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Patricia Rozema is a Canadian film director whose adaptation of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (Miramax, 1999) produced a torrent of varying receptions, ambivalent at best, denigrating at worst. The novel itself is not highly popular with Austen readers/critics and it was adapted only once for the BBC and broadcast as a miniseries in 1983 before Rozema released her vision of the novel on film in 1999. This interview is meant to interrogate the choices behind her clearly politicized interpretation of the story. Since she is both the screenwriter and director of the film production, Rozema embodies an interesting case of the reading, envisioning, and rewriting process of literary classics like Austen's and representing them in the twentieth century's most popular medium, the cinema, which has its own methods of communication. In this interview, I investigate Rozema's reading of the text, the ideological stances that informed, affected, or shaped her reading experience, and her position in relation to the issue of fidelity to the original text, which is still at the core of any critical assessment or indeed general reception of film adaptations of classic/canonic works of literature.
Our dialogue took place through written correspondence and I received the answers to my questions in March 2003, when Rozema was busy working on a film and I was still researching Austen and film adaptations in England. I hope this interview sheds some light on the stages of filming Mansfield Park and highlights some of the central issues regarding film adaptation in general, and that of Austen's novel in particular.*
Hiba Moussa: What factors do you think make a book adaptable?
Patricia Rozema: The moral core of the piece needs to be built into the turns of events themselves, not just the prose description of those events. Some novels declare themselves in their interpretation of events and some, the ones that are more easily adapted, declare themselves in the very fabric of the causal relations.
HM: How much do socio-historical circumstances, whether those shaping the time you read the, book or the time the book was produced, affect your reading and understanding of a novel?
PR: They affect me very much. In fact, that is what I added to Mansfield Park, the movie. I felt like we couldn't...