Even before the first notes of ‘Dawn’, Dario Marianelli’s evocative opening piano theme, the first sound we hear is the morning call of the blackbird. This is the considered touch of supervising sound designer Catherine Hodgson. “I love working birdsong into the sound to mean something. To use them as punctuation marks, to get the most for the characters’ motifs,” she explains over a Zoom with her partner, the film’s editor Paul Tothill.
For Elizabeth, Hodgson chose the “very British” blackbird. Much like Lizzie, it’s a strong and confident soloist, mellow yet fervently individual, saying what it sees. Darcy’s call is her mirror: the blackbird alarm; a more urgent, clipped and territorial voice. “It’s a subtle emotional thing that Catherine has always done,” Tothill observes. “It’s almost subconscious.”
Across three volumes, Austen helps us know and understand the leading couple: how they think, and why; whose opinions they value; when their fixed ideas about each other begin to shift. Letters run on for pages, marinating in details. A miniseries, at least, has the time to capture some of this nuanced interiority in dialogue, but in a two-hour film, metaphor is everything—and everything becomes metaphorical. Even the generous testicles of a resident farm animal.
“Adding a star for the slow zoom on the pig balls,” notes Gaven, just one of many fans of the Pride & Prejudice camera moves. “Wright shot this like a horror movie, with slow dollies, creeping zooms and lots of contrast,” writes Quark; Jamie suggests the filmmaker let the spirit of Dario Argento enter his body because “if we can’t crash-zoom into her pupils then how can we see Elizabeth’s soul?” The scariest scene? The showdown between Elizabeth Bennet and Dench’s Lady Catherine de Bourgh, shot like a 1960s fright-fest.
But back to the balls: “This pig turned up on the day and it had the biggest balls I’d ever seen in my life,” Wright explains. “Not that I’ve seen a lot of pigs’ balls, or balls in general. Metaphorically, the pig is the sire that comes and takes care of the lady pigs and in a way that’s what the whole film is about, mating.”
