1 Interviewer: Peter, Um, Great Expectations- but Did It Meet

Interviewer: Peter, um, Great Expectations- but did it meet yours? Peter: It sort of did and I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. It was a very decent, robust, competent, workmanlike adaptation and nothing damns it with faint praise more than that (interviewer:not really that good). I thought it was a really likeable attractive piece of work, I really liked Jeremy Evans. When you think how awful he was in War Horse, but that wasn’t really his fault, I thought War Horse was so treacly and this was pretty decent- he is a pretty good lead to play this. I wondered why we were hearing it all again, I mean it’s great, I love it, I can’t get enough of Pip being beastly to Joe Gargery and being snobbish to him and the awful toe-curling embarrassment of all that, just deathless, I can’t get enough of them but why are we seeing it all again, especially as the film seems to be making a bit of a virtue of not having anything radically new to say about it- I don’t think, unless I miss.. Catherine thinks it does. I thought it was good and I’ll sit and watch it perfectly happily, there were some very nice cameo turns in it- Sally Hawkins, who’s just born to be a Dickens player, David Walliams as Mr Pomchook . So I thought it was good but I wondered why we were hearing about it again, what was the point when people like the BBC, with their version of Bleak House , which was so radical and strong, why do this, why do this now? Why do it if you’ve really nothing new to say? Presenter: Catherine, can you answer that question, Mike Newell’s talked about this being his sexy version of Great Expectations- did you feel any of that? Catherine: I didn’t feel sexy, I didn’t feel it was sexy and I didn’t feel sexy watching it, I felt the opposite of sexy. And I don’t know why they’ve done it again, I mean,I suppose one thinks, depressingly, cause of the money and the selling of it (Presenter: presents) Christmas, lovely Christmas. I’ve gotta disagree with Peter, I mean I just didn’t, I thought it was solid in the sense the sofa is solid but it didn’t have the sort of beauty and you have this sofa ..uh, you know, the thing about Great Expectations is that he wrote it as a cliffhanger, every single thing was a cliffhanger and this just piles them all up and there’s no soap in this, there’s no tension and I don’t think those cameos were great, Sally Hawkins wasn’t horrible enough to be Mrs Joe and I didn’t think that Walliams was funny enough to be Mr Pomchook. Everything sort of disappointed me and I thought Jeremy Evans, I know Pip is, as you say in your interview, to be a bit of a shit, but he was completely dull, all those scenes of him welding, he’s too pretty to (Presenter: he did a lot of training for it. He trained as a blacksmith) Really? He’s no Day-Lewis though, is he? I mean. Did you like it? Presenter: I didn’t like it much, I mean I have to say I thought it was very flat, not much to it, and also all the British character actors there, you know, that you’d expect to see: Helena Bonham Carter ; oh and Ralph Fiennes was good Peter: I find myself on the same spectrum as all this but for some reason, a sort of Dickensian sunny room , I didn’t think it was bad Presenter: Do you think that part of the problem is it’s got quite big boots to fill in terms of Davis Lean’s 1946 version? Catherine: Yeah, even the Ethan Hawk version, this doesn’t really do anything, it doesn’t have romance, it doesn’t have camp and you’re desperate for something like, you know, Helena Bonham Carter as Miss Havisham , for years you’re thinking think, oh that sounds fantastic but actually she’s less kind of Havishamy than she is in normal life. Extract from the film: 1 Do you wish to see Miss Havisham? Come closer. What do you think? I think she’s really pretty You can break his heart. 2 .

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