HOWZAT

“What is difficult for us to understand now,” says Moggach, “is exactly what is in store for those girls if they don’t get married.”

The team assembled to create these differences includes the costume designer Jacqueline Durran, whose work with Mike Leigh on Vera Drake won a Bafta. “I think Joe employed me because he wanted a fresh look on it, so he didn’t get someone who had done a Regency adaptation before,” says Durran. “He wanted it to have a strong provincial theme, and that was the touchstone. Because it was set earlier, we could drop the waistline, and it was altogether a bit scruffier.”

The Bennets’ looser clothes are echoed by their unadorned complexions and more natural hairstyles. “We made them old-fashioned,” says Moggach. “So you can understand why Darcy might look on them as rather hoydenish and country bumpkin.”

With the exception of a lip-glossed and inevitably Hollywood-pleasing Lizzie Bennet, freckles and even slightly discoloured teeth are visible. “Powder was banned. I don’t think I used a powder puff during the whole filming,” says the hair and make-up designer, Fae Hammond. “Hairwise, we just added pieces, rather than using wigs. We didn’t use a make-up base, just a correction palette for continuity purposes, and absolutely nothing was used on the skin of the younger girls. I hope people can relate much more to them, as they’re just young, fresh girls.”

The production designer, Sarah Greenwood, worked with Wright on Charles II. “Setting it earlier made it less hidebound and tight,” she says. “I often feel that productions are sanitised in a way that takes away from them. In the BBC production of Pride and Prejudice, it felt like the family lived in a very glossed-over world. Joe and I followed our hearts — we were allowed to create our own world. The one thing we consciously didn’t want to happen was that the girls spent the whole time sitting around sewing.”

Cinematically, contemporary social realism has its own trademark style, one increasingly used in television docu-drama. Pride & Prejudice, all shot on location in the UK, plunges down corridors and pulls the viewer into the room with a fly-on-the-wall proximity to the action.

“It’s the idea of making it less formal and shooting it in the tradition of British realism,” says Wright. “If something is contemporary, people shoot it with zoom lenses and handheld cameras, and if something is period, then they want to shoot it with a static, formal composition. But, actually, zoom lenses are incredibly exciting, because they mean you can move with the moment and improvise. To shoot Pride & Prejudice in a so-called contemporary style brings it into fresh relief.”

The promotional material featuring Knightley, complete with 21st-century eyebrows, is subtly misleading. Pride & Prejudice is, in many ways, a labour of love. It may even change the way in which Austen is filmed and perceived. As Greenwood says: “It’s not to say that you can’t do something with Austen that is very arch and very pure. Who’s to say what is right and wrong? There are different ways of approaching it. I think there will be purists who say, ‘She didn’t mean this,’ but we don’t know what she meant. We can only go back to history and take it from there.”

Pride & Prejudice opens in cinemas on September 16

Sleep with Me (Bloomsbury £12.99), a novel by Joanna Briscoe, is out now