Director Carrie Cracknell on Persuasion: ‘I always intended to absolutely honour the heart of the book’

Published some 205 years ago, Jane Austen’s Persuasion is often characterised as the author’s greatest novel.

The heroine, Anne Elliot, is the second daughter of the comically vain baronet Sir Walter Elliot of Kellynch Hall. Eight years before the novel begins, Frederick Wentworth, an officer in the British navy during the Napoleonic Wars, proposes to Anne after an intense courtship. She accepts but is soon persuaded by her snobbish father and family friend Lady Russell to break off the engagement.

Angered, Wentworth throws himself into his work and acquires a fortune through raids upon enemy ships. Following Napoleon’s 1814 abdication, Wentworth returns to England to visit his sister, who now lives near Anne. At 27, Anne is a confirmed spinster and the rekindling of their relationship is complicated and by no means certain.

“I think Persuasion is Austen’s most mature work,” says Carrie Cracknell, who has directed a new film of the book for Netflix. “It’s not as widely read as Pride and Prejudice, but you really can’t overestimate how the popularity of certain books is determined by what is on school syllabuses. I think Pride and Prejudice is a great entry-level Austen. But Persuasion is her best. It maybe needs a bit more attention.”

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Austen’s novel, the final work the author completed before her death in 1817, is characterised by Anne’s generally unspoken sorrow, punctuated by occasional allusions to her sense of longing. “We certainly do not forget you, so soon as you forget us,” she tells a friend and naval officer, who claims that men love more deeply than women. “It is, perhaps, our fate rather than our merit. We cannot help ourselves. We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us.”

Cracknell’s thrilling new adaptation allows Anne to more clearly articulate her heartbreak. With more than a curtsy to Fleabag and the colour-conscious Bridgerton, Netflix’s Persuasion — scripted by Ronald Bass and Alice Victoria Winslow — breaks the fourth wall, allows its heroine plenty of wine, and has fun importing contemporary relationship and break-up tropes.

“I think for Alice and Ron, who wrote the script, it was important to find a way to access Anne’s feelings that felt faithful to the book and had all of the kind of complexity and the longing of the book,” says Cracknell. “By having her directly address the camera, we are allowed to see her silent form of suffering. Breaking the fourth wall gives her a boldness. Obviously when you’re reading a novel, you’re totally steeped inside someone’s psyche, and in film you have to achieve that in a different way. Having her look straight down the barrel and look at us and bring us in on her journey — that felt really interesting.”

Persuasion’s modern tweaks allow for some great japes. Anne (gamely played by Dakota Johnson) produces a stack of sheet music saying it’s the playlist that Wentworth (Cosmo Jarvis) made for her. She’s resistant to the charms of her father’s heir (Henry Golding) because: “He’s a 10. Never trust a 10.”

Not everyone is amused. When Netflix dropped the first full length trailer for the new film last month, various social media platforms exploded with complaints. One Twitter user took issue with the screenplay’s translation of Austen’s passage “Now they were as strangers, nay, worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted” into “Now, we’re worse than exes. We’re friends”. Another complained that Anne “...wasn’t like Fleabag at all. She wasn’t even open enough to acknowledge that she loved still Wentworth.” There were jeers at the accents and pleas to “leave Anne Elliot for us sad plain women who love her, Netflix”.

Austen creates these very interesting, slightly strident women, who are always slightly out of their time and slightly out of their class

“I mean, the trailer was watched by about 25 million people in the first few days,” says Cracknell. “I think the trailer was cut very much in mind for a young audience. Hopefully, it’s a conversation that’s happening on TikTok and Instagram. Ultimately, it’s quite a small number of people on Twitter who have — understandably — really strong opinions about the book. But it has always been my intention to absolutely honour the heart of the book. I mean it’s a beautiful thing that it always evokes. This idea — and it’s an idea that I think a lot of people have in their 20s and 30s — is that your life is running away from you and you can’t make that stop or you can’t control it in the way that you would like to. And the melancholy that comes from that feeling. So it’s been really wonderful, as a filmmaker, to try and grapple with that and with gallows humour, which I think is absolutely in Austen’s novel. We really tried to bring that out in the film. So that it doesn’t become totally dominated by sadness because I don’t think melancholy is necessarily kind of expressed in that way. I think many of my funniest friends are my most melancholy friends.”

Cracknell, a British theatre director who has staged acclaimed productions of Medea (National Theatre), Electra (Young Vic), and A Doll’s House (National Theatre of Scotland), has been an Austen fan since she first read Pride and Prejudice at school.

“I was obsessed with the Jennifer Ehle version of Pride and Prejudice,” recalls Cracknell. “I had a really wonderful English teacher who allowed us to watch the entire thing in school, which was maybe more about her and Colin Firth than about us learning. That was sort of the beginning, and then I read all of the books through my school years. I think Austen holds this very deep, very particular cultural position for lots of Brits. She’s an interesting combination of seeing, because she’s just the most wonderful viewer of society, and she creates these very interesting, slightly strident women, who are always slightly out of their time and slightly out of their class. And then, of course, there’s Austen’s profound romanticism which, you know, we are all suckers for in different ways.”

Cracknell’s theatre career began at the University of Nottingham, where she founded a company called Hush with friends, including Ruth Wilson. The group’s show transferred to New York and London while they were still at college. Aged 26, she became Britain’s youngest artistic director when she and Natalie Abrahami took over Notting Hill’s Gate Theatre. She has subsequently worked at the Royal Court, the Almeida Theatre, and Dublin’s Gate Theatre. Persuasion is her debut feature.

“I wanted to move across to film for a while,” she says. “In theatre, I was increasingly interested in this sort of small, interior life of the work. But because the venues I was working in were getting bigger and bigger, there was a sort of disconnect between those two things. I love scale and I love being able to work a big scale, so suddenly it felt like I had to make the move. I just adored being behind the camera. Many of the shooting days were the happiest days I ever had at work. Being able to work at such a sort of level of detail with the actors. And being able to kind of catch a moment and then put it to one side and then move on. You’re always holding the entire spine of the thing that you’re making. I really enjoyed that.”

Cracknell found several superb collaborators for her lavish-looking debut feature, notably a luminous Dakota Johnson in the central role and a hilarious Richard E Grant as the absurdly self-regarding Sir Walter.

“As you meet Dakota she’s like a proper old-fashioned movie star,” says the filmmaker. “She’s so intelligent and smart and funny. And I think what’s interesting about Dakota, maybe because she had an extraordinary childhood, she’s incredibly watchful in a way that reminded me of Austen. She has Austen’s thoughtfulness and playfulness. And I mean, Richard is a complete delight. He’s such a lovely actor. There’s not a cynical bone in his body. He’s so enthusiastic and passionate. He’s just there every day, perfectly costumed, bang on time, ready to work, with a little bag of sweets.”

Persuasion is on Netflix from July 15th