
Photo: Sean Zanni/Patrick McMullan via Getty Imageīehold this description of a casual de Wilde look from The New Yorker: She’s the unofficial photographer for Rodarte, the work of which she’s documented since the brand’s inception in 2005, and she is even responsible for this Childish Gambino album cover: Reilly to Robert Pattinson to a pin-up Lena Dunham. Emma is her first feature-length film, but she’d actually spent the past few decades as a prolific celebrity photographer, shooting a bizarre menagerie of famous people, from John C.

Her look is defined by fine, comfortable things velvet slippers, wide-brimmed felt fedoras, and custom-made suits by shops in Brooklyn I have never heard of.Īs I scrolled through her Instagram in the wee hours of the morning, I immediately became enraptured and soon realized that Autumn de Wilde is also not your average Hollywood director. There’s something in her posture - proud, ramrod straight, unflinching - that suggests a baroness or mid-19th-century silk tycoon she embodies a sort of elevated taste that people (me) aspire to have but are too dumb and inexperienced to imitate. When you first see Autumn de Wilde, you know she is not a regular person. I was curious about how Emma’s aesthetics came to be, which was how I came upon its director: a woman named Autumn de Wilde.
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I love working with actors and bringing out the things I see in them that make them such brilliant artists.I hadn’t seen a period movie look so tasty since Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette in 2006, which with its campy Versaillian milieus - all frosted cakes and feathered muffs - thoroughly enchanted me. I think that’s why I had fun working with actors as a photographer over the years. The fantasy-building of who this actor as an artist is, is so fun to do as a photographer for me. They shouldn’t be treated like they’re there to advertise food or a dress. I feel actors should be treated more like rock stars. They broke the mold when they made Kate and Laura. They were fascinating, and I had never met women like that in my life, that spoke the way they did. So I actually set out to prove that my process with musicians was the same for any genre, and that’s why when I met Kate and Laura at the beginning of their career, I wanted to document it. I pretty much mostly worked with rock ’n’ roll music, but I kept thinking to myself, “I don’t know why people see such a difference.” What I do is I go into the world of the artist, and I heighten, I bring the fantasy to it, I document it. I also love Sense and Sensibility, because I was a big fan of Ang Lee and Emma Thompson and her script. I’ve used it as inspiration in places you would never guess.

I saw it when I was 15, and it had a profound effect on me, so that movie has always kind of been my guiding light for a lot of things. I love them, good or bad, and one of my favorite period films of all time is A Room With a View. But I am an obsessive researcher, so I see every period film that’s made. I didn’t go to college, and I was not the best student in high school. So Jane Austen was part of my world, just like Shakespeare and Fawlty Towers.

Because of that, I think, from a young age, I devoured everything, British television, British films, Masterpiece Theatre with my mom. Slate: What was your personal relationship with Emma before you signed on to direct this adaptation?Īutumn de Wilde: My mother is English, I grew up in Los Angeles, my dad’s from Brooklyn, and I had this kind of obsession with both places I didn’t grow up in, you know, England and Brooklyn. This interview has been edited and condensed. The director spoke to Slate about bringing out the screwball comedy in Jane Austen, why rock stars and actors really aren’t so different, and the reason you won’t find Beck on the movie’s soundtrack. It’s fitting that de Wilde’s take on Emma, which will expand its theatrical run on Friday, looks beneath those petticoats to reveal multiple bare butts. But the photographer and music video director did land the job, and she swears that working with artists like Jenny Lewis and Florence and the Machine perfectly prepared her for her feature debut.
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The Bear Nails the Art of the Surprise A-Lister CameoĪt the time she was asked to pitch a new film version of Emma, Autumn de Wilde was best known for her work with rock stars, making her far from the obvious choice to helm a period piece full of parasols and petticoats.Is Jennifer Lawrence’s New Age Gap Rom-Com As Creepy As It Seems? It’s the Biggest Debut Novel of the Past Year.

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