How Autumn de Wilde Made “Emma” So Edible - The New Yorker

One recent afternoon, not long before the première of “Emma,” the first feature film by Autumn de Wilde, the Los Angeles-based director and photographer visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York. De Wilde, who is six feet two, wore a plum-colored Borsalino fedora (“I was re-upping my hats, and Bill Nighy helped me”), a high-collared pink blouse, a dark A-line jacket, a mango Prada Galleria bag, navy trousers, pink socks, and black oxford shoes. She carried an elegant cane (“I have arthritis, and I decided not to hide it anymore”) and resembled an amused Edwardian flâneur. “My style icons are two people: Oscar Wilde and Paddington Bear,” she said.

She has a special memory of the Met: her five-year-old daughter, asleep—“She was like a long noodle”—on a bench in front of Jackson Pollock’s “Autumn Rhythm (Number 30),” the billboard-size action painting from 1950. “She looked so amazing,” de Wilde said. “People started gathering around to take pictures.” Arrow de Wilde, now twenty, is the lead singer in a band called Starcrawler, and six feet three: a very long noodle. De Wilde later re-created the Pollock nap image in a photo shoot, with Elijah Wood wearing Rodarte pajamas.

“We only got in trouble when he tried to take his shoes off,” she said.

“Emma,” with a screenplay adapted from Jane Austen by the novelist Eleanor Catton, comes out at a particular moment, when a number of female directors and creators are reimagining classic girls’ stories (“Little Women”) and biographies (“Dickinson”), and playing up the boldness and independence of their heroines in ways that feel new. De Wilde’s artful whimsy—evidenced in her short films for Prada, photographs for Rodarte, and album covers for Jenny Lewis, Beck, the White Stripes, Childish Gambino, and Elliott Smith, among others—makes Austen’s familiar tale of youthful meddling in Regency England look pleasingly strange.

De Wilde likes to “tell stories with color,” she said. The film opens in a hothouse bursting with orange and pink flowers; Mrs. Goddard’s boarding-school girls move in a flock, à la “Madeline” or “The Handmaid’s Tale,” wearing red capes and pale bonnets; the pink-and-green décor of Hartfield, Emma’s home, evokes a layer cake frosted with buttercream. “I wanted it to be like a pastry shop,” de Wilde said. “I told all my departments, ‘The colors need to feel edible.’ ” Amid these trappings, the humans themselves can look almost plain.

De Wilde headed toward the Met’s classical sculptures. “In my fashion research for ‘Emma,’ I was fascinated by the change in women’s fashion in the Regency period—from corseted hourglass hoopskirts to, basically, nightgowns,” she said.“The aristocracy was raping Italy and Greece of their sculptures and bringing them back to England; it seems so obviously inspired by them.” She charged past Pacific Island bis poles (“Incredible!”) and continued, “For the first time, men could see the shape of a woman’s body under her dress—the shape of her butt when the wind blew.” She made a curved-rump gesture. In the sunlit atrium of the Greek and Roman Sculpture Court, de Wilde admired the ancient statues’ Austenian features: Empire waists, tight ringlets, soft arms, muscled languor.

Austen’s novel, whose heroine is not only handsome, clever, and rich but a spirited busybody, is, de Wilde said, “so much about Emma observing things inside her head”; Austen’s appreciation of absurdity makes her fun to adapt. “Life is bizarre,” de Wilde went on. She did a double take. “Like this.” Behind her, two teen-age girls were messing with a cell phone near an armless statue. “She’s taking a Boomerang of his broken penis,” she said.

Forging on, de Wilde saw Austenian details everywhere. Passing an exhibition called “Making Marvels,” loud with ticking and the whirring of gears, she was drawn to a clock that resembled a gold-leaf, steampunk R2-D2. “This is fucking incredible!” she said. A small boy looked up at her. “The sound of clocks is in every room in ‘Emma,’ ” she went on. “Emma’s life is orderly, beautiful, and ornate. But the clock’s not working anymore, in her life.”

De Wilde grew up in the arts: her father is the sixties-counterculture photographer Jerry de Wilde, and her mother, Mary, regularly took her to museums. As a kid, de Wilde was prone to “museum fatigue,” she said, “because I didn’t realize how over-observant my brain was. So I used to play this game where I would memorize color combinations that I liked: lavender, citrine, dark green, rose.” She gestured at a nearby painting. “Would you remember that her headband was red? But that red is fucking amazing! Green is on the opposite end of the spectrum, and it’s attractive to our eyes.”

She pressed on to the European galleries. Gérôme’s “Pygmalion and Galatea,” circa 1890, was a “big inspiration,” she said. “I have muses.” She cited “Emma” ’s stars. “Anya Taylor-Joy is a muse, Mia Goth is a muse, Johnny Flynn is a muse.” She looked again. “Of course, this is a man, so he’s making out with his muse.” Passing an 1831 David d’Angers bust of a woman with her hair styled in egg-shaped buns, she said, “Mrs. Elton!,” and took a picture. Male nudes brought to mind Merchant-Ivory’s “A Room with a View,” from 1985, which she had the “Emma” cast watch. “The pond scene”—frolicking, whooping, bouncing—“is a pivotal moment in my life,” de Wilde said. “And it told so much about the freedom they desire—the men as well as the women.” They also screened “Bringing Up Baby”: “I like to show a rebellious woman by making everyone around her not rebellious.”

As she said this, she was standing in front of Gustave Courbet’s “Woman with a Parrot,” from 1866—a female nude, splayed on a sheet in delicious repose, her wavy hair spread out, her hand extended in welcome to a vivid green bird. “This is how I felt this morning,” de Wilde said, smiling. “This is my emoji for today.” ♦

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