NEW YORK—If you only watched the British TV shows and films that make it to North American television networks and theatres, you might assume that it would be impossible for a British filmmaker to have a lengthy career and avoid making costume dramas. Julian Jarrold says you would probably be right, despite the fact that his resume includes a popular modern British TV show, Cracker, and a popular modern film, Kinky Boots. Jarrold, who directed the upcoming Becoming Jane, says that any British series or movie that takes on classic novels won't travel far if it doesn't have something to offer modern audiences. His film stars Anne Hathaway as a young, rebellious version of the novelist Jane Austen who falls in love with a man outside her class. It opens in Vancouver next Friday (August 3).

"What I was trying to do with this film," Jarrold says in a New York hotel room, "was to look at that period [the late 1700s] in a fresh, grittier, and more contemporary way. I think that with all period dramas there is this tension between authenticity and re-creating the world in a way that attracts modern audiences. Jane's contemporaries see her as being unusual in that she is kicking against the marriage market and all that, and that was my interest as a director.

"At the same time, you know people will go, 'I don't understand people who curtsy all the time and have lots of money and live in pretty houses. I can't relate to that.' So you have to find ways to capture the relatable qualities. I think that was easy here because she is this feisty character. She is this fresh, vibrant person who is living in this tiny, sleepy community. And I think you just assume that Jane Austen would have been clashing with this world all the time."

Jarrold has already moved on to another period piece. Last month, he started production on the film version of one of the most popular costume dramas in television history, Brideshead Revisited, the Evelyn Waugh novel that was serialized by PBS and Britain's ITV in the 1980s. He says that although he again went looking for relatable ideas within the material, finding them was more difficult.

"It is a more difficult task with Brideshead, because two of the characters are filthy rich. You have to ask, 'What is their problem? They are living in the most beautiful houses in England.' But there is a fascinating argument in it between agnosticism and fundamentalism that does have relevance today, and the characters are very fascinating and flawed. The perception about the novel is that it is nostalgia for the aristocracy and that world between the [two world] wars. But I went back and read the book and I thought it was such rich pickings for a movie. There are things in this exotic world that are very dysfunctional, and they work as themes that you can apply to the modern world."