Vinterberg: Old Madding movie was confused

Thomas Vinterberg found earlier adaptations of Far From the Madding Crowd too “confusing”.

The director helmed the latest film version of Thomas Hardy’s classic, which stars Carey Mulligan in the role of strong-minded Bathsheba Everdene.

It was also tackled by John Schlesinger, who cast Julie Christie in the same part, in 1967 but Thomas decided to avoid it.

“No, I saw 20 minutes of the Schlesinger movie and decided not to see any more, because I found it confusing to some degree,” he explained to comingsoon.net.

“It’s made by three of my biggest heroes. I’ve been in love with Julie Christie since I was a child and Schlesinger is great and particularly Nick Roeg [Nicolas Roeg, director of photography] behind the camera. I’m a huge Roeg fan, like a giant Roeg fan, and I found that almost intimidating. I decided to pretend that this was a one-off love affair between me and Thomas Hardy because I thought that would be the most pure and inspirational way to go.”

Far From the Madding Crowd may seem like a strange choice for Thomas, who last directed drama The Hunt, about a convicted paedophile who tries to return to normality. He explained why he decided to make such a drastic departure from the feature.

“Well, first of all, I like to change. I hate repeating myself, and here was a considerable change, both in genre but also in gender in the sense that my latest movies had been very full of testosterone and this was an exploration of being a woman that I found incredibly modern actually, and visionary,” he opened up.

“The first thing that has to happen to me when I do a film is unexplainable thing where you sort of fall in love with something. I read this and these characters moved me, the way that Thomas Hardy plays with fate moved me. I was to some degree overwhelmed by it and humbled by it, and it couldn’t go away.”