You may be familiar with the opening line of famed author Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.
The Gothic classic explores timeless themes as readers navigate
the bubbling romance turned sinister thriller.
The thing that attracted me to the
project was the
kind of Russian doll-like smuggling of stories within stories within stories.
You can have a horror film that lives inside a thriller that lives inside a romance movie.
I can imagine [du Maurier] kind of chuckling as she’s writing this thing going
people are going think that it’s about
a woman who falls in love with this guy and their incredible life,
but what it’s actually going to be is something really dark and disturbing.
I wanted to go back again,
to recapture the moment that had gone,
and then it came to me that if we did
Enter this new woman who has this sweetness
and purity and almost innocence that certainly the last Mrs. de Winter,
the late Mrs. de Winter didn’t have any of.
du Maurier always said that Rebecca was a study in jealousy.
Mrs. Danvers runs the house and has been for the last sort of year or so while
Mr. de Winter has been absent.
And she’s quite a formidable character and woman
and she is fiercely loyal to the first Mrs. de Winter, to Rebecca.
And she laid an emphasis on the words, “this wing,”
I think Mrs. Danvers– it could have been her. She could have married somebody like
Maxim de Winter but didn’t and ended up as a servant.
And I think that’s a great, not her tragedy, but her, that’s her rage.
I’d just found that it was something that I’d felt like could be retold and brought back
and would surprise the audience as much as it had surprised me, you know.
And I fell for all the twists in it again.
You can’t go on living in that big old house with her ghost!
I don’t believe in ghosts.