How long did the process take from start to finish? I then worked from that very long, dialogue-heavy screenplay manuscript, so as not to be too overwhelmed by the original book itself. I pretty much did a quick dramatization of the letter material shuffled it as dialogue scenes and encounters and did a very rough sort of edit of everything. I was doing paid work on other things and had this as my fun project, my lark – and I would slowly adapt it. I didn’t want to sweat over it and stress over it – I wanted to view it as something lighthearted and gay. I knew that to do it well, it would take me a long time. What kinds of challenges did its epistolary form present you with? What was the adaptation process like? And in the novel I wrote, which is based on the film, I bulked up my edition by adding the original Lady Susan as the second half. I personally saw it in an edition of Northanger Abbey – they put the fragments of Lady Susan behind the story to bulk up the edition. But it was published and it has been in different editions since then. We’re talking about the Victorian age, so they were very circumspect about what they printed. Her literary nephew (James Edward Austen-Leigh) wrote a memoir of his aunt – A Memoir of Jane Austen – and he added a lot of the fragments and unpublished manuscripts that she had left to its second edition.Īpparently there was a dispute in the family about whether he should publish Lady Susan or not, because it wasn’t considered proper. It’s actually been published several times since 1871. When did you first come across the story of Lady Susan and what form was it in? Photo credit: Bernard Walsh, Courtesy of Amazon Studios and Roadside Attractions. Whit Stillman on set of Love & Friendship. Delightfully risqué for the times, it’s easy to see why Stillman was so taken with the story and spent the time needed to ensure it was written properly.Ĭreative Screenwriting spoke with him about the project. On a search for a new husband for herself and one for her daughter, she heads to her in-laws to let the rumor mill die down about her possible involvement with a married man. Beautiful but devious, the young widow is irresistible to men. Lady Susan (Beckinsale) is, however, not your typical Austenian heroine. Over a decade later the finished product, Love & Friendship, stars Kate Beckinsale and Chloë Sevigny and is being praised for its authentically Austenian charm and wit. But he was so captivated by the story (which was never published in the writer’s lifetime) and its sharp comedy that he kept it as a side project and worked on it in between paid gigs. When Love & Friendship writer and director Whit Stillman began the task of adapting Jane Austen’s short epistolary novel Lady Susan for the screen, he knew it would be a long labor of love.
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