's so out of character for the broadsheets to behave like that." "And it was cross-gender as well." "It wasn't just female writers getting excited about Darcy." "It was also male writers talking about the wider context of the piece." "You know, the class divide, the snobbery, the vanity and everything that surrounded that marvellous story that Austen created." "When you're casting, you've got to find somebody who can say these very witty, sometimes rather cruel, cutting remarks as if he thought of them himself." "You know, not like he's just learned them off by heart and saying them." "So Sue Birtwistle," "I mean, almost as soon as we knew we were going to do it, she had thought of Colin Firth." "And I was a bit apprehensive about this because Colin I knew as a terrific actor, but I didn't think he looked physically anything like Darcy because he had fair to ginger hair." "And he'd always had a bit of a disinclination for playing heroic parts as well." "I'd had him in something called Circle of Friends, playing, you know, a bit of an upper class scoundrel in that who seduces one of these Irish sisters." "And he did that very well." "But we thought actually what he's got to do is dye his hair black because we thought we can't have a ginger Darcy, can we?" "I mean, he wasn't really ginger, but he was inclining in that direction." "And also, I must say, he did go to the gym and got himself sort of lean and mean to play Darcy because you couldn't have a Darcy with chubby cheeks, could you?" "At least, that's what we thought." "So that was part of it." "Also, one of the things people never think about much, but I think is terribly important is that" "it's nice if the hero's got a beautiful voice." "And Colin's got a lovely voice to listen to." "So even when he's saying rather mean things, you just think," ""Oh, I'm thrilled at the sound of his voice,"" "'cause it's very well modulated..." "You know, he's just a beautiful speaker of the lines." "And he and Jennifer just went together so perfectly, I thought." "And they got on very well." "Good day, Miss Bennet." "Elizabeth Bennet is loads of people's favourite heroine in all of English literature." "She's got to be able to do so many things." "Obviously, she's attractive." "But also she's quite tomboyish in a way." "She's quite energetic." "She goes for long runs and long walks and she doesn't mind getting muddy." "There's all that element to it." "And certainly, Jennifer Ehle had that kind of mischievous quality about her really that really suited Elizabeth Bennet, I thought." "I remember one of those scenes where" "Darcy's seen her at a dance before." "And at first, he doesn't seem to think much of her at first and he says he isn't going to dance with her, he hasn't seen anybody who..." "He thinks her sister's quite good-looking, but he's not interested in her." "But he does have a good look at her." "And then again, he sees her for the second time when she's come running across the fields because her sister's been taken ill at Netherfield and she wants to see how she is." "And so they come face to face and there's Elizabeth who's got kind of muddy up to the ankles and her face is ﬂushed from her exertions." "And in my stage direction," "I thought this is the moment when Darcy suddenly realises that he fancies Elizabeth very much." "And to his surprise, he finds that he's got an erection." "And I just..." "I just wrote this in the stage direction, it was not directions to the cameraman as to where to focus his camera." "But it was really just to make him laugh, I suppose." "But also for Colin to choose this as the moment, you know, when he's just got to act being tremendously turned on." " Miss Bennet." " Mr Darcy." "I am come to enquire after my sister." " On foot?" " As you see." "Would you be so kind as to take me to her?" "BAZ BAMIGBOYE:" "I think when I interviewed Jennifer before she started shooting, she just said that there's a yearning and a passion in the story." "And that came through, that yearning and that passion." "And then you had Alison Steadman as the doting mother." "And, look, you know," "Colin Firth was, I suppose, everyone's..." "He was the personification of Darcy." "He was dark and he was brooding." "And he kind of had this upper class sense that was untouchable." "It is about the story and also the way the characters played to each other," "It is about the story and also the way the characters played to each other, but also the actor." "So, you know, Colin Firth coming and we did, you know, first try-on and fitting to see what we could..." "You know, how lovely..." "We didn't have to work very hard, I have to say." "And the only thing he was particularly nervous about was the britches, you know, the dancing britches." "He said his calves were little, but we never did it, you know." "He said, "I might need padded this..." But he didn't." "But my aim with Colin and the boys was to, and the army boys, was to create something that felt like jeans and a T-shirt." "So the britches needed to work." "You know, sort of on the hip really." "So that they would look and feel sexy." "I went to Italy actually to source the uniform because I knew that we A, couldn't afford to make it and B, we didn't have time." "And Baruzzi's in Italy, actually, the way that they construct their uniform is almost like real." "And they never have it altered, so, you know, or bits taken off and put back on." "So it has a real, lovely complete integrity to it." "So I hired all that, the Red Coats, but we had to make the britches because the Italians like a sort of slinky thing." "Stretchy, slinky thing which doesn't do anything for your front at all." "So we made the britches." "I had probably about just over two months' prep." "Which actually, considering the length of the shoot is 20 weeks, isn't very much." "So immediately I set off and I took a camera that I wasn't very familiar with." "It was before digital photography, so now, I mean, it's easy-peasy, isn't it?" "And took photos without a ﬂash of all the things that I was interested in." "Went to Platt Hall in Manchester where there's a big collection, archive, of fabric swatches, cottons and silks." "Just absolutely thrilling it was." "And then I realised out of all of this," "I took bonnets, I took actual existing dresses, and shoes, anything that was accessories, and there's very little men's clothing surviving." "I think the London Museum have a wonderful coat." "There probably are other pieces, but I didn't see very much." "I think it's just 'cause it gets worn out." "And I realised that in order to create this sort of fresh look on these young girls that one needed to feel it was very modern in a way that you could go, you know, to Top Shop and buy your summer dress." "It's got to have that sort of energy and zing about it." "One would probably have to print these fabrics 'cause all the Indian prints that you can buy are so recognisable." "And you have to put a colour wash over them in order to mute them and just generally, you have to alter them." "So I thought, well, the way to do this was to actually find somebody who could print it for me." "And there was a daughter of a friend of mine who had done a textile course in Liverpool, and Ruth's a very old friend of mine and she took it on and borrowed the print tables at Bradford  Ilkley College" "to print it off." "Then she created these prints." "Lizzie, look." "What do you think?" "Kitty says not, but I think it becomes me very well." "A wonder that you ask me then." " You look very nice." " Thank you." "I was given one little red shoe, from probably between 1800 and 1810, by a friend of mine who found one on a theatre ﬂoor and we put it on Julia Sawalha's foot and it fitted." "So we got this man in Northampton, a shoemaker, who copied the little shoe." "And it's got a little heel and things." "Like a little kitten heel." "We had a picture one day of the actress who played Lydia, Julia Sawalha." "We had a picture one day of the actress who played Lydia, Julia Sawalha." "And it's a lovely picture." "All she's doing, sitting in her costume, with her glasses, she had a script by her side, and she was gently sort of pulling on some white tights and suddenly, this was this..." "Deemed to be this highly charged erotic picture we put on page three of the Daily Mail." "That was the level of excitement that was going on while it was shooting, and afterwards it was crazy." "I mean, we sent one reporter posing as Elizabeth Bennet, another, a male reporter, of course, playing as Mr Darcy, getting them up in the costumes and live like those characters for a week." "I mean, any stunt we could think of to get stuff in the paper about Pride and Prejudice, we did." "I think the first time we realised that it was an exciting project was when we had a press screening." "And the reaction at the press screening was unlike anything else that I'd been to." "There was a real excitement about it, a buzz that there was something special that was going to engage on so many different levels." "And, also, period drama didn't have a particularly hot reputation in commercial terms." "For example, ITV hadn't done any for years, the BBC had done The Old Devils and Middle-march, but Pride and Prejudice, the most popular of Jane Austen's novels, just struck a chord." "And when we saw the media reaction, we then knew that this was going to be a major hit." "All the previous dramatisations of Jane Austen had just been, I suppose, very Cranford like." "They had sort of concentrated on the little details and they'd always been about young ladies and gentlemen buttoned up to the neck, having polite conversations in wobbly sets." "I wanted to make it very out-of-doorsey and emphasise the physical aspect that these people were bodies as well as minds, and find lots of opportunity for showing them doing energetic things like galloping on horses and diving in lakes." "I wanted to show him as a natural man really." "Or taking the chance just not to be, you know, a man in society with all his responsibilities because it comes at a particular time." "He's been in London for weeks, you know, spending time with very boring, snobby people." "He's ridden up to his family home where, in a day's time, he's got to host a big house party of the same rather dull, snobby people." "And he's got a little bit of time for himself, just a little window of opportunity to just be on his own." "And I thought, "What would he do?"" "Well, it's a blazing hot day, he's ridden all the way from London, there's this lake." "What better than just to dive into it?" "So that's how it came about." "I had no idea it was going to turn into, you know, this kind of famous sexy scene that all the women of England got so excited about." "But it was a nice little scene." "I thought about, you know, his conversation with Elizabeth afterwards." "I knew it would be quite a funny scene." "But I thought it would be mostly about social embarrassment." "These two people having a very polite and stilted conversation and completely ignoring the fact that one of them is soaking wet from head to foot." "But somehow women seemed to respond to it in a very special way." "And still do." "Mr Darcy." "Miss Bennet." " I..." " I did not expect to see you, sir." "We understood all the family were from home" "or we should never have presumed..." " I returned a day early." "Excuse me, your parents are in good health?" "Yes." "They are very well." "Thank you, sir." "I'm glad to hear it." "The scene where Colin goes into the lake." "Oh, how dare he?" "He goes into the lake, and then emerges dripping wet, and, yeah, that created a big stir." "I think that was maybe a front page picture." "I can't remember now, but it was big news." "Very exciting, you know." "You know, an actor with his clothes on, dripping wet." "Shock, horror." "I mean, really!" "But you had to put yourself in the perspective of Pride and Prejudice." "You know, would he have done this?" "Would Mr Darcy have done this in full view of Elizabeth Bennet?" "We don't think so, but it was great drama." "We had a great party." "A sort of thank you from the controller of BBC 1 to all the cast and crew on Pride and Prejudice just after Colin Firth got back from filming Nostromo in South America." "So he had no idea that all this excitement around Darcy was going on." "He had an inkling, but he had no idea until the location manager came up and told him he was a sex god and did he have any idea what that meant." "And he was absolutely bemused by it." "This complete change because he wasn't known for playing romantic leads." "And because he'd been away in Cartagena shooting Nostromo he'd been isolated from all the media frenzy." "He'd done his work before, but to come back and be faced with pages and pages of Darcy mania must have been an extraordinary experience for him." "In the first half, the book was easy." "Everybody seems to be in roughly the same place." "Jane Austen actually writes some beautiful scenes with lots of dialogue in them." "And in a way, I felt it was easy as well as a pleasure to adapt the first three episodes for the first half of the book." "Then everybody buggers off to different parts of the country and writes each other letters in the second half." "To Miss Elizabeth Bennet." "We have this very important letter that Darcy writes to Elizabeth in which he's explaining" "why he's being like he is." "And he tells the whole story of his dealings with Mr Wickham, which has got the story of Georgiana." "And he also explains, you know, why he's not too pleased about allying himself to Elizabeth's family." "He starts it all dressed up and takes all night writing it." "And I finish with it the next morning and he's just in his vest." "(LAUGHING)" "And when he's talking about Wickham..." "I reversed the order of things in the letter and Jane Austen starts off with the family and then goes on to Wickham." "But I thought he could start with Mr Wickham and then we ﬂash back into that story, so, in a way, I'm creating the character of Georgiana for the readers because she hardly appears in the story at all." "And so we were able to give Emilia Fox her first part on television." "And she was just so lovely and ravishing." "And, of course, when you see her, you immediately start sympathising with her and completely changing your attitude to Wickham." "So that kind of worked." "So I told all that Wickham stuff, finished up with Darcy in his vest, then cut to Elizabeth when Darcy is talking about" "the behaviour of her mother and her sisters at the ball." "Elizabeth remembers those scenes and so we ﬂash back to them as well, but in quite an exaggerated way, so that her mother appears almost like a kind of cartoon character and Lydia seems to be, you know, possibly sort of Beryl the Peril-ish" "sort of charging around and being impossibly noisy and vulgar and flirty." "We kind of knew pretty well that we'd done a good show and that we'd..." "All the performances, and especially the lead performances, had been very good." "But we still thought we were appealing to very much of a niche audience." "The kind of people who'd probably read the book and loved it already." "You know, just the standard classic serial audience." "Well-educated, middle-aged to elderly, most of them." "So it was a great surprise when it got this 10 to 12 million audience, which really put it into" "very popular, you know, hit show category." "It engaged across every demographic." "Male, female, young, old, it didn't matter." "It was a fantastic romance story." "It was about the class divide." "It was of its time and yet contemporary." "So it engaged on so many different levels and it was also, the classic phrase now, "water cooler talk"." "So people were talking about it in the office the next day." "11 million people were watching it every week and that built as well." "So there was a real interest in the latest shenanigans with Darcy and Elizabeth and because it was spread over six weeks, it gave people a chance to actually build up the loyalty with the series, which you never get with a single film or a two-parter." "There were quite a lot of letters that came about the wedding dress." "Jennifer's wedding dress." "And how could they, where could they get one?" "And I think we generally steered people in the right direction." "The hat that Alison wore to the wedding, with feathers down the back and things, which I wasn't there on the day, and she rang me up and said," ""We don't know which way round this is supposed to go."" "And in the end, it doesn't really matter." "She could have had the feathers across the front, she could have had them..." "They were on the back." "And there she is bobbing along with the family." "Rather to our surprise, this was really very well received by the Jane Austen Society." "'Cause even if..." "They could see it was an intelligent adaptation." "We weren't doing all the extra things that we did, you know, just for the sake of it or just to make a sensation or anything, but we did have reasons for it." "So even if they didn't entirely agree with what we'd done, they could see the point of it." "No, I mean, we did get some get some criticisms along the lines of," ""I suppose you realise that the kind of pen Darcy was writing with" ""had not been invented until 20 years after."" "Which we thought, "Oh dear," you know, and one always gets this." ""Those flowers were very modern ﬂowers, very modern tulips."" "We used to get those kind of things as well and you think, "Oh dear!"" "They are very elegant." "Better pleased with themselves than what they see, I think." "The difference between the two camps was something that was terrific to do really." "Because the Bingleys can be, you know, all glamour, you know, Gucci really, feathers and bits of this and that." "And it was fantastic to use the very bright colours on them." "There was an orange dress which was overlaid." "I think was a very bright orange underneath and I remember going, "Oh no!"" "Because I thought I'd been too bold, but actually it's just fantastic." "I think my favourite scene in the whole thing is the one in the music room at Pemberley." "Which is the moment when I think she first realises that she's deeply in love with him." "Jane Austen writes such wonderful lines, but when it's a film or a visual thing, the best moments come when nobody's saying anything and it's just looks." "And that was the best scene for me of the whole thing." "Certainly the most moving one." "They just did all this so perfectly." "I mean, usually when" "I'm writing something, you know, I get moments here and there when I think, "Oh," you know, "they could have acted that a bit better."" "But I never really felt that in Pride and Prejudice." "Once or twice towards the end I thought there were bits that I could have done better." "There's a bit right at the end when he finally makes his proposal." "Dearest, loveliest Elizabeth." "They seem to be doing it on the walk and I thought I should have written in quite clearly that they stop walking and they..." "'Cause you got to have them standing still so that you can get those wonderful looks and glances between them." "And, you know, in a way, I wish I could have the chance to re-write just that scene anyway." "I think Pride and Prejudice is one of those enduring pieces." "It's a cracking story." "It's got all the elements of romance, passion, unrequited love, frustration, a class divide, snobbery and vanity, and those eternal themes." "And it'll be one of those pieces," "I think, which people perhaps in 50 years' time will look back on as a defining moment, certainly in television drama, but it also stimulated a whole raft of feature film period adaptations." "There's Sense and Sensibility following hard on the heels and suddenly Austen was the entertainer of the year." "In Entertainment Weekly magazine in the US, or Vanity Fair calling her the hottest writer in entertainment." "I think, "Bizarre!" She's been dead for nearly 200 years and she's bigger than John Grisham."