It’s
safe to say that Renee Zellweger enjoys hopping on the other side of
the pond to practice her well accustomed British accent.
Who can forget her lovable and memorable performance as the
hilarious and adorable self-proclaimed spinster Bridget Jones that
single handedly inspired faith and hope among all unattached women
in the world? I was pleasantly
surprised to see that she was just as sweet in person and eloquent
to boot.
In
her next film MISS POTTER (no relation to Harry), Zellweger embodies
the role of Beatrix Potter, a distinguished painter and most
importantly a British literary phenomenon of the early 20th Century
who introduced ‘The Tale of Peter the Rabbit’ to the world,
empowering all women and leaving her legacy to children everywhere.
In the charming film, Zellweger does a remarkable job in honoring
the life of the modern, courageous, spirited and assertive artist
who quietly rebelled against the social environment in which she was
restricted, thus breaking all limitations and overcoming obstacles.
Zellweger teams up with Emily Watson and her DOWN WITH LOVE
costar Ewan McGregor, who plays her rookie publisher as well as the
great love and loss of her life.
Directed by Chris Noonan who gained fame for his 1995 movie BABE,
the story is set in the beautiful and magical locations of Victorian
England.
I
had the great pleasure of sitting down with Zellweger, Noonan,
Watson, McGregor over the holidays as they shed light on the making
of this delightful film, interpretations of the heroic author Miss
Potter, her environmental work and the legacy she left behind!
See what they all had to say about the upcoming film MISS
POTTER.
In
proving one’s self worth do you think you need to be eccentric or
creative?
Renee
Zellweger (RZ): Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m sure
(eccentricity begets creativity). I mean, I don’t know how to
answer your question from a general perspective. I can only tell you
from my own experiences, and I wouldn’t answer it very eloquently
because I’m not that self-aware. I had a lovely conversation with
Ewan the other day about anything that might be strange about
myself. I wish I had something to blame, and then I thought, “Oh,
wait, I’m an actress.” (She laughs.) Now it all makes sense.
I don’t
know if one begets the other or which would come first. I don’t
know. I have met a lot of actors and worked with a lot of creative
people who need their medium. They need it. It’s their basis and
foundation, what helps them cope, how they channel their emotions or
their inabilities to deal with other things. It’s the way they
communicate, an outlet. It gives them stability. It gives them
purpose. I’ve met those people. I don’t think I’m one of them.
It’s an important creative medium for me and it stops there.
I don’t
know that it is my first medium, this one, the acting. It was more
accidental, but it has become very important to me in my life and I
do need it. I can’t explain to you why. As far as my perceptions
about Beatrix, I just imagined that she has such a rich imagination
because she had such an isolated adolescence and that she was living
within such rigid parameters that were set by her mother in terms of
expectations that didn’t interest her or didn’t come naturally
to her. That was my perception, anyhow, that she needed her
(storybook) characters as a creative outlet.
Chris
Noonan (CN): I think Beatrix did need her creativity as an outlet
because she was so restricted. It’s very similar to the answer you
just heard. She was so restricted in her expression in other avenues
of her life, so restricted in her friendships by her parents. I
think she turned to her writing. In a sense she created her own
friends, and she turned to her writing to create personalities that
she could relate to and maybe even people that could talk back to
her. But a lot of this is just conjecture. We researched her life
pretty thoroughly and we filled a whole lot of gaps, and I can’t
tell you whether we made the right choices in filling those gaps.
Her life is pretty well documented, but that only gets you to a
certain point with anyone’s life if it’s in the past and who’s
now dead.
Are
there people alive who knew her?
CN:
There are people alive who knew her, but they’re very old people
now. So you’re piecing these things together from anecdotes and
from bits of writing that you found, and so on. When you start
talking about people’s deep psychological motivations and so on,
that’s a very hard thing to conjure up when you look into the
past. So you inevitably invent. You look at the evidence and you
say, ‘Now, what would it be that would be motivating her to do
this?’ and you invent something that would fulfill that necessity
in her life and you conjecture that that’s what it is, and then
you assert to the world that that’s what it was. I hope that
we’ve made the right choices, but can’t guarantee it.
Where
her books in your own life?
RZ: I knew
a couple of her stories. I didn’t know all of them. And I knew
absolutely nothing about the woman. I remember the images as far
back as I can remember anything at all. I remember Peter Rabbit
being there. My mom read the books to my brother and I, but not all
of them. There were other children’s books and authors who were
more prominent in our adolescence.
CN: I
never read her books when I was a kid. I was aware of her because of
all that crockery with her characters on it. I knew people who had
that crockery, but I didn’t have any. So I had a relatively
Beatrix-free childhood, I think. Perhaps that’s why I’m so
messed up today, you know; I didn’t have that influence as a
child. I don’t know what else to say to you. I can’t sort of
fill in the gaps.
Emily
Watson (EW): Yeah, we had them all.
I read them all and loved them all and actually the copies
that we had, had scribbling and writing that had been done by my
aunts and uncles when they were children.
They were fairly common in British households.
Ewan
McGregor (EM): And yes, I had them read to me I’m sure.
A lot of, I don’t remember the stories particularly when I
was a kid. Like Rene and all the rest of us, I was familiar with her
illustrations – the images. And
I supposed with Peter Rabbit, the Mr. McGregor reference kind of
haunted me and my brother for a few years. (Laughs.) It’s
interesting that our parents would have had them read to them as
well and possibly their parents as well so.
And, I read them to my kids.
Did
you have concerns for reaching a kind of jaded public at this time
with this traditional and remarkably charming story?
CN:
Well, we had a lot of violence and sex in the film, but we cut that
out. You just make the film that you believe is going to bring some
joy to people and that they’ll find entertaining, and you hope
that it finds its audience. I have no idea how big an audience this
film will find. I have high hopes for it. One just trusts that your
guesses are good for finding the audience, because you don’t want
to make a film that contains a number of messages and they’re not
received.
You
want to share your enjoyment in making a film with an audience and
you hope they enjoy it as you’ve enjoyed making it. But there’s
no way of really predicting unless you’re dealing in much more
predictable genres than this. You know, if you’re making a James
Bond film, I think just the name Bond is going to guarantee you a
big audience, but the name Beatrix Potter doesn’t necessarily
because there isn’t a proven track record of Beatrix Potter
reaching an audience. So we’ve just made the film that we loved,
according to the ideas we felt were appropriate, and we pray that it
will find its audience. That’s all I can say.
EM:
I think it’s interesting that you referenced the violence in
films. I think there is a place for that. I really do.
It’s a very violent world and there is a lot of the world
that just sits there and don’t pay any attention to what we see on
the news or what we read in the newspapers and in a way filmmakers,
it can be a way to shake society and say look ‘This kind of thing
is going on.’ I think there is a place for it as well. I don’t
think there’s overkill. And
maybe if there is a lot of violence in movies it’s because there
needs to be.
RZ: I
don’t think that people are cynics. I think we’re cynical about
manipulation and things that are disingenuous. We’re very cynical
about manipulation and I’m not sure that it’s necessarily true
that we’re cynical about simplicity. I think if things are honest,
I think that they’re relatable. One of the things that we had
discussed in the very beginning of this film was that there’s a
very fine line there, and this was not a woman who was overly
sentimental. Chris, in a couple of scenes, we’d discuss it and
I’d say, “Oh, Gosh, please just don’t let me corny. Don’t
let me be corny. Don’t let me be schmaltzy.” And he looked at me
and he said, “I don’t do schmaltzy.” I think that if you’re
talking about a film that’s telling a human story that people will
connect with, whether or not it’s simple based on its being
founded in truth, on truthfulness.
Emily,
do you think your character is a feminist or lesbian and was it a
challenge to play a character treading a fine line?
EW: I think it’s very hard with us with our understanding
of the way we view sexuality now to impose that on that time period.
Obviously, there are famous known lesbians in and around that time,
but I think probably that Millie has a crush on Beatrix because
she’s such a shining star. I
think passionate friendships between women were a known thing.
People used to write incredible letters and had passionate
friendships but I don’t think that’s saying we should be judging
relationships we have or categorizing it.
If you turn around to Millie and said, ‘It’s a sexual
thing. You’re a lesbian,’ she’d probably have been horrified
but then in another day and age, she might be.
I don’t know. All
these things are relative I guess.
Renee,
what made you want to take on the role of executive producer?
Also, how far did you want to push the fantasy angle as the
executive producer?
RZ: You
have no idea how closely interrelated your two questions are.
That’s where it all began. Chris and I and our friendship began
over a conversation in a hotel lobby in Santa Monica, California,
about that very thing. I was curious about it, having read the
script, because I didn’t believe in how it was being
conceptualized on the page at the time. I was afraid of it. I
thought it was gimmicky and kind of silly, and I wanted to hear what
Chris’ feelings about it were, and then so many other questions
came up, and I could tell that there was so much to discussion.
I thought
it (executive-producing) would be an interesting opportunity to
learn how to collaborate creatively in a different way and to
participate on a more substantial level, instead of just meddling
and having opinions, making it legal to meddle and have opinions. I
talked to the producers and I spoke with Chris and it just seemed
like it would work. They said “yes” and it went from there. We
just discussed things that I wouldn’t usually participate in, in
terms of the meetings and making decisions about things. I’d
usually just have an opinion about it and maybe throw it out there,
invited or not. I
can’t help myself. But in this case, we got together and we sat on
many couches, many late hours in many hotels in different parts of
the UK and threw everything on the table until the sun was coming up
sometimes, to try and solve some problems. It was fantastic. I
enjoyed it very, very much, very much.
CN:
That was a matter of fine judgment. The initial drafts of the script
had a far more ‘sophisticated’ set of animations, much more
dominant animations, which had Beatrix’s drawings come to life on
the page and then jumping off the page and into the real world came
these 3-D CGI creatures, which would have required us assigning
voices to the creatures. They were like fantasy characters. They
were true fantasy characters.
But
we all felt, in fact, that the core of this film is a delicate
series of human emotions and human relationships and that, for one,
if we went that far into CGI and animation it would start making it
look like, really, the key people in Beatrix’s life were her
animal creations and, two, that she was a bit crazy, that she
imagines a rabbit jumping off the pages, standing next to her and
she has a little conversation with it. Immediately, you think
Beatrix is a little bit loopy. So we were pretty unanimous in
feeling that a different approach was needed to that.
But I
felt that there was something very valuable in having her animations
exist in their own right in the film because, as an artist, Beatrix
gave expression to her inner life, to her psyche through her art and
through her stories, and that having creatures that we could animate
and even have conversations of a limited nature with her would give
us access to her inner life. She was a very private person who
wasn’t one to talk about herself endlessly, by all account. So it
gave us access to her without having to resort to the clumsier
cinematic devices like having a voiceover of Beatrix saying, ‘I
was feeling very depressed at that’ or ‘This made me very
happy.’ They’re clumsy devices and they tend to produce corny
results, and we didn’t want that.
So
then it was a process of finding the level of that animation and the
style of that animation, and I was very strongly of the feeling that
we should remain as faithful to Beatrix’s artwork as possible,
because they’re beautiful drawings, her drawings, and to get
beyond that would seem to be sacrilegious, in a way, if you’re
making a film about Beatrix Potter. So, we went on a search for
animators and found this wonderful, wonderful woman who was born and
brought up in the Lake District, who was a devotee of Beatrix
Potter, who had been an animator on Roger Rabbit and was very
thoroughly trained in traditional film animation.
She
didn’t do any computer animation. And she was also a really lovely
person with a wild style; like she had dreadlocks and piercings, not
exactly what you’d think of as a Beatrix Potter devotee. But she
was a Beatrix Potter devotee. Her name is Alyson Hamilton and she
sort of stayed with the film from the early stages, from the time
that we were designing the animation sequences, through to the very
tail end and made a really great contribution, I think. So I had to
deal with that in the editing and deal with the integration of that
very delicately and with some wit, I think. I was anxious that they
be introduced in a witty way rather than as a ‘look at me, look at
me. Aren’t we clever doing this sort of animation?’ way. So that
was the aim.
Emily,
what is your take on your character as a very independent woman? Did
you see her as being nice to her friend or really what she felt?
EW: I think its probably complicated and a bit of both. I
think the lady doest protest too much. She’s not this lady walking
around declaring her manifesto- this is who I am and I’m not
marrying you sort of thing. She does it with great fun and she’s
good fun and she thinks they had signed up for their sisterhood and
then feels deserted. But
I think it’s all credited to the screenwriter.
Probably inside of her is the most horrible churning of ‘Oh
my God, I’ve made such a fool of myself.’
I think she’s afraid of honesty and probably is lonely and
wishes life had been different. It’s very difficult for us to
imagine all that. Basically you lived with your parents ‘til they
died and then she lived with her brothers and went visiting for tea
and that was it. Had love come her way, there is a real distinction.
We didn’t see marriage about love in that period.
It would have been a financial transaction.
In the heart of the film it’s saying that love is the most
important thing and go for it.
Renee
and Ewan, talk about the re-teaming since Down With Love.
Did you have fun?
EM:
Um, well, when Rene and I were making ‘Down With Love’ we had a
fantastic time. And I
think it’s safe to say we are both really proud of it and loved it
deeply, and we had a great deal of fun.
But the comedy in the film was very specifically a kind of
‘60’s type of comedy. I kind of wanted to play it although it
went against the grain a little it, because nobody really plays
comedies like that anymore.
And
it was difficult to learn and if you didn’t’ time it absolutely
perfectly it didn’t work. So,
it was quite hard work and occasionally we would be struggling
through a scene and look at each other and just go, ‘Gosh, if we
could just play it straight forward – a scene.’
So, we talked about it and we both enjoyed working with each
other very much kept in touch and then Renee called me up and said,
and asked me to read this, which was exactly that. A lot more free
flowing to it. Finding the scene in front of the camera. Its useful
and its great fun to work with Renee again.
It was a good time.
RZ: It was
hilarious, because you’re working in a different way when you’re
doing stylized work like that Down With Love. We had no point of
reference about whether or not we nailed it, because there’s no
way to tell. Cut, moving on. I’d go, “What do you think? Did we
get it?” And he’d say, “I don’t know. Do you think we got
it?” “I don’t know.” (She laughs.) We thought how great
would it be to just act and see what happens.
Again,
like he said, we were looking for some things (to do together), and
then I read this script. Chris and I had been discussing our wish
list of people, and right away, straight away, there was just no
question in my mind. My plan was to beg and grovel shamelessly that
these people would agree to participate – one (Watson) having just
had a baby and not wanting to leave the house, and the other
(McGregor) who’s perpetually booked no matter what because he’s
on everyone’s wish list, too. So I read that scene where Beatrix
and Norman are alone for the first time in her room, and there’s
so much subtext to that, so much meaning compacted into the tiniest
little gesture.
And I knew
that Ewan would understand the delicate nature of that and the
vulnerability that was necessary for that. He has such a gift for
communicating those things honestly. It was just such an enchanting
moment in my mind, and so it had to be him. I talked to Chris and
Chris said, “Oh, yes, of course. Of course it has to be him.”
And that’s when the begging began. Luckily, they came to play.
Just to go further with it, that day on the set, it was
mesmerizing, really. He was focusing on some technical things going
on (something about keeping time to the music), dealing with that
and had absolutely no idea, unbeknownst to him, the six-foot-seven
steadicam guy, and Chris and myself and everybody in the room, we
were just enchanted. It was more than I had imagined when I read the
script. So, anyway, there we go.
Renee,
which authors or books have inspired you?
RZ: I
don’t think she’s weird. I had this conversation earlier. I
don’t think it’s strange at all that she speaks to her work when
she’s in that creative place in her mind, when she’s conjuring
this world in her mind, this imaginary world. It’s not strange at
all to me. I love her eccentricities. I think she’s brilliant. I
think she’s completely complicated in the most wonderful way, and
I’d love to have known her. In terms of my own stuff, that’s
really interesting. You know, I don’t know specifically. It
changes, you know. I pick something up and find it completely
inspiring because it’s a different kind of prose. I love Carmac
McCarthy’s writing. I loved Charles Frazier. You could smell those
words. I mean it’s unbelievably rich prose.
I mean,
what, do you mean like as a kid or do you mean now? You mean now. I
like African-American writers and I like Southern writers. There are
elements of the subculture that are exquisitely rich, just
historically. There’s a musicality to Langston Hughes’ work that
jumps off the page and it makes me need a pen. I need a pen. I need
a pen. I need a pen. I need a pen. He’s probably my favorite. And
there’s just so much emotion. It’s kind of like in Latin
cultures. You find this kind of passion for all elements of life. I
find that the same in African-American writers, just this passion
for things. Sorry. I need a pen. I need a pen.
Rene,
is this the type of movie your fans expect from you?
Do you think this is a chick flick?
RZ: I
don’t think this is a chick flick at all. I don’t think it’s a
chick flick. I think it’s far more complex than that. It’s not
meant to be female entertainment. It’s an important, important
story, and it’s a beautiful story, and I don’t think I’ve met
a guy yet who’s seen it and didn’t connect to it, or cried.
It’s just real. It’s a human story, the most powerful kind of
story, to take advantage of the impact this medium can have in terms
of moving a person – making you self-aware in a way, making you
recognize something different, making you question things, learning
something, growing as a person.
I don’t
think it’s a chick flick. I think that underestimates it in a
terrible way, and I don’t think that’s true, that there are
people out there who have expectations of the stuff I do. And, no,
it’s not a conscious decision, but I’m curious, and I know that
if I feel like I’ve been there before, I don’t really have much
interest in repeating myself and going there again.
CN: I
don’t think it’s a chick flick at all. It’s a love story, and
in the contemporary mores of Hollywood, if something’s got
violence in it and a lot of cursing or whatever it’s seen as a
male movie, and if something’s got a love affair in it it’s seen
as a female movie. I think that’s an incredibly limited way of
looking at things. I know so many men who have watched this movie
who have been moved to tears by it and have got a lot out of it. You
know, the world has moved on, and I just think that’s a very
outdated way of categorizing movies.
EW: I think it’s very difficult to ask a question of an
artist to ask them to define themselves by their place in the
market. I think it just doesn’t make any sense.
You do things, make things you love because you have to. When
a director that you have admired for years calls and asks you to do
it, you say ok, ok, ok. I
don’t really think about that stuff when you make choices on
compulsion to have an interesting life.
EM:
I don’t have anything else to say. I agree with everyone
else.
What
is your next movie?
RZ:
It’s a psychological thriller.
And the animated BEE MOVIE with Seinfeld who is hilarious
funny. But can we talk more about Miss Potter something?
Because I don’t think it’s a chick flick.
What
do you do or use as an outlet to deal with the tabloids and wind
down from your daily job?
RZ: (She
laughs.) I go to the gym, and I run and I spend time to physically
get it out (of my system).
But I
didn’t mean celebrity, I meant creativity. I’ve met eccentric
people who need, need that medium, need it for stability. They need
it. They’re true artists. That’s why when people ask me, “Oh,
wasn’t this person weird?” or “Wasn’t that person
difficult?” I say, “No. No, they’re not. They’re true
artists. True artists.”
Rene,
I last saw you on the set of ‘Case 39’.
RZ:
At the insane asylum. (Laughs.)
It’s a family film.
Babe
was a huge international success, but we’re only getting your
second film in a decade-plus. Why so long Chris?
CN:
Well, I sort of sat in a hole, very depressed… No, not really.
It’s very hard to follow a success. It puts a lot of pressure on
you and it makes you really want to follow it with something
that’s equally successful. I was offered many, many, many, many
scripts in that period and every time I read one I got more down
about what was on offer.
Can
you talk specifically?
CN:
No, I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to slander films.
But they all seemed to be very derivative, and that’s sort of the
nature of the film industry these days, it seems to me, maybe not so
much right now, but in the last 10 years. It’s very easy to get a
film up that you can say, ‘It’s just like this film that was a
success last year,’ or ‘It’s a cross between these two films
that were both successes last year,’ than it is raising the money
for a movie that is completely original and no one has ever seen
anything like it before.
That’s
the kind of thing I’m interested in more than I’m interested in
remakes or rehashes of already made movies. So I found it very hard
to find anything that I was interested in. I developed a couple of
movies. I co-produced a movie in Australia for a first-time director
and I kept looking and kept depressing myself by reading scripts.
And this was the… I can’t say it’s the first script I read in
that process that really moved me, but it was one of the first
scripts I read that moved me because it seemed to be genuine. The
emotions of the film seemed to be genuine. It seemed not to be a
manipulative emotional film. It seemed not to just be pushing
buttons. It seemed to be much more about the reality of life and I
really, well, I shed a tear over the script and was immediately
interested in it and pursued it from there.
How
long did it take from there?
CN: I
guess that would have been about three years ago that I first read
the script. A lot of time passes with most films, and this was just
the latter stages of the development of the film. It had been
developed already for about five or six year by one of its producers
and its writer. So one has to be very patient in developing films.
This
is also a movie about people coming out of their cliché’s and
emerging into their true selves. How did you identify with your
characters in that way?
EM:
Wow. I don’t know. I don’t know. I think there is something that
he wanted to …I think there is something interesting about that
when he meets Beatrix his brother is upset that they are going to
publish the book and immediately she says, “Well it must be like
this, this and this.’ And,
I imagine she must have been a tough cookie to deal with. So, when
she meets Norman, he’s so nervous about being a publisher that he
immediately meets her demands or enthusiasm with goals of his own,
because they seemed to be a perfect match in terms of the passion
towards her work. I don’t know that it was about – I don’t get
the sense he was trying to prove himself.
CN:
I’m going to be equally frustrating for you, because I don’t
think I have approached this script from the point of view of
intellectual analysis of themes and that kind of thing. I think
it’s much more an intuitive process for me, and so I haven’t got
a ready answer for your question. I think that’s the critic’s
job to look at the film and… you’re doing the critics job by
pointing out to us that this is a theme in our movie.
It’s
not a theme that’s consciously driven me through the movie, but
it’s something that I find very interesting, that it’s there,
and I think we all, as creative people, we instinctively arrive at
decision as to how we make a story play. And often the threads of
those decisions can be brought together and a thematic line can be
seen in them, but (it can) be one that wasn’t actually intended.
It wasn’t one that we set out to do. But that’s sort of the
magic of the creative process anyway.
RN: In
what respect? Well, from the inside, when you’re trying to make
decisions about how to maybe show the evolution of a character
throughout their life, you make creative choices about how to show
that, on that day or in the way they dress, they’re mannerisms,
how they change, how they carry themselves a little bit differently,
things like that. It’s subtle and it’s truthful in terms of
making the choices for the moment.
There are
a few of them you have to plan in advance, like wardrobe changes for
example. For Beatrix, I spoke with Anthony and we decided that when
she was under her mother’s influence she was going to be more
uptight and more rigid and more formal. And as she begins to find
her own legs, well, we’re going to show that her clothes get a
little bit less tailored, and she’s going to grow a bit. You know,
she’s going to spread out. You know, with the landscape she’s
going to take up a little bit more space, not only in her life but
to find her voice, and so her clothes should be the same to reflect
it.
There are
subtle things like that, if you want to draw a parallel with the
Norman and Beatrix characters. There’s a definite common bond
there between the two of them, who kind of lived at home, kind of
were the caretakers, kind of didn’t have massive social
existences, and they have this common denominator in this creative
effort that they shared. That was part of their affection. He
(McGregor) and I discussed it as being this thing that they shared
in terms of finding their own. It was more subtle than that. It was
subconscious. It was not something that either one of them was
consciously aware of. They just started to collaborate and liked it.
You have to be responsible and pay attention to that in some
respects, but they’re so loosely tied. It’s more about being
accurate on the day as per the script requires as per that moment in
telling the story requires.
Can
you talk about Potter’s environmental importance and farmland
preservation?
RZ: I’m
going to skip that and go straight to my sex life. My mother would
be proud. OK, let’s see, what can I tell you about her
environmental contributions? I was very surprised. I knew nothing
about it. And just recently I was reading about the things that she
did with the Girl Scouts, in terms of accommodating them, teaching
them and helping them learn how to survive on their own in the wild,
all sorts of things. I had no idea about the land. I just didn’t
know of the magnitude of the contribution that she had made in that
respect.
I didn’t
know that it was responsible partially for the future of the farming
and the…I mean, obviously one begets the other, but I didn’t
know. Still, I can’t tell you too much. I kind of stopped with
gathering my information that pertained to this part of her life,
because it was such a finite period and there was so much
information. I could do better to pull Chris and Emily in on this,
because they could help me remember with what they’ve collected.
What was it, 4000-something acres she started to collect? She was a
founding member of the National Trust…
CN:
A lot of that land was working farms, so it’s not virgin land or
virgin forest or anything like that. It’s much more that she fell
in love with the land as it was in the Lake District, and just
didn’t want to see tourism develop there and that kind of thing.
So she wanted to be part of this organization to preserve it.
RZ:
She referenced feeling the encroachment. She definitely
envisioned that it was going to happen inevitably if she didn’t
participate in something like that.
EW: I think for
Americans to appreciate how important it is in the UK, if you visit
there now, there are places with natural beauty, there are so many
people there, and it’s so small and everyone is so grateful for
the small bit of preservation that has been done.
It they had eaten it up, there would have been no wilderness
now but for Americans it’s a different thing because it’s such a
huge country but it is so important for the UK.
RZ:
It does feel encapsulated. When you go there, it feels
encapsulated, like there’s a point of entry and a point of exit.
Absolutely. When you get to the preserved land, or the English
countryside in quotations, I didn’t get that feeling, that endless
sort of ongoing wilderness before you that you might get in
Northwestern, uh, Northeastern, uh, Midwestern America today. I feel
it here, too, so I can imagine, because it is quite small and
precious (England).
EM: That’s why we invented the Midge in Scotland, which is
a tiny mosquito ‘because we’re not up there. (Laughs.)
Is
there a statue of Beatrix Potter in England? Is she a national
heroine?
EM: She’s on
the back of the 25lb. note. (Laughs.)
Are
you currently filming “The Tour” with Hugh here in NY?
EM: Yes.
Going
good?
EM: Yes.