AVC: Is it fair to say that you’ve been thinking about this book as a filmmaker since you read it?
MN: Not at all. I read it as a reader twice, I loved it so much. It inspired me, but I never even thought at that time that I would make it into a film. This was 1993. TV streaming series and long-form cinema were not in the vocabulary. I’m an independent feature filmmaker, and I never thought to make it a series.
AVC: It’s really visually stunning, right from the beginning.
MN: It is also, I have to say, an embrace of decay to show aristocracy, but to show it warts and all, in a sense, and to embrace it. I actually love the aesthetic of peeling walls and crumbling palaces and plaster not being there. I’m working with Stephanie Carroll here, my production designer for 25 years, so this whole team knows this country, this landscape. So it’s not about doing justice to its ornateness, for instance. It’s anti-ornate for me. It’s about actually using color in a modern way.
What’s new to VOD and streaming this weekend
Including Let Them All Talk, The Wilds, A Suitable Boy and Wolfwalkers By Norman Wilner
Courtesy of Bell Media
NOW critics pick what’s new to streaming and VOD for the weekend of December 11. Plus: Everything new to VOD and streaming platforms.
Let Them All Talk
(Steven Soderbergh)
Soderbergh and Meryl Streep follow 2019’s The Laundromat with a lighter and considerably less problematic project. Streep plays celebrated author Alice Hughes, who takes the Queen Mary II to pick up a literary prize in England, bringing along her nephew (Lucas Hedges) and two old friends (Candice Bergen, Dianne Wiest) – and decades’ worth of baggage. Deborah Eisenberg’s script builds a farcical structure out of everyone’s resentments, jealousies and perceived betrayals, with the lofty Alice fussing at its centre and Bergen fuming at its outer points. Wiest coasts blithely through it all and Hedges fumblingly courts Alice’s agent