CraveOnline: Is doing a traditional costume drama as difficult as the big scale Harry Potter and Prince of Persia type movies?
Fred Topel: It’s easier in the sense that there aren’t those visual effects, and that of course cuts tens of millions of dollars off budgets. So therefore you stand a chance. We made this movie for about $13 million which is very, very, very small. I’ve actually never done a full on costume movie before. I’ve done period movies from the ‘20s or the ‘30s or whatever, but maybe since my very first film, I’ve never done the full on, what people would understand as a costume drama. It’s no different than any other drama. It’s all about the characters and the motivations and whether you believe them and whether you feel for them. It’s the same stuff that you would be use in a modern drama.
Are there still some visual effects to erase some modern elements in the scene?
Oh yes. You can’t do without that stuff now, but what I think is that even the young audience, the kind of 14 to 20-year olds, or maybe even 10 to 20-year-olds are now becoming jaded with special effects. They want to feel that it’s real. They don’t just want to be amazed. They want to feel something did actually happen and they’re very savvy. They know that a lot of the time, nothing did happen. It just happened in a computer. So how are they supposed to feel anything? How are they supposed to feel that the characters are in peril or that the characters are threatening or any of that stuff when they know it’s in a computer? I think sometimes CGI is counterproductive.
I completely agree. How difficult was casting these beloved characters?
No more difficult than it normally is. I wanted this to have an impact for young people. I wanted people to absolutely believe that the hero, Pip, falls headlong in love when he is 13 years old and it never leaves him. The next time you see him, he is only 21 years old, 21/22 years old. So I wanted it to be a film that would have an impact for people of that age, people in their early to middle 20s. So casting for that was very important. I needed to have beauties. Both the boy and the girl need to be great beauties, particularly the girl. Holliday Grainger triumphantly is. Of course Jeremy Irvine is what we know him to be. He’s a big, strong, masculine, handsome boy. So those were very important factors when we were casting.
What do you think makes Great Expectations such juicy drama?
Really?
Well, I want you to articulate it.
I’ll tell you, if you think it’s really boring, then you just cut it out. What I think is it’s a confession. I think that it’s Dickens saying to himself, “I have been immensely successful and I have not been too picky about how I have got where I have got. For instance, did I ever really love my wife? I think perhaps I didn’t and I would like to write a character who is somebody who falls in love, and at the end of it all just manages to get the girl. I would love to feel that about myself, but you have to know, gentle reader, that I have been a very bad man on the way between.” And he was, he was terrible to his wife for instance. He’s not the devil. He’s not evil but he is very, very human and I think he confesses that during the film.
The question you would ask about the book is why is Pip so horrible? Why is he such a little shit? What’s that all about? He rejects the people who love him and he tries to take up with the people who are never going to love him. Why is he so bent out of shape? Of course that’s partly to do with love and that’s partly to do with worldly ambition and it’s partly to do with money. Dickens had all of those pressures on him and I think that he wanted to pick a lot of stuff out and that’s why the book is so strong tasting. You’ve got somebody who is saying, it’s very nearly the end of his life, it’s his last but one book. He’s saying, “If I’m going to tell it at all, I have to tell it now.” So he does and he reveals his hand.
One of the things that’s timeless to me is you can do everything you can to meet some dream girl, Estella’s, expectations and that still doesn’t create love. It’s something maybe all of us men have to learn.
Yup. I think that that’s absolutely the case. God help us, I think everybody sort of looks back and says, “Ah, if only she had been the one” which of course is nonsense. I don’t think a woman would make that mistake. She might find herself in that position but she wouldn’t carry on making that mistake the way, for instance, Pip carries on making that mistake. I mean, the end of the book, the original end of the book is fantastically bleak. They don’t get back together.
Dickens then rewrote it because a friend of him said, “You are a popular novelist and your audience is going to leave you in droves if you are as black about the end of this story as you have been.” Dickens completely rewrote the ending so that he held out the possibility of happiness, but that wasn’t his original plan. His original plan was that these two ships part finally in the night and never did sail into port together, ended up as unhappy individuals. That was his original instinct for the book.
