Most actors make their directorial debuts with a short film, maybe an episode of television. Emily Mortimer went and directed a whole dang miniseries for her first time. The well-established actress plays a small role in the three-part limited series The Pursuit of Love, while also writing and directing the story of Linda (Lily James) and Fanny (Emily Beecham), two cousins and life-long friends growing up, falling in love, and facing the challenges of being a woman in the early 20th century.
Now making its U.S. debut on Amazon Prime Video, The Pursuit of Love takes a decidedly modern point-of-view on the decades it chronicles, with Nancy Mitford's original novel's own attitudes on love and sex guiding Mortimer's approach. In a one-on-one interview with Collider, Mortimer explains how she ended up behind the camera for this series, what anachronistic songs she wanted to include but couldn't, and how her brother-in-law George Vjestica helped bring together a "super band" of players from the Pogues, the Pretenders, the Specials, and the Bad Seeds for a key sequence. She also reveals how she borrowed from her own experiences as an actor to approach the film's more intimate scenes, with some help from Ita O'Brien, the intimacy coordinator behind Hulu's Normal People (so you know it's good).
Collider: Congratulations on the series — it seems like had a really fantastic critical reaction in Britain.
EMILY MORTIMER: Yeah. So, I mean, I have been trying not to really look, because, I mean, just going online and reading anything about yourself or your contribution is just such a sort of perilous thing to do. So I can't quite decide how one's meant to navigate that, but I do get the impression that there have been nice things said.
I heard someone once say about reviews that if you want to believe the nice stuff, you also have to believe the not nice stuff.
MORTIMER: Yeah. So therefore it's better not to believe any of it, I think. It's just like, take the bad with as much of a big as a pinch of salt as you take the good.
Exactly. So in terms of taking this on, I feel like it's an incredibly ambitious thing to do a three-hour mini series as your first major directing project. What was exciting for you about that?
MORTIMER: Well, I keep thinking that, had I really done it in a conscious way, I probably would not have done it. But it sort of happened to me, and I found that I really loved it.
I had been approached to write an adaptation of the book. I re-read the book. And I found that I felt that there was a lot in the book that felt relevant somehow. And I thought, "Yeah, I'll do that. That would be fun." I knew I loved the book growing up, and it still felt very fresh and relevant to me, even though it was another period drama about people, sort of initially, in a country house in England, which was a bit of a red flag. But even despite that, I felt that there was something really exciting and fresh in the writing. I felt sort of seen and forgiven by Nancy Mitford as I read the novel, and I also felt that it was a real treat to read it. And it felt quite radical in a lot of ways, the way she writes about sexuality and women and motherhood and all of it and love.
But the directing thing... I mean, I wrote the scripts now I look back on it in quite a bossy way. I was sort of basically telling everyone where to put the camera and what costumes to wear and what music to have, but I didn't think that in a million years I would be given that opportunity or allowed to do something like that, given that I had no experience of it.
It was Lily James, who was already attached to the project before I came on, who really gave me that opportunity. She was the one that suggested I direct it. And because it was Lily and because they wouldn't have been able to make the show without Lily, everybody went along with it. And I did too. It was one of those moments in life, where I saw this door opening, and I had two choices. One was to walk through it, and one was to not, and I just walked through it.
And from that moment on, I was directing this thing and there was literally no time to think, luckily. Because if I had had time, I probably would've just got paralyzed and not been able to do it. It kind of happened and I just kept doing it and kept saying yes, instead of saying no. I mean, it would never have happened if it hadn't happened that way, because I would never have said to myself, "I'm going to write an adaptation of The Pursuit of Love and adapt it for the television and then I'm going to direct and be in it, et cetera." I mean, no.
Over the course of your career, you've worked with a lot of really exciting directors — when you were approaching this, were you thinking about their styles? Were you thinking, "I should try something like this?"
MORTIMER: I wasn't consciously thinking of those things, because I've had so many experiences that it's difficult to pinpoint what I learned from who or where, but I definitely did. There were moments when I would start to realize when I was feeling scared — the odd moments where that was enough time to sit there behind the monitor and while you're waiting for the shot to be set up or something and think, "Oh, fuck it. This is quite daunting." And I would remind myself that actually, as an actor, I had probably been on more sets than a lot of the crew had — even of the very most experienced crew, because your turnover as an actor is quicker than most people, like a designer. You're doing three or four things a year as an actor, if you're lucky, compared to other crew members.
And so really, I'd notched up quite a lot of experience, quite a lot of manhours sitting on various movie sets over the years and working with some of the greatest directors alive, including Martin Scorsese and others. I did kind of comfort myself with that, and I felt like, no, I actually know. I can look at a schedule. I was starting to understand that I could look at the schedule that the first AD would give me and be able to say, "We're never going to have time to do all that." Or, "That's much too much time for that." Just from my experience of sitting in trailers and looking at my schedule and thinking, "They're never going to get to that one. I don't need to bother about my lines for the one at the end of the day, because they're never going to get to that one." And all that. So yeah, I have stood on a lot of film sets, and I guess I must've learnt something from that.
In general, how did you approach casting? What kind of qualities were you looking for?
MORTIMER: Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, it was a particular quality, a particular skill that all the actors in the show had. And I realized that during the meetings I had and in getting ready for the shoot. It was so interesting, because there were lots of incredibly talented actors that I met, but it was a particular tonal thing that I think was really important in all areas of the shoot, not just in the performances, but in the music and the set design and the costumes and everything. And in the way, I guess, I edited it too like, where it's this quite fine line between some ... It has to be funny. It's a comedy in a way, or it's a satire certainly, but yet it has to feel really grounded and emotionally true. And it has to be able to make me cry.
And so, that's a particular tone that some actors have a talent for. I remember auditioning for the parts of Louisa, the oldest sister, who's played so brilliantly by Beattie Edmondson. And there was three actors in a row, and one of them came in and did it very straight and very kind of like she was in a kind of drama. It was a very grounded, straight rendition of a woman who's very jealous of her sister. And it was quite intense and good, but it wasn't funny. And then the next one came in and did it just totally for comedy, for laughs, and that wasn't right either. And then Beattie came and did it, and it just felt really grounded, really real, but with just this ear for the kind of rhythm of something that had just a humor to it, a lack of earnestness to it, or something. And that was what really all the actors I've felt across the board have a kind of instinct for that tone. I think it's really hard to do.
One element that's hard to miss about the show is the fact that you get to bring in a lot of modern music, which is a lot of fun. Were there songs you couldn't get that you wanted?
MORTIMER: Yeah, there were a few. The first song that I wrote into the screenplay when I was getting ready to do the show was a Grace Jones cover of "La Vie En Rose." I had wanted that — that was the first moment where I thought, "That would work so well here," and then that sort of got me thinking about being able to use music from different time periods across the show.
But [Grace Jones] was too expensive. And then I wanted Iggy Pop's "Nightclubbing" for the nightclubbing sequence, but I think the Roxy Music works so well there, "The In-Crowd." Yeah, there were a couple, but we did really, really well. Clint Mansell, the great composer, is the composer for all the music. And my brother-in-law, George Vjestica, who's a Bad Seed — he's in the band Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds — he is the music director. He helped me curate all these tracks. He was my great right-hand man through choosing all the music.
In fact, that band, the band that you see in the first episode when Linda [James] and Tony [played by Freddie Fox] come running down the aisle and do that crazy dance, there's a band. My brother-in-law's in that band, playing the guitar, but it's like a super band. There's Jim [Sclavunos] from The Bad Seeds and my brother-in-law George [Vjestica], and a guy from The Pretenders [Nick Wilkinson] on the double bass, and Nikolaj Torp Larsen from The Specials on the accordion, and then Spider [Stacy] from The Pogues is playing the pennywhistle. There you go, for your music trivia.
Wow. Were they all just friends with your brother-in-law?
MORTIMER: Yeah. He got this band together, and they all came down and did it, and it was amazing. It's an old hunting song, and they just managed to make it sound as like the sort of punk rock Pogues song somehow.
That's wonderful. To wrap up, as an actor, you've had plenty of experience with nudity and sex scenes — what was it like directing sequences like that?
MORTIMER: It was really interesting. I mean, I was very set in that I wanted something like that, because the story was sort of Linda's journey, through her romantic life, was about coming to a place where she was sort of sexually liberated and felt quite awakened sexually. And that it was something that she could embrace without feeling ashamed of it. So I wanted that sex scene between her and Fabrice [Assaad Bouab] to be really sexy, but yet feel... I mean, I find sex scenes often very embarrassing to watch, and I wanted it to be sexy without being cringe-y and also to feel like it was kind of from a woman's point of view somehow.
And so, they have these things now called intimacy coordinators. And we had this incredible woman who did the love scenes from Normal People, Ita O'Brien, who's a real artist. It's almost like choreographing a dance, and we spoke at length with her, and I thought of great moments in sex scenes that I've loved in movies, and I used that a bit and we kind of put them all together in this kind of strange... Really, the most electric moment in falling in love with someone or getting into a sexual relationship with someone is that first touch, when they first touch you, or you first touch them, and you know that you're both thinking about the thing. And I wanted to kind of riff on that moment. And so, then I developed this whole kind of flash-forward thing.
Lily was just incredible and so open and up for it. And I was very careful to make Lily and Emily [Beecham] feel that in any moments where there was nudity that they could watch it with me and come back into the monitor. And we watched it together and worked out what looked good and what didn't. It was a collaboration really. I guess that's what it was. It was all of us talking and all of us working it out and being very open about it.
I've done a lot of those kinds of scenes in my life. And it often can feel like somebody just died or something. It's very funereal and there's this sort of hush sort of church-like sort of atmosphere on a set when people have to take their clothes off, which makes it much more embarrassing. And nobody's talking, and nobody's looking you in the eye. It's something that we really feel so sort of, I don't know, awkward and self-conscious, and I just wanted it to not be like that. I wanted it to be like, we're all chatting and we're here.
The Pursuit of Love is streaming now on Amazon Prime.