2 Days Until Jane Eyre 2011 ~ BrontëBlog

Village Voice publishes a glowing review of the film:

The moment may be right to cash in on Jane Eyre’s blend of girl-to-woman rites of passage, supernatural/psychological paranoia, tragic love, and English accents, but Fukunaga’s film is anything but trendy. Rather than Twilight-izing a classic tale (...) Fukunaga has made his Jane Eyre an intimate, thoughtful epic, anchored by strong lead performances and the gorgeous, moody 100-shades-of-gray cinematography of Adriano Goldman. (...)
Jane Eyre hits its glorious gothic peak with Jane in flight from that romance—alone in a storm in a deserted field, the pain of having opened her heart only to have it broken twinned with literal sickness resulting from “exposure.” Though she has hit rock bottom, it’s this “action” that will ultimately lead Jane to what she’s been looking for. Even as it romanticizes agony, Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre plays as a correction to the Twilight series—in which a teenage girl idolizes mystically powerful boys—arguing that love, in its perfect state, is a meeting between equals. Using Brontë’s text as the basis for an inquiry into free will versus servitude, Fukunaga mounts a subtly shaded, yet emotionally devastating, examination of what it really means to choose one’s own way. (Karina Longworth)

The New York Observer goes in the opposite direction. But once again, their arguments seem more related to the reviewer's own phobias and limitations (check the comment on the language again) than to the film itself. It seems that for it to be acceptable it should be written with the syntax and vocabulary of a 21st-century blockbuster. We might have to ask Dan Brown to rewrite the dialogues:

With the great 1944 version of Jane Erye, starring Orson Welles, Joan Fontaine and a perfect supporting cast easily available to buy or rent, it would seem that nobody needs a sixth remake of Charlotte Brontë's gothic Victorian novel, published in 1847. But filmmakers just can't resist the camera-ready thrill and romance of the story, so it's back to the Yorkshire moors, the birdlike stirrings in the unloved heart of the orphaned Jane, the creepy mansion of the brooding Edward Fairfax Rochester, the mystery of the screams in the night and the secret horror locked away in the attic, and the rest of the familiar territory already worn thin by the heavy feet of not only Welles but Colin Clive, George C. Scott and William Hurt. This one is workmanlike and nothing remarkable, but compared to the rest of the junk polluting screens today, it is an elegant and welcome antidote. (...)
The dialogue is often so arch and formal it needs translating ("Stay your wandering at a friend's threshold" means "Come in"), the direction heavy-handed and improvidently corny. Still, it's grimly fascinating in ways that won't lull you to sleep. You gotta hand it to Charlotte Brontë. One hundred and sixty-four years since she gave hyperkinetic Victorian schoolgirls their first sleepless nights, she's pulling them in all over again. What's next? An all-male version with Charles Busch and Cheyenne Jackson? (Rex Reed)

The reviewer should notice that there are a few (others think that quite a lot, actually) versions of the film besides Jane Eyre 1944.

Another good review comes from Syrie James, the author of The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Brontë

I have only two minor gripes with the film (WARNING: spoiler alert. If you aren’t familiar with the classic story, please stop reading now.) While the revelation of Mr. Rochester’s secret was very well-done, I felt the madwoman in the attic was too prettified and not nearly “mad” enough. And the ending was too abrupt. An explanation (for the uninitiated) of how Rochester came to be blind would have been nice, and I would have preferred another minute or two to relish the lovers’ final, emotional reunion. But that aside, the filmmakers have done a masterful job translating the novel to the screen.

Reuters distributes an interview with Mia Wasikowska:

Q: You are noted for accents, from various American styles to now, northern England in "Jane Eyre"? Did you practice as a child growing up in Canberra?
A: "I even remember playing dolls in an American accent 'cause for us that was make believe...I think it would be almost scarier for me to do my own accent."
>Q: Not so long ago you were in a small soap opera, now, in "Jane Eyre," you are acting alongside the likes of Judi Dench?
A: "It helps not to think of it as too bizarre. It could be easy to get overwhelmed by it. It also helps that I have worked with great people, but they are also really grounded." (...)
Q: Jane Eyre also has an inner confidence and determination. Why does this character keep resonating?
A: "It's a really important character for women particularly, because she has an innate sense of self respect, which a lot of people don't have. And she has no one to have got that from, it's not like she had a loving upbringing or something, but she is born with something inside of her that says 'I am worth having a good life. I am worth being respected, I am worth having a good relationship. And I am worth being treated well.' And all those things speak to people, no matter what time it is."(Editing by Bob Tourtellotte)

Collider publishes a more in-depth interview with the Australian actress:

How do you think the film and Jane relate to older teen girls today? Do you feel like these feelings transcend the ages?
WASIKOWSKA: Yes. I think it’s a very modern story and also a very universal story. When you take away the costumes and the setting, at the core of it is a story of a young girl who is trying to find love and a family and connection, in a very dislocated world. I feel like that has transcended. It continues to connect with people. It’s a very universal theme and something almost everybody experiences to a different degree in their life.
How cold and miserable was it to shoot some of these scenes where you had to be out in the weather? Did you get sick?
WASIKOWSKA: I did. I remember precisely that, on day two, I got hypothermia, but it was okay. It was very, very cold. It was hard enough in regular clothes, let alone with fake rain and soggy period costumes.
There was not only the weather, but a grayness to the world Jane is in. How did that translate to how you create the character?
WASIKOWSKA: Yeah, it was very bleak. When you’re in that environment, you really get a sense of the isolation and the distance between one estate and another. Also, as an 18-year-old living in a world where your main source of company is an 8-year-old girl or Mrs. Fairfax, I thought that was really interesting. In our world, we have so many ways we can escape with technology, like TV, Facebook, computers, text messaging and all that. For her, it was reality, every day. (Read more) (Christina Radish)

NewsOK has also interviewed Mia Wasikowska and Cary Fukunaga:

“I think (Jane Eyre) is such an important character for women, and for young women especially, because she is someone who is born with an innate sense of self-respect,” Wasikowska said during bustling press interviews hosted by Focus Features at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. “And there's really nowhere that that would have come from. It's not like she had a loving upbringing or anything. But she has something inside of her that says, ‘I'm worthy of being treated right, and I'm worthy of having a good life and being loved.' And that's something I think people connect to and have continued to connect to. And that's what makes her timeless and very modern as well.” (...)
“Charlotte Brontë's perspective of herself was that she was plain, and I feel that Charlotte Bronteë is the essence of Jane,” Fukunaga said. “But Mary Rivers counters Jane later in the story and says, ‘You are pretty. You're not plain.' It's Jane's own vision of what she sees herself to be. (...)

“I think that's what the arts are for anyway,” Wasikowska said. “It's what's cool about ‘Jane Eyre.' There are so many different interpretations, and it's fun seeing what different people do with it. And often it's like a reflection of what's going on in our own day as much as it is about the period story.” (Dennis King)

GlobalNews Canada has a video interview with Mia Wasikowska.

The Playlist has its own interview with both Cary Fukunaga and Michael Fassbender:

The Playlist: So what drew you to “Jane Eyre”? It’s been made numerous times before.
Cary Fukunaga: Yeah, I thought just, “Why not one more time?” It feels like it’s made every five years, and 2006 was the last one, so 2011 makes sense to make another one. It’s my turn—do it. It really was one of those things where I was aware of the Bob Stevenson version of film from 1944. I was not aware of the 26 other ones that were there. I knew that it had been made a couple of times, but I didn’t realize it was that many times and that the BBC had just done one. But I watched it and I kinda felt happy that I knew I wasn’t making that version of the film, so it was okay.
What sets your film apart?
Toby Stephens was great [in the 2006 BBC version]...See, I watched a few episodes of it, and then I couldn’t do any more. It was because…I heard it got better once you got to the middle of it, but the first few? I was just all in the desert, the Red Room, weird quirky camera pushing it out with like a red filter, I was like, ‘What is this? What’s going on?’ But I respect Ruth Wilson and Toby Stephens. And even Michael [Fassbender] who watched a bunch of it said that he really liked what Toby did in that series, so I should one day probably watch it, but I didn’t want to be too influenced either. I didn’t want to do things to be different just to be different either. And some things after I shot the film, I saw what they did, and it dawned, I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, we did the same thing.’ I remember one day I was having lunch or dinner at Pizza Express, which is the chain pizza that’s all over England. And we were shooting in Buxton and a bunch of the horse stunts guys were there, and this old guy, sort of the curmudgeonly old man was like, ‘Been watching what you’ve been doing. And pretty much every shot is like every other ‘Jane Eyre’ I’ve seen, except for this one thing you did. That was pretty good.” And I’m like, “Oh, thanks.” .... Because he basically, the same horse crew had been on the previous three “Jane Eyre"s since the early ‘90s. (...)
So this definitely focuses a bit more on the Gothic and the darker elements than some of the previous adaptations. Was that present in the script, or was that something that you kind of chose to do?
That’s present in the novel, I feel like. I think the Bob Stevenson version is one of the rarer versions that actually does really stay more in that pre-Gothic in that, it’s at the earlier end of the Victorian era. It has that sort of foreboding isolation, that dense fog, what’s beyond the moors in this isolated house, what’s beyond this tapestry in this wall, those creaky noises upstairs. It has that feeling in the book. And we just definitely wanted to do that. The question then becomes, how far do you go into the world of horror, or how much do you stay in the world of period drama/romance, while maintaining that tone. And that was the tricky part for me, really looking at the script—a scene, a scene, a scene—trying to be consistent with that. Because if you try to go horror and go too much horror, it takes away from the romance; it literally does. There were scenes we took out of the film because if you balance out the overall experience of it by going to this moment of potential horror, like Bertha Mason ripping the veil, for example. If you do it right, it takes away from the following scene where Rochester is reasserting his love for [Jane] and that everything is going to be fine once they’re married and away. And you kind of need that relationship to work by the latter part of the film. So that was the hard part, taking out bits of horror that we did shoot in order to balance out the romance story so that neither one felt really half-baked. There was actually some sort of complete execution of the one sentiment.
Do you think that the trailer is pushing the darker-side of things?
Definitely, definitely. I tell my friends, “It’s not that scary.” (Kimber Myers)

Moviefone interviews Michael Fassbender:

Moviefone: Were you forced to read 'Jane Eyre' in school?
Michael Fassbender: No, I wasn't, actually. That wasn't on our curriculum. But my sister and mother had always talked about it, and that was kind of the reason I wanted to do it, really. They were such big fans, and so I thought, "Well, let's see what they think of what I can do with Rochester." (...)
How closely did you work with Mia on creating the chemistry between Jane and Rochester?
Well, I don't think chemistry is something that you can really create. I had so much respect for her as an actor that I just wanted to make sure that I was totally there for her in whatever ways I could help, just as a fellow actor. There was a big respect there, and I think that there was the same coming from her end. And it just worked. I don't really know how you develop something like that. We didn't hang out extensively to create that. I was doing a lot of homework on my own. We did do some rehearsal time, but she's just a real professional and really brilliant, so I just sort of had to, as I say, try to keep up with her and then all of that will be taken care of.
Rochester's a very serious guy. Did you find yourself trying to lighten the mood in between takes?
Yeah. I kind of tend to do that if the material is heavy -- not always, but sometimes to be a little bit caught unaware, or to be relaxed going into a scene is an interesting technique to try and endorse. But not all the time. Sometimes it's not good to be joking. [Laughs] But Mia and I had a good relationship, so we would have a bit of a laugh in between takes, or right up to action, really, because it distracts you. There's a lot of stuff [happening on set] ... Sometimes you just want to be distracted by something else. (Andrew Scott)

And Salon too (a very interesting one):

So many actors have played Rochester over the years, from Orson Welles to Charlton Heston to, I don't know, Timothy Dalton. Did you watch any of them do it?
I figured, you know, that I'd be the first to really get a take on it. No! Just kidding! I watched all of them, really, or as many as I could get my hands on, from Orson Welles through Toby Stephens [in the acclaimed 2006 British miniseries]. I liked Toby Stephens the best, actually, out of all of those I've seen.
Orson Welles really hams it up in that role, as I recall.
Wow! [Stentorian Orson Welles voice.] "Jane! Jaa-aane! Jaa-aaa-aane!" Whoa! Slow down! At one point I was also involved in "Wuthering Heights," actually. And I watched Laurence Olivier's Heathcliff. And again, I was like: Whoa, shit! OK, Olivier was great, and Orson Welles -- they are who they are. But, shit, this has dated, I gotta say.
I really liked this version of "Jane Eyre" a lot. But the other side of that is that it has a lot of unexpected and raw qualities, and some people will really hate it.
Which is good, you know. It's always better to have people that love it or hate it. The worst thing is indifference, you know. If you're stuck in the middle you may have made a bad film. Maybe that's unfair -- anyone who manages to get a film made in the first place, that's a real achievement.
As you play Rochester, he almost seems diseased. He's got a secret, obviously. Do we have to warn people about spoilers for a story written 160 years ago? [Laughter.] But it's like he's a drug addict, or he has cancer and hasn't told anyone. Something's eating him inside.
Great, great. That's what I was trying to get at. That's what I wanted with him, he's got a shadow on him all the time, this guilty secret, this dirty secret. Everything springs from that secret, from what happened to him in Jamaica. His whole life has been formed from that. You can imagine this guy who sets out for Jamaica when he's young, full of hope, has his whole life ahead of him, and it all goes really wrong. Fifteen or 20 years later, you can see that he's somebody who hasn't opened up to anyone. He has no friends in his life. People come around, but he's a bit odd, you know -- Rochester who travels all the time, who's trying to escape from reality.
He doesn't want to fall in love again, because it destroyed him so much that first time around. So when Jane comes along, not only is he attracted to her, but he's also scared of her. She starts peeling things away from him, and that's what I was trying to work on. Hopefully those elements are exposed.
And here's another thing. When I read it I thought to myself: God, he's quite bipolar. He goes through the ranges, and it can be in one scene. He's gone from seemingly contented and at ease to disgruntled and melancholic and dark. That was the first thing that struck me when I read it, and I thought: Cool, that's interesting. (Read more) (Andrew O'Hehir)

Indiewire publishes a video interview with Cary Fukunaga and Mia Wasikowska after the recent Film Independent screening. Marketplace talks with Rebecca Eaton, co-producer of the 2006 adaptation.

The novel gives screenwriters and directors a lot of room to be creative, she says, so every version is different.
Rebecca Eaton: You can either do it extremely compactly, just in the house, with the servants and the crazy wife in the attic, or you can add lots of other dimensions to it.
Similarly, you can do it on a low budget or a high one. Either way, Eaton says, it's the story that sells.
Eaton: I think "Jane Eyre" is every romantic, strong woman's dream come true. (David Gura)

The Fairfield Weekly has a curious way of presenting the picture:

Wikipedia counts 26 film or TV versions of Jane Eyre, dating as far back as 1915 and coming from as far as India and Hong Kong. Most have had one thing in common: They're really boring! Not that the 1847 novel was exactly a Robert Ludlum thriller, but Charlotte Brontë fit enough Gothic spookiness, emotional restlessness, tension between genders and social classes, themes of sin and atonement and occasional feelings of unreality into those 450-plus pages to make Jane Eyre pretty rich with flavor. Most directors only go for a romantic period piece where people dress nice and talk fancy. Director Cary Fukunaga has promised to capture some of the book's darkness for his version, starring Mia Wasikowska (Alice in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland) and Michael Fassbender (the young Magneto in the upcoming X-Men:First Class). Of course — because it's an adaptation of a really old, really British book — Judi Dench has a supporting role.

More website talking about the movie: Greg Vellante (with interviews with Mia and Cary), Silver Screen Bijou, Brontës.nl, Flagpole...

Finally, Focus Films proposes the following to kill time before you can see the film:

Help Jane Eyre author Charlotte Brontë complete some of her most famous quotes, or for even more fun, create your own! Check out our Charlotte Brontë Twitter Libs on the official Jane Eyre site here: http://janeeyrethemovie.com and follow Charlotte Bronte on Twitter for more: http://twitter.com/charlottebronte