"I was a bit worried about playing a mother, I've tried to avoid it."
So says Emma Thompson of her rather unusual (but very effective) casting as the chilly matriarch Lady Marchmain in Julian Jarrold's Brideshead Revisited. She then launches into a surreal account of her own maternal status, which she insists kicked in rather early. "My eldest child", she declares, "I've had since I was 13 – he's nice, but he was a bugger to push out at that age, I can tell you." (Her eldest and only child is in fact a girl, and was born in 1999).
Thompson is in make-believe mothering mode throughout the press conference. Whenever a difficult question is addressed to one of her young co-stars, Thompson intervenes with a studiously batty quip or bizarre anecdote to give them time to think about their answer – and after they have responded themselves, she places her hand on their shoulder comfortingly, as though to reassure them that they have done alright. Not that Matthew Goode (Charles Ryder), Hayley Atwell (Julia Flyte) or Ben Whishaw (Sebastian Flyte) needs her protection, but this does all give the impression of a production 'family' far less dysfunctional and fractious than the Brideshead residents they portray in the film. "We were," as Atwell puts it, "all part of something we cared about."
All insist that the feature stands apart from both Evelyn Waugh's novel and the 1981 TV series. Goode denies prior knowledge of either before taking on his part, and expresses the hope that viewers can get over "the elephant in the room that is the series". Whishaw, too, claims that because he had not watched Anthony Andrews' turn as Sebastian in the series, "It didn't feel like I was taking on something iconic," while Thompson pitches in somewhat implausibly with: "I didn't even see it, I was 20, I was a punk rocker... I was trotting around London in a lot of zips", adding, "I've sort of grown into it now."
Goode describes how it took him a while to warm to his character and to appreciate the humanity of his ambitions, proclaiming the essence of the story to be for him "the loss of innocence and happiness." Similarly Thompson defends Charles' chief antagonist, the fearsomely Catholic Lady Marchmain ("Marchers, as I like to call her"), as a figure who is absolutely convinced that the repressive strictures she imposes on her children are saving them from destruction. "She believes," says Thompson, "she is giving them the religious version of the green cross code", comparing her parental impulse to restrain her own daughter from running into traffic. Both Thompson and Whishaw stress the film's intense emotional impact, while Atwell alludes to its interpretative complexities.
Which is where director Jarrold and producer Robert Bernstein, also present, come in. Both make the persuasive case that what drew them to this particular period drama was in fact its "contemporary resonance", with the conflict between Lady Marchmain's unswerving fundamentalism and Charles' equally fervent individualism standing in for all manner of current preoccupations in the world. Although they admit to greatly expanding the relationship between Charles and Julia, so that the original story has been transformed into an elaborate (if "un-Hollywood") love triangle, this won "the full approval of the Waugh family", who were involved from the start and apparently prefer some performances in the film to their equivalents in the series. Of course, the film is, at least in its serious engagement with issues of theology, much truer to the book (which Waugh had, after all, written to be 'the great Catholic novel') - and Jarrold is adamant that the film is not "kicking Catholicism in any crude way", but rather trying to dramatise something of an evolving rapprochement between two opposed views on religious faith.
Just how, though, Emma Thompson got from all this to a confused story about pole-dancing and bike-mounting will have to remain a mystery...
Brideshead Revisited is released nationwide on the 3rd of October.
