Mrs. John Dashwood had never been a favourite with any of her husband’s family; but she had had no opportunity, till the present, of shewing them with how little attention to the comfort of other people she could act when occasion required it.
– Sense and Sensibility, chapter 1.
I read Emma Thompson’s S&S screenplay and production diaries last night. The diaries are hilarious, and now that I’m rereading the first few chapters of S&S itself, I have a whole new appreciation for the screenplay. I’d forgotten how sparse the book’s dialogue is, and I’m realizing just how much of it she had to invent or stitch together from the narrator’s remarks. She did a marvelous job.
Back to the WIP, which has been fighting me all week.
oh yes, the bit about how they came to Emma Thompson in a rush and said: we have no dialogue for the scene when they get to London in come in the house! And she shot back:
Hello, [Hobbs]. Still alive, I see.
Which was absolutely perfect.
I love everything about this movie, and I think the screenplay is a model of how such adaptations should be done.