Looking at other period pieces...

"It's always odd to be mentioned alongside a Scorcese film... But it is great for my vanity! (laughs) I do love The Age of Innocence. There is a great shot in this film... I would have died for such a shot! And I probably will... The others I am afraid I don't respond to. I am just never convinced by them. There is something about them that just doesn't say anything to me. I can't feel anything for Jane Campion's Portrait of a Lady... Perhaps it is because I am getting old and miserable... (getting dramatic) I am getting miserable and I love it!" (laughs)

Casting the actors...

"I wanted the film to look like a portrait of John Singer Sargent, a portrait painter of the Belle Epoque. The faces have a look that is unique to that period. I've never seen the "X-Files" because I don't watch television. And then this photograph of Gillian Anderson came in. And I said: "That's a Sargent face! Can I see her?" They said: "Yes, she is in this series called 'X-Files'." "Oh, I don't know about that... and I don't want to!"

And I went to Los Angeles, and she read the part. And I said: "Will you do it?" And she said yes. It was looking for people who looked right and who could also read the dialogue. I saw 400 actors and actresses. You say the same thing at the audition: What the meaning of the scene is, what the sub-context is, and you get some readings which are really excruciating. Then someone comes in, and you think "they're gonna do it! I don't know how but they're gonna do it!" Jodhi May came in for the part, and I thought "She is much too young. She is much too young!" And she gave this knock-out audition... The same for Anthony LaPaglia, who plays Rosedale. As soon as they started reading.. they've got it! They've got it! After seeing 60 people in two days, they've got it!.. You want to adopt them illegally! (laughs) And that buoys you up for the next 60 who don't get it!"

A moral film?

"I did not consciously make a moral film. What intrigued me about The House of Mirth was its modernity: It is about money, about service, about what you look like, and that is exactly what modern culture is about. You read anything and it's about who's good looking, what amount of money they've made... There's something chilling about that. Perhaps my view is moralistic... But that is what interested me: The superficiality of that, and how people could be perceived to do something wrong when they had not, and they are destroyed by it. Of course, something more modern would be to show how people can do pretty much anything now and get away with it... But that was not the case there.

I was raised a Catholic. Catholicism in England is very strict. You can't imagine how strict it was. All the things that you are taught are still inside even though I am no longer a practising Catholic. So I guess that morale is terribly Catholic. But I do feel there is something cruel about any society that bases everything on money and what you look like. Because what happens when you are no longer beautiful? What happens if you don't have any money? If at the end your life you're ugly and you've got lots of money, then it makes life reasonably easy. But that is not the reason we exist - I mean, surely, what is important, above anything else is to give love to the people we care about, and receive love from them. If we can't do that, what is the point of having money? What is the point of being beautiful? At the end of the film, Lily reaches a kind of salvation, she realises that in a way, she is better than them, because she cannot do what everyone else does, she cannot trade one person for another. She reaches a kind of salvation, and she knows what the cost is; and the cost is complete destruction... I wasn't aware that I'd made a moralistic film, but perhaps I am just terribly moralistic at the end of the day! (laughs) But you must not tell anyone!" (laughs)