Production is currently underway on director Mike Newell’s (Four Weddings and a Funeral) adaptation of the Charles Dickens classic Great Expectations, and today we’ve got our first look at star Helena Bonham Carter in character as Miss Havisham. To answer your question: no, Tim Burton has nothing to do with this movie. Carter is joined by Ralph Fiennes who’s playing Magwitch, as well as Jeremy Irvine (War Horse) as Pip, Holliday Grainger (The Borgias) as Estella, with Robbie Coltrane (Harry Potter), Jason Flemyng (X-Men: First Class), and Sally Hawkins (Happy Go Lucky).

Hit the jump to check out the images, as well as a synopsis for Dickens’ novel for those unfamiliar. Great Expectations will be released in the fall of 2012.

Here are the images (via Deadline). Click for high resolution.

Here’s the synopsis for Great Expectations:

Pip, a poor orphan being raised by a cruel sister, does not have much in the way of great expectations between his terrifying experience in a graveyard with a convict named Magwitch and his humiliating visits with the eccentric Miss Havisham’s beautiful but manipulative niece, Estella, who torments him until he is elevated to wealth by an anonymous benefactor. Full of unforgettable characters, Great Expectations is a tale of intrigue, unattainable love, and all of the happiness money can’t buy. Great Expectations has the most wonderful and most perfectly worked-out plot for a novel in the English language, according to John Irving, and J. Hillis Miller declares, Great Expectations is the most unified and concentrated expression of Dickens’s abiding sense of the world, and Pip might be called the archetypal Dickens hero. [Amazon]