Talking with the Headmistress of AN EDUCATION: Director Lone Scherfig

(Filmmaker Lone Scherfig, above.)

By Terry Keefe

(This article is currently appearing in this month's Venice Magazine.)

In the early 60s, Britain had not quite started swinging yet, but it was about to. While we were driving Cadillacs and generally thinking big here in post-war America, much of Britain was still in economic and emotional recovery from WWII at the dawn of that decade. If you had to pick a color scheme to represent the mood of the time, it would be a light grey, with some vibrant primary shades starting to bleed in from the edges. This calm-before-the-cultural-storm is the setting for director Lone Scherfig’s An Education, which centers around a suburban teenage schoolgirl named Jenny (played by Carey Mulligan) who is working hard to get into Oxford, until she meets the suave, thirtysomething David (Peter Sarsgaard) who seduces her into his hipster world and shows her an alternate future, for better and for worse. Filmmaker Scherfig was familiar with this period on the cusp of two very different parts of the 20th Century, partially through first-hand life experience, as well as research required for her previous work. “I’ve shot things that take place in the late 50s,” she explains, “and I was also alive then. I was actually in London just a few years after [the time period of the story.] You can also read it in the script that London was bursting with energy and ready to explode, but not knowing how to. Like Jenny is. She is so much like her time.”

(The two faces of Carey Mulligan's Jenny, above. Before and after Peter Sarsgaard's David.)

Because of her performance as Jenny, actress Carey Mulligan has already been added to the collective, speculative short list of Best Actress nominees, and the hype is deserved. Mulligan, 22 years old at the time of the shooting, brings an innocence to the 16-year old Jenny which is heartbreakingly ephemeral, underscored by her quick development into the far more knowing young woman who is ready to face the decade ahead by the film’s end. Despite a deep bench of a supporting cast which includes Alfred Molina, Olivia Williams, Emma Thompson, Dominic Cooper, and Cara Seymour, An Education would not have succeeded as it does without a first-rate performance in the center role. Scherfig was very much aware of the stakes involved in picking the right Jenny, recalling, “We saw a lot of girls, a few hundred on DVD, because you have to always make sure that you’ve done your absolute best, because the role is so important to the film. But Carey was always the one I liked the best. She was my number 1 from the beginning, so it wasn’t that complicated.”

(Alfred Molina, Cara Seymour, Carey Mulligan, and Peter Sarsgaard, above, and Olivia Williams in the next photo.)

Scherfig was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, and previously directed a number of features at home, including Italian for Beginners, which was the fifth Danish Dogma Film. While Scherfig faced the obvious challenges of working with material which, while universal in general, also has elements that are very culturally specific to Britain in the early 60s, the filmmaker was also armed with a strong script by famed writer Nick Hornby (High Fidelity, About a Boy), who himself adapted the story from a short magazine memoir by Lynn Barber. Scherfig came on board the film after a few early drafts of the script were already in place, and she recollects of the development process from the point that she became involved, “I had a lot of questions to make sure I had read it right. To make sure that I had understood all the jokes, because you don’t know if there is something you haven’t caught, when you come from a different culture. At the same time, the script had a lot of space for a director, as it was very minimalist, and that is very nice. I wanted to stay pretty faithful to the script, but I can also tell that the film looks like my other films. I’m happy that the innocence of the script is still there. That tone has survived the process pretty well and that was something that was important to me.”


An Education Trailer below: