What was life like in the 1920s just after the First World War ended? That’s the backdrop for the film Mothering Sunday, a historical drama written by Alice Birch, based on the novel by Graham Swift and directed by Eva Husson. Just a few years after the war, England is still coming to terms with the impact of the conflict and how many boys had been lost over in Europe.
Mothering Sunday focuses on Jane (played by Odessa Young), the housemaid of two grieving parents who lost their sons and leave the estate for the day. On this special day, she finds freedom and romance, as she is able to spend time with a secret lover who lives in a nearby manor. The affair must remain secret though, not only due to their class divide, but because his fiancé is friends with Jane’s employer.
When Husson read the screenplay — a compassionate, thoughtful and honest piece — she was compelled to make this her next film; feeling the honesty in Birch’s screenplay.
“It was a culmination of everything that I am passionate about in life: writing, sex, and pure cinema,” Husson says, adding that she was experiencing personal lost when reading the script and she embraced the storytelling as a way to process emotions.
By the time Husson came on board, Birch’s script was close to being in its final draft form. However, she worked with the writer to develop the timeline and references to time in the script. She wanted to ensure audiences understood the time differences between when Jane is a few years older and her time with Paul, the man with whom she is having an affair.
As an avid reader, Husson took part of her research to Virginia Woolf, who fascinated her because of Woolf's presence as a writer and her relationship to the 1920s. Husson used this as a way to envision what young women had to deal with at the end of the World War while trying to embrace a new era.
“World War I happened and post-modernism emerges, which is about finding meaning in chaos and tragedy,” Husson says of her approach to Mothering Sunday. “It also conveys the fragmentation people felt at the time — that thought was part of the script that I embraced.”
Researching is one of the parts of screenwriting that she enjoys the most and always starts the process from scratch, taking a look at the imagery first. It’s more than just looking at the moment: Husson explains that if your character was twenty years old in the 1920s, they have a visual remembrance of the 1910s. Just like now, the previous decades influence your style — clothes might be a couple years old, a couch in the living room could be 10 years old, a style of the bathroom might be much older.
Husson adds, “I researched a lot of photography of the time. In France, the imagery of people at the time; we had a lot of muted colors. We have a vision of the time of being black and white, but it was really colorful.”
Beyond the visuals, Husson looked closer into the character during her research by reading maids’ diaries depicting the harshness of daily life.
“The final draft of the script and the final cut of the movie are very similar,” Husson shares. One thing that changed during the editing of the film, though, is the non-linear narrative. The breakup of time and the fragmentation regarding memory and writing (Jane of a few years after the affair is a writer) were tightened to ensure there was the emotional payback needed for audiences to connect with the story.
“It was much more fragmented in the script,” she explains.
One lesson that Husson jokingly took away from the film: Never film during a pandemic. She didn’t have much control over that, but she admits that every step of the way was made harder due to safety protocols. Despite the struggles, there were several factors working in favor for shooting during the pandemic; lessons that writers can take away when crafting their stories to make them easier to shoot. One lesson in particular is thinking about the number of characters and locations. For example, as a small, contained story without large crowd scenes or complicated action that might require large numbers of cast and crew members saves budget. Also, Mothering Sunday is set in a small number of locations, most of them country houses with limited public access.
When it comes to shooting, Husson encourages indie directors to have a complete shot list before prep because things move so fast and you’ll chase the whole time; a lesson she plans on taking to her next film.
Husson can't dream of an alternative career to filmmaker.
“It’s the only way to not go crazy,” she says, and admits that she never stops working. “I’m overwhelmed by stimuli all the time and have to create order — this is my strategy."
Mothering Sunday stars Odessa Young, Josh O’Connor, Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù, Olivia Colman, and Colin Firth.
The film is currently in limited release.