Joe Wright wasn’t intending to create one of the most obsessed-over period pictures of the 21st century. He tells us he merely wanted to be “at the service of Jane Austen and her story.” So how did a close-up of Matthew Macfadyen’s fingers become so distractingly important as to pack out theaters twenty years later?

Fans are bewitched us, body and soul. A fresh generation of diverse movie-lovers are seeing themselves in Fitzwilliam Darcy’s social self-consciousness and Elizabeth Bennet’s propensity to blurt her unfiltered wit. They’re running to Wright’s 2005 adaptation of Pride & Prejudice for demure dating inspo that predates the apps by two centuries (“Bring back men who yearn,” pleads Kamri).

Austen was born in 1775, the start of the Industrial Revolution, as property rights became entrenched and capitalists made haste—but still a century before Western women could begin to own land, keep their earnings or cast a vote. She wrote smart, funny, low-key-feminist social commentaries about the English gentry of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; those published in her lifetime were done so anonymously, in deals that largely did the author out of deserved royalties.

Austen’s fame came long after her death at 41, and keeps growing. In the age of throwback horrors like the tradwife and fertility policing, her novels feel as urgent as ever. “If you’ve got five daughters and no loose cash, for a family like the Bennets it’s a real serious dilemma,” actress Rosamund Pike explains in a behind-the-scenes interview from the set of Pride & Prejudice. Keira Knightley, in the same interview, details the life-altering economics of a young woman’s choice of husband: “Marriage gets turned into a business. It has nothing to do with love.” 

The advent of cinema upped the Austen fervor. Her stories sing on-screen, what with all that romantic edging and the capacity for out-the-gate ensemble casting. “Five gorgeous beauties on a mad-cap manhunt!” is the wacky tagline for MGM’s stacked 1940 version of Pride and Prejudice, starring Greer Garson as Elizabeth and Laurence Olivier as Darcy. The 1996 Emma has Gwyneth Paltrow, Toni Collette, Alan Cumming and Ewan McGregor; Autumn de Wilde’s 2020 adaptation gave us Anya Taylor-Joy, Johnny Flynn, Josh O’Connor and Mia Goth; Northanger Abbey brought Felicity Jones, JJ Feild and Carey Mulligan together.

Wright, too, amassed “an absolute Murderer’s Row of well-cast talent” for his Pride & Prejudice: Pike, a decade ahead of Gone Girl, Dame Judi Dench in her biggest wig, Rupert Friend long before ing Wes Anderson’s company. Knightley’s profile was on the rise after a banger run including Bend It Like Beckham, Love Actually and the first Pirates of the Caribbean; Pride & Prejudice kicked off a trio of collaborations for her and Wright (Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina would follow).

Though not his first period outing (Wuthering Heights gets that medal), Pride & Prejudice—and Jacqueline Durran’s handsome costuming—escalated its leading man to heartthrob status. “Matthew Macfadyen is so enrapturing in this role,” Claira gushes. His moody Darcy can prove unnerving, however, for latecomers who first saw the actor smarm it up on the small screen. “Tom from Succession wasn’t anything like Tom from Succession. Such a douchebag edgelord in the beginning, and then such a neurodivergent king at the end,” writes Sam of Macfadyen’s uptight bachelor undone by love in the form of Knightley’s earthy “bad bitch”, Miss Bennet. “My goodness is Keira Knightley good at creating chemistry with literally anyone,” Nathan observes.

Even before the first notes of ‘Dawn’, Dario Marianelli’s evocative opening piano theme, the first sound we hear is the morning call of the blackbird. This is the considered touch of supervising sound designer Catherine Hodgson. “I love working birdsong into the sound to mean something. To use them as punctuation marks, to get the most for the characters’ motifs,” she explains over a Zoom with her partner, the film’s editor Paul Tothill.

For Elizabeth, Hodgson chose the “very British” blackbird. Much like Lizzie, it’s a strong and confident soloist, mellow yet fervently individual, saying what it sees. Darcy’s call is her mirror: the blackbird alarm; a more urgent, clipped and territorial voice. “It’s a subtle emotional thing that Catherine has always done,” Tothill observes. “It’s almost subconscious.”

Across three volumes, Austen helps us know and understand the leading couple: how they think, and why; whose opinions they value; when their fixed ideas about each other begin to shift. Letters run on for pages, marinating in details. A miniseries, at least, has the time to capture some of this nuanced interiority in dialogue, but in a two-hour film, metaphor is everything—and everything becomes metaphorical. Even the generous testicles of a resident farm animal.

“Adding a star for the slow zoom on the pig balls,” Dario Argento enter his body because “if we can’t crash-zoom into her pupils then how can we see Elizabeth’s soul?” The scariest scene? The showdown between Elizabeth Bennet and Dench’s Lady Catherine de Bourgh, shot like a 1960s fright-fest.

But back to the balls: “This pig turned up on the day and it had the biggest balls I’d ever seen in my life,” Wright explains. “Not that I’ve seen a lot of pigs’ balls, or balls in general. Metaphorically, the pig is the sire that comes and takes care of the lady pigs and in a way that’s what the whole film is about, mating.”

“I am heavily into looks and glances,” says Tothill, who also confesses an obsession with “editing dialogue scenes when people don’t quite say what they could or should say, where you have the undercurrent. Pride & Prejudice is chock-full of them. The way that Roman shot it also, you can see the eyes the whole time, and that’s crucial. You’re automatically drawn to the eyes in a close-up shot. Even in that scene, they look—but they’re not quite looking at each other.” 

That scene...

Fun fact: Wright and Tothill both despise “traveling shots”. Getting in and out of cars, driving back and forth, walking in and out of buildings: it’s all a distraction from the action of reaction, the fervid looks and yearning glances, the human stuff that propels a story. And yet, it was precisely an improvised reaction to a “getting into a car” moment, 25 minutes into Pride & Prejudice, that launched a thousand memes and even more reviews.

Like Austen’s novels, Wright’s film came out at a time of huge technological change, when Web 2.0 opened the internet up to -generated content. ​​Pride & Prejudice premiered the same year YouTube was born; Tumblr’s GIF-friendly format followed two years later, securing the movie’s place in 21st-century culture via the fan-made power of micro-obsessions, which the likes of TikTok, Instagram and hello, yes, Letterboxd, have only strengthened two decades on.

In a behind-the-scenes interview from 2005, Knightley already knew the impact of that gloveless moment, at least in of Regency-era etiquette: “They don’t really touch. Women don’t shake hands with men, you know? So the first time Darcy touches Elizabeth is when he helps her into the carriage, which is a really beautiful moment, because it’s the first skin-on-skin touch.”

“I felt it when we cut it,” Tothill re. “It still gives me the shivers thinking about it. There’s this sort of electricity between them as they, flesh-on-flesh, touch hands. Then he walks away and you get that shot of him just flexing his hand which is… it is quite ambiguous. I’ve always seen it as sort of slightly confused.”

“Joe Wright just spotted that,” Macfadyen, the hand-flexer himself, tells Letterboxd. “He was like, ‘Oh, what are you doing? What’s that?’ It wasn’t like a [moment], it was like, ‘Oh, let’s just grab that.’ And then we moved onto something else. It wasn’t a ‘thing’. At all.”

In the meantime, the anniversary 4K restoration of Wright’s film arrived last month into a healthy repertory landscape which, along with a decent streaming stint on Netflix, has seen thousands of first-time Letterboxd logs in recent weeks. “It’s been on my list forever,” Orson says of their interactive experience, in which “a theater full of women of all ages made a wide variety of sounds when Darcy did the hand thing.”

“Time will explain,” Jane Austen writes in Pride and Prejudice. This is proving true for those revisiting a picture they didn’t connect with the first time around. Filmspotting’s Adam Kempenaar has “seen the light”, recently delivering four-and-a-half stars in what his daughter Sophie, in the comments section, celebrates as “a comeback for the history books.” “Took my wife and ended up swooning alongside all the other enraptured fans in our packed screening,” Ethan shares, itting, “I’ve grown a lot!”

It’s all music to the creative team behind Pride & Prejudice. “The film is so comforting,” writes Moggach. “I’m so glad people have found it so.” Tothill is exceedingly grateful we’ve clocked the little things. “Thank you for noticing, because those big close-ups were designed by Joe and edited by Joe and myself to do something—and they have. It clearly works because of the response, which is fantastic.”

And the director? He just feels very lucky: “I’m very grateful and humbled by the fact that the movie reached out to people and maybe gave them a little bit of peace in this dreadfully violent world.” Thanks for the helping hand, Mr. Wright.