The Best Parts of Period Dramas Are the Sheep

"The diaries are a hilarious and sharply observed chronicle of a wild period in Thompson's life - she was still reeling from discovering that her ex-husband, Kenneth Branagh, had cheated on her, and she met her future husband, Greg Wise, while filming it - but what has always stuck with me was how obsessed the film's director, Ang Lee, was with all his shots of livestock."

"At one point, he even suggested opening the film with an extended sequence following a game hunt in action, which would all be a metaphor for courtship (since the men are tracking down and capturing someone, see). The idea was scrapped - thankfully, according to Thompson, who acknowledges it was way too on the nose - but the rest of the film is absolutely chock-full of livestock."

Raised with a persistent Anglophilia rooted in British-literature classes and a fondness for The Toast, many develop an obsession with Emma Thompson and Sense and Sensibility. Thompson's set diaries chronicle personal upheaval during filming and reveal Ang Lee's pronounced focus on livestock cinematography. Lee proposed opening with an extended game-hunt sequence as a courtship metaphor, a notion later scrapped as too on the nose. The final film nonetheless features constant shots of livestock—especially sheep—with nearly every establishing shot showing herds, visually reinforcing the 19th-century British countryside's economic realities and Austen's ties between love and money.

Read at Vulture