Miss Potter

Directed by Chris Noonan

Peter Rabbit, Jemima Puddleduck and Squirrel Nutkin are familiar to most people, but few know about the life of the surprisingly feisty Victorian lady who created them. That should change quickly thanks to the enchanting Miss Potter, starring Renée Zellweger as Beatrix. The film follows the children’s author from young adulthood to middle age—surviving her tortured relationship with her overly critical mother, defying convention by publishing her books, becoming a famous woman of independent means, suffering the tragic death of her publisher/fiancé and enrolling as prime supporter of Britain’s National Trust, eventually donating 4,000 acres of land and 14 farms to be conserved for enjoyment of future generations who are still delighting in her books.

Miss Potter is Australian director Chris Noonan’s second feature—made 10 years after his phenomenally successful directorial debut with Babe. “I felt tremendous pressure following Babe,” explains Noonan. “Its success wasn’t a shock because I believed in the film completely, but everyone was asking, ‘So what’re you going to do now?’ Subtext: prove yourself.

“The big stir made many people interested in hiring me. I didn’t want to jump aboard the first train entering the station, nor do rehashes of rehashes. I wanted to do original work—work that made a difference. Those projects are few and far between. So, I made TV commercials to put bread on the table. And fiddled with my own ideas—some are still in development. And I came across two scripts I liked and thought I could do something with. But, in both cases, the producers didn’t like my take on the scripts. They had other ideas …”

[Beatrix Potter’s] story is so good, and she’s such a fascinating person—nothing like what you’d expect. I suppose people think of her as a Victorian fuddy-duddy and not of interest to modern people. But everything I found out about her while reading the script won me over, and I thought this story should be part of everyone’s upbringing. People should know about it.

Everyone knows Beatrix as a writer, but they don’t know what a remarkable person she was. I knew nothing about her before I read the script. Then, I had to make this film.

It was a long process. When I signed on, it was only partially funded. My first task was to figure out how much we needed to make the film. Then there was a period of raising money from various sources. It came together slowly. While we were shooting, Weinstein Company signed on, and we got funds that allowed us to readdress the film’s ending to make it work.

This is a strangely, unconventionally structured film—defying basic rules. When telling a romantic story, you don’t kill the romantic lead at the end of the second act of a three-act structure. That’s hard to recover from, but that’s what happened with Beatrix. It took a lot of figuring to make it work—which we hadn’t done when began shooting.

Initially, we thought Beatrix would mourn her fiancé’s death [played by Ewan McGregor], then we’d start another romance with the man who eventually became her husband. But in preliminary editing, we realized audiences would fall so in love with Ewan …

Isn’t he ever? His performance is pure—nothing showy, and, for that reason, he wins you even more.

I wanted understatement from the actors. I’m allergic to overstatement of emotion in films. For me, when actors demand responses from me, indicating what my responses should be, I withdraw. But if it’s left to me to respond, and I’m responding to situations that are true and believable arcs in the story, I’ll truly respond as though I’m watching someone’s real life. I hate corn, and I hate overstatement of emotion.

It starts with casting. You cast people who have that ability. And with Miss Potter, I ran a two-week workshop, a boot camp, for the entire cast—servants and all—where we discussed our approach to the film. A historian talked about the world at that time, and we learned about wars were being fought and about etiquette of communication between the classes, which was very important in Britain … It’s a theatrical approach, really, but it works well for films. We’re all professional illusionists building a world for audiences to believe in: If everyone on screen inhabits the same world, audiences believe it’s real.