[Exclusive Interview] Lone Scherfig on An Education

If you’ve seen An Education then you already know how excellent it is. The film premiered at Sundance this year and was met with wonderful reviews. It’s a coming of age tale about a girl trying to figure out what to do with her life and her education. While that may sound like a movie you’ve already seen before, it isn’t. It fully deserves its acclaim and it also features one of the year’s best performances from Carrey Mulligan. The film is currently in limited theaters and will be expanding this weekend. With all that said, here’s what the film’s director Lone Scherfig had to say.

Warning: This interview contains heavy spoilers.

How’s this day been for you? Do you like doing all these interviews?

Lone Scherfig: Yes, because I haven’t done much of it yet. Its fine… It would be weird not to since you do all this work to get some feedback and hear about the questions that this film poses.

What was your experience like at Sundance this year?

Lone Scherfig: It was fantastic! The reaction was positive and it was the first public screening of the film. It was great sitting in a room hearing people laugh where we hoped they would. It’s also a wonderful place.

Could you talk about how, exactly, you got involved in the project?

Lone Scherfig: Nick Hornby and I have the same agent so she slipped me the script early on and I said I wouldn’t mind if they asked me to do it and they did.

Since it’s Nick Hornby, I imagine that the original script he wrote was great. So did you not have to make a lot of changes to it?

Lone Scherfig: He did about two drafts when I was onboard and sometimes you change things for practical reasons. It’s a very English thing to do — to keep working and working. So he re-wrote a little bit, but not much.

Were you a fan of his books?

Lone Scherfig: Yes, I am and the new one is hilarious.

One thing about his books is that all his characters seem to have a distinct awareness of problems in society, even the little things. Would you say that applies to this film?

Lone Scherfig: Well, it’s a film that discusses education from different angles. Why should she have one, and each of the characters are actually defined by whether they have an education or not. The father’s insecurity, thats the way David came into the family so easily because the father didn’t have an education. The way Jenny and her mom don’t really understand each other since Jenny is ahead of her own mother educationally. Nick Hornby is a former school teacher… It’s kind of like a little glass ball you look into where you see London exploding straight after the film. All of England and the world changed culturally very rapidly. So, it’s Jenny’s preparation for a future that she’s not sure of. She has this appetite for life, for art and she just wants to do something and not become Emma Thompson’s character. She doesn’t know what is and I think this is Nick’s thesis on how education affects people. It also looks at how London was coming of age, just like Jenny.

That’s actually what I just about to bring up: that this really is a coming of age tale. I didn’t find Jenny particularly likable at the beginning. She seemed resentful towards her parents and even mean to that boy who liked her. Would you classify this as a coming of age tale since she changes so much?

Lone Scherfig: It’s hard to put it into a specific genre. This is actually a marketing problem we have since the film is at times is comic and at other times its thoughtful drama. That’s one good reason of why talking to someone like you is that you get to give people more keys to the story… The story comes first and sometimes you can get humor out of the material and sometimes you avoid jokes since you don’t get much out of them.

I think this also fits into the category of films like Revolutionary Road and Far From Heaven — which show society’s problems in a new light. What would you say this film does differently for that genre?

Lone Scherfig: Um, well, I love those two films and I also love melodrama. I don’t have the courage to do that though. I prefer something more humorous and optimistic. This is not about a girl who’s self-destructing, but someone who has to fight to go to school for her own reasons and not anyone else’s reasons. She has to figure out why she wants an education while her father wants her to have one just for security.

One scene that stuck out, to me was where Jenny first came home from hanging out with David and her mother seemed jealous when she said she had had the best night of her life. Was that intended or am I looking at that differently?

Lone Scherfig: I think she just doesn’t understand her daughter and she commits a sin of omission by not asking her about her night. Jenny wants to open up and talk, but her mother doesn’t feel like she has the right to talk to someone more educated. The mother should have been there for her and she wasn’t. Her daughter is just a different species. She doesn’t understand her.

Could you talk about casting Carrey Mulligan? I thought she was great.

Lone Scherfig: Yeah, we had a pile up of auditions and she just really stood out. She was always the one I wanted, but we had a really long casting process to make sure every decision was the right one. She hadn’t done anything and some of the others were more experienced. It was her first main role and she’s someone you like to look at on screen. She’s really good.

I heard Peter say in an interview that you would allow him to basically stop while shooting during a scene and talk to an extra. Is that true?

Lone Scherfig: I do believe a lot in getting ideas on the spot about your physical surroundings. If Peter had an idea like that I would trust him. It feels more organic and less staged.

There seemed to be this odd parallel between David and Jenny. They both pretended to be something they’re not. Was that at all your intent?

Lone Scherfig: That’s a good point… A part of her love for him is that she sees him as the person she wants to be like. She also is a fake at times, like at the beginning where she hides that she goes to school and she pretends to be older. After two weeks she seems older, because she becomes more settled in that lifestyle. They are not honest with each other at that point and she even admits that she was bored without him. Even at the point where she says that she knows that he is a criminal. She still forgives him since life without him is much worse than with him.

Do you think David felt a connection to her since they’re kind of alike in that aspect?

Lone Scherfig: No, I think it’s that she is honest and blunt. She’s so sweet and charming. That’s what he falls for.

Do you think he truly cared for her or was looking to exploit her?

Lone Scherfig: He falls for her and he finds her innocence very heartbreaking and warming. He doesn’t want to exploit her and he’s even relieved when she doesn’t want to make love early on. She’s even more advanced than he is because of his boyish antics. He’s not the greatest lover in British film history (laughs).

There’s obviously an ambiguity whether David will continue that life at the end. The last scene you see him in, he seems destroyed and maybe as if he’s realized how bad his actions have been.

Lone Scherfig: We talked about that, how he’s done it before, and with someone as young as Jenny. When he says he’ll get a divorce I think he means it, but he’s also the type of person who says to his wife the next day, “let’s have another child.” He’s a borderline sociopath.

Would you say you feel any sympathy for him? I don’t know if this makes me a bad person, but I felt somewhat bad for him in that last scene.

Lone Scherfig: I have tons of sympathy for him and I like him. He is a bad person, but he’s very human. Both Peter Sarsgaard and I totally love him, but he is not a good guy (laughs). I just hope my daughters never run into someone like him one day (laughs).

A lot of scenes earlier on that focused on David seemed brightly lit and the camera work felt distant, was this intentional to make him come off as more glamorous?

Lone Scherfig: Yes, we were trying to make him look glamorous. Scenes like the auction are lit slickly to make him seem glamorous. Other scenes where Jenny is in trouble are rougher and more handled. We invested a lot of energy in lighting and it all depends on location.

That’s one thing I loved about the film is that the cinematography actually adds layers to the story and characters. Was that always planned?

Lone Scherfig: Yeah, we wrote that stuff into the script. It’s a little eerie and those scenes seem darker. The gas station scene is a perfect example. Instead of making it look big, we wanted this small melodramatic feeling where the gas station seems downright cute. I think it worked for the film and when you read these locations on page they come off like something from an American film. It’s the American mythology of having people at gas stations discovering something horrible.

How much do you storyboard?

Lone Scherfig: That scene actually was storyboarded, because we had very little time there to shoot. For a film like this, not much. If it’s a scene that we know will be technically complicated then I’ll storyboard it. All the rain sequences we story-boarded too…

Did you do that for the Paris sequence?

Lone Scherfig: Yeah, because that’s period Paris so that was really hard. We still shot it handheld and there are just some places you can’t shoot in Paris.

What was the toughest scene to shoot?

Lone Scherfig: (Pause) Um, maybe the dog track sequence… It’s really not a difficult type of film to shoot. The difficulties come more so from trying to get the tone right.