Emily Mortimer On How Love and Pain Live Parallel for her Delicious Directorial Debut for ‘The Pursuit of Love’

Everyone falls in love. Some of us fall harder than others, and some of us fall in love over and over again. Prime Video’s The Pursuit of Love is a ravishing, playful, and, at times, satiric view on how we look at those who find themselves perpetually succumbing to their whims and fanciful delights. First-time director, Emily Mortimer, brings a love to the original text and an accomplished eye to this new adaptation.

This is the third adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s beloved 1945 novel of the same name. The series follows Linda Radlett and Fanny Logan, two cousins with two wholly different perspectives on the prospect of finding a husband. Linda, played fiercely by Lily James, has a thirst for life that doesn’t seem like it will ever be quenched, while Fanny is a bit more cautious and watches her lovelorn cousin fall in love as easily as she ties her shoes. As Linda and Fanny both find husbands in a world on the bring of war, there is a subtle but tremendous pain that lives parallel to the idea of love. After all, once love is lost, the sorrow and the regret creep in. You cannot have love without pain.

“Part of the reason why I was drawn to the book was exactly that. Nancy Mitford has such a good take on love and how it really is a madness. It sends you completely mad, and it’s absurd. It can feel wonderful and awful at the same time. It’s absurd for the people watching the one falling in love, but it’s deadly serious for the one that’s doing the falling. I felt like it chimed in with my personal feelings of romantic love and how it gives meaning to everything. And how ridiculous it is. What I love about the book is that it manages to explore everything about romantic love but mock it without losing its faith in it. The last line of the book–which I was determined to keep as the last line of the show–is when Fanny says that she thinks Fabrice could’ve been the love of Linda’s life. The Bolter says, ‘Oh, dulling, one always thinks that. Every, every time.'”

Would you be able to adapt a book or text you are, in essence, in love with? Mortimer has a love of Mitford’s work as a whole, and she detailed to me not only how important the author’s work is for those who live in the UK but how it connected it with her father, author John Mortimer. Most importantly, Mortimer wanted the viewer to connect with the story as if they were reading Mitford’s text for the first time.

“Here it is a less familiar title, so I was hoping that I was introducing Mitford’s work to a new audience. In England, it’s almost required reading for girls of a certain age. We all read it when we were in our late teens, so there is a lot of passion for that text. Not everybody has read it, but there are enough to make me worry about fucking it up. My dad was a writer, and he loved the Mitfords in general. There’s a whole culture of what the Mitfords represent in England. My dad had tried to adapt the memoir of Nancy’s sister, Jessica, into a television show, and he wrote a radio play about Unity Mitford–she went to Germany and got in bed with the Nazis. It was like I was talking to my dad while I was writing it. He told me funny stories about them growing up, and he would quote books to me. That was helping me, and, I felt, like it was part of my DNA. I wasn’t doing it for him, but, in every choice I made, I wanted him to think it was funny or clever or cool or approved. That protected me a bit, I think.”

“When I first re-read the novel after I was approached to direct it, I was worried if the world needed another costume drama in a big country house in the English countryside. When I read it again, it was to thrilling to read. It was exciting and brave, and you felt so forgiven reading it. There is a wickedness and a lack of earnestness and fearlessness about conventional morality. All my energy was put into how to make a series feel like it feels when you read the book. You never feel like you’re reading a book about the story between the wars in England. You think you are reading a book that’s about you.”

There are two cornerstones in Linda and Fanny’s lives in the form of Dominic West’s Uncle Matthew and Andrew Scott’s Merlin. Matthew is an austere, domineering presence in their lives, and he doesn’t hold back on his opinion of the roles of men and women. Merlin, on the other hand, is puckish and holds his own to Matthew in an admirable way. While these men are on completely opposite sides of the traditional spectrum of masculinity, there is a similarity in how they are both every present in the girls’ lives.

“Not a lot of people pick up on that. I knew that they had a match for each other. Dominic was in it from the early days, and Andrew came on alter. I knew that whoever played Merlin had to be an incredibly flamboyant person and he had to have such power to be a match for Dominic. They are two sides of the same coin, in a way, even with their completely opposite viewpoints on life. They are both larger than life people, and there is something about Matthew’s lack of tolerance and xenophobic, misogynistic, horror, depraved, backwards-thinking…no one is all bad or all good. The lack of moral judgement or sanctimony is very important to me, and that’s partly why it felt that reading the book felt like antidote. Everyone is so morally certain right now, and that’s frightening to me. Everybody is so knows what they think, and they are always so right. Not everyone can be right all the time. Nancy Mitford was dealing with a time period that is very similar to ours when the world was running up to the second World War, and everyone was dividing into the polarized camps of fascism versus communism. She kind of mocks it all. Linda’s love life is a kind of satire on the politics of the twentieth-century. She goes from a capitalist banker to a communist activist, and they are both absurd, self-seeking, and full of themselves. They are uninterested in real feelings. To me, you create this character of Matthew–who has all these awful things–but by the end of it, he’s dwindled into a certain love of this gay, fluid, Prospero-figure who lives down in the next house. They are both father figures, and they are both besotted by Linda.”

My conversation with Mortimer quickly turned into a lovefest for Lily James. How could it not?

“It’s an amazing testament to her that she did this and Pam & Tommy in the same year–two towering performances. She’s the real deal. I think she’s an old school movie star of epic proportions, and talk about brave. Lily’s just got it. She’s funny, sexy, intelligent, and absolutely heartbreaking. She’s really instinctive.”

Not only is does Mortimer deliver behind the camera, but she takes on the role of The Bolter, Fanny’s glamorous, absent mother who has married more men than she can count. She is a woman who lives life for herself in a time when she was nearly commanded to settle down and have a family. Mortimer is a delight, and she delivers some of the best lines, including:  “Whoever invented love should be shot,” “Don’t waste money on underwear,” and “Sometimes being good kills you as much as being bad does.”

“The first two are Nancy Mitford’s lines, and the last one is me. The Bolter is such a good part. When they asked me who I was going to play, I thought I could do it since she isn’t in it very much. I secretly knew it was a very good part. As we were coming up to it, I didn’t think there was any fucking way that I could pull it off and direct this series. I went to the producers about three times and I kept trying to fire myself, and they wouldn’t let me. I had such a good time, and I had never done anything like it before. I felt so comfortable, weirdly, directing myself since it wasn’t about me. As an actor, you are constantly thinking that you’re never funny enough or sexy enough or good enough. It’s all about you. As a director, you are focusing on telling the story and its communicating itself. It was really not stressful. I wouldn’t look at myself back, because I couldn’t stand watching myself. Those were the only days that I would come home and my husband would ask my how it went, and I would tell him that it was fine. It was so annoying for him, surely. The benefit of directing yourself is that you get to edit yourself. I’m sure I saved my performance in the editing room.”

Every time The Bolter returns, she sees Fanny in a new light. Perhaps The Bolter admires Fanny for being strong enough to be a nurturing mother, and she respects that her daughter could do something that she never could. It’s one of the most fascinating, unsaid things about the script that the audience can latch onto.

“I felt that it was important that she decides that she likes her daughter. She’s not maternal, but she thinks her opinion changes over time. As someone who feels sham and guilt naturally, I thought it was fun to play someone who never felt that. Just getting to feel that was so thrilling. If you want to get more profound about it, I think there were women of that time who, if you wanted to be free and not defined by the man you married, you had to become an almost absurd caricature to do it. You could put on the ridiculous turbans and bangles as a defense. It’s not just joyous. She is really telling the world to ‘fuck off’ so she doesn’t feel bad about herself.”

The Pursuit of Love is streaming now on Prime Video.