An Education a lesson in detail

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      TORONTO—Director Lone Scherfig (Italian for Beginners) suspects that her new movie, An Education, may be so impeccably British because she’s Danish. “No one will know how the film would have looked if it had been shot with a British director, but I’ve been more careful with detail than I’ve been with my other films, because the world is totally different. Even if England is so close to home, it’s such a different culture,” says Scherfig, who lives in Copenhagen.


      Watch the trailer for An Education.

      “To get the class system, the education system, London at that time [the early 1960s], to get all of it in there, maybe it is an advantage to be a foreigner because I don’t take things for granted. So it means that, for instance, the dialects and the classes and all of that”¦I would make an effort of communicating. Because I can see that it has to be communicated, at least to someone who is not English.”

      An Education, which opens Friday (October 23), is the first screenplay by best-selling author Nick Hornby that isn’t an adaptation of his own work. Instead, it’s an adaptation of a very short autobiographical coming-of-age story by acclaimed British reporter Lynn Barber. “Lynn Barber is a journalist at the Guardian and she’s a very feared journalist, actually,” Scherfig says. “People are flattered if they’re interviewed by her, but they are also afraid because she comes up with details about them that they didn’t know that she saw.”

      The author of About a Boy was clearly interested in writing a screenplay about a girl growing up in an era when young British women could be anything they wanted—as long as they wanted to be teachers, civil servants, or housewives.

      The film stars Carey Mulligan (best known for her work in British TV series like Bleak House and Dr. Who) as the woman on the verge of self-discovery. Peter Sarsgaard is her older, supposedly wiser love interest, and the iconic Emma Thompson plays a teacher with a knack for dream-crushing.

      Speaking to the Georgia Straight in a hotel bar just after the film’s Canadian premiere at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival, Scherfig says she was lucky enough to see the script before almost anyone else because she and Hornby share the same agent. “She slipped me the script at a fairly early stage and I just told them if they needed a director I’d be interested. I wish I had a better story to tell. The same story about Carey Mulligan,” Scherfig says. “I saw a couple of hundred girls and she was the best girl. So it’s not a complicated back story to this film.”

      Scherfig was already a Hornby fan, but the script captured her imagination the same way the story captured Hornby’s. “It’s a very layered script, and there’s not much on the page. He’s a pretty minimalist writer, which I really like. So the whole tone, and getting the whole period squeezed into this contained little film, was the challenge. You don’t see much, but the things you see do have to be right. And the choices you have to make have to be precise, because you can’t show all of London, for instance. You just see bits and pieces and then you have to think, or make up the rest. The music is helpful, and Nick knows a lot about music, so he came up with some good suggestions for tracks.

      “Obviously, Nick saw that the way Jenny was coming of age, London was coming of age, that she was very much a product of her time. Her appetite for the future and for something she doesn’t yet know, for a life you can’t have at that point, is a strong engine in the film. She just wants to be around people who know lots about lots and”¦enjoy art and music. So it’s her emotional tour through to figuring out that she should get an education for her own sake and not just to find a husband or because they say she should, but because it’ll give her a better life. And she does have a really good life, the real Jenny.”

      Prior to filming An Education, Scherfig had spent only a few months in London in her life, although she filmed her movie Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself in Scotland. “I’m in the neighbour country, just right across the water. In Shakespeare’s time, it was far, far away, and the Prince Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, was just about the most exotic thing you could show on-stage, but actually it’s just an hour away.”

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