‘The Invisible Woman’: Ralph Fiennes on resisting cliches
Ralph Fiennes’ second film as a director, “The Invisible Woman,” about Charles Dickens’ love affair with the much younger Nelly Ternan, found the actor-filmmaker carefully navigating the perils of period movies, from stuffy pageantry to overwrought melodrama.
At the Envelope Screening Series, Fiennes and Felicity Jones talked about bringing the Victorian romance to life for a contemporary audience.
Having screened the film at the Telluride and Toronto film festivals, Fiennes said, “The most heartening responses have been when people have talked about experiencing the intimacy or the intimate moments. I don’t just mean the lovemaking moments, I mean the conversations.”
VIDEO: Watch Ralph Fiennes, Felicity Jones discuss ‘The Invisible Woman’
He continued: “People have talked about the camera and the visuals and things like that positively, but I strongly wanted to resist the kind of cliches … of Dickens looking at Nelly across a room and from that moment, we know they’re going to be lovers. I wanted to keep it back. I wanted to chart the odd progressions of a relationship, of an attraction. I don’t think it always happens, I think that people don’t quite know they’re attracted to each other sometimes. It was sort of trying to imagine what it was, this progression between them … to come together.”
Fiennes was also pleased, he said, that “people have commented on what they feel to be the reality of the world, the Victorian world. It’s a difficult one because there’s a sort of formality to the way people speak, and I hope we’ve got it right. But I have felt it’s connected with people.”
For more from Fiennes and Jones on “The Invisible Woman,” watch the full video above.
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