Who Plays Who?

Carey Mulligan Peter Sarsgaard Dominic Cooper Rosamund Pike Alfred Molina Cara Seymour Amanda Fairbank-Hynes Ellie Kendrick Emma Thompson Matthew Beard Sally Hawkins Luis Soto Nick Sampson Kate Duchêne Beth Rowley

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Jenny David Danny Helen Jack Majorie Hattie Tina Headmistress Graham Sarah Rachman Auctioneer Latin Teacher Nightclub Singer

What Do The Critics Say

"No movie I've seen in a very long time has touched me so deeply, or bestowed so much pleasure. There are thrillers, and then there are thrillers. No shots are fired in "An Education," and the closest thing to a car chase is a bit of brisk driving after the theft of an old map. Yet this tale of an English schoolgirl's hard-won wisdom is thrilling all the same: for the radiance of Carey Mulligan's Jenny, who's wonderfully smart and perilously tender; for the grace of Lone Scherfig's direction, and the brilliance of Hornby's screenplay, which took its inspiration from a short memoir by Lynn Barber." Joe Morgenstern WALL STREET JOURNAL "Through stellar performances, clever writing and exquisite cinematography, the story is fresh and thoroughly captivating." Claudia Puig USA TODAY "A superb choice to close the 2009 Sydney Film Festival An Education gets everything right, even though Danish director Lone Scherfig is modest in her claims for the film, saying the rest of the festival program is a hard act to follow. Carey Mulligan's game teenager is a wonderful creation, certain to launch Mulligan into the cinematic stratosphere. Peter Sarsgaard is equally excellent." Andrew L Urban URBAN CINEFILE "As with first love, so with the movies: The right girl makes it all worthwhile." Dana Stevens SLATE "Mulligan might well remind you of Audrey Hepburn more than fifty years ago in Roman Holiday. Let’s get this right out of the way: Carey Mulligan is the real thing. Sure, you loved Meryl Streep as Julia Child in Julie & Julia, a part that is bound to earn the veteran actress her 16th Oscar nomination, but it’s this sparkling young newcomer who might take home the statue. Scherfig avoids most of the pitfalls of the coming-of-age genre. Her tight direction coupled with Hornby’s screenplay, the wonderful performances (don’t overlook Olivia Williams as a concerned teacher), the lush cinematography, and the pre-swinging-’60s production design makes An Education worth studying." Brett Michel THE BOSTON PHOENIX

"The heart and soul of An Education though, is Carey Mulligan’s raw and captivating performance that radiates with tenderness and charisma. She helps to make the film quite engrossing to watch and the character of Jenny easy to like and care about. Director Lone Scherfig includes beautiful costume and set design that’s authentic for the specific time period. It’s also worth mentioning the exquisite cinematography and musical score, especially during Jenny’s enchanting trip to Paris with David. Boasts a radiant, Oscar-worthy performance by Carey Mulligan." Avi Offer NEW YORK CITY MOVIE GURU "The next Audrey Hepburn? The new Kate Winslet? British actress Carey Mulligan has drawn some pretty bold comparisons for her performance in the charming new coming of age story "An Education". Michael Phillips AT THE MOVIES "Nick Hornsby's disarmingly clever script about the corruption of ideals and first love, bursts into life under Lone Scherfig's tantalising direction It's a stylish, spellbinding and blatantly funny film that reminds us of how blinkered love is and how impressionable we are when temptation wafts by sweetly, like an alluring French perfume." Louise Keller URBAN CINEFILE "The most extraordinary thing about this engaging, hysterical and deeply moving film is how natural this supposedly inappropriate relationship feels. This is thanks, not only to the excellent script, direction and leads, but largely to the terrific ensemble cast." Giles Hardie SYDNEY MORNING HERALD "An Education is, as the title suggests, about Jenny exploring her own desires and shortfalls, and it's too smart a film for easy answers. Deceptive charm is both the subject and the method of An Education , a film which serves as a lesson in how to blend entertainment with provocative ideas. Directed with a light, brisk hand by Denmark's Lone Scherfig. An appealing coming of age story, the film features a radiant young actress, Carey Mulligan." GLOBE AND MAIL

The Inside Story "The extent to which I never asked him questions is astonishing in retrospect: I blame Albert Camus. One of the rules of existentialism as practised by me and my disciples at Lady Eleanor Holles School was that you never asked questions. Asking questions showed that you were naïve and bourgeois; not asking questions showed that you were sophisticated and French. I badly wanted to be sophisticated." Lynn Barber "An Education" "I’m still not entirely sure what it was about Lynn Barber’s piece that had such a strong pull on me, but quite clearly there was one," says screenwriter Nick Hornby ("About a Boy"). "I read it and gave it to my wife, Amanda Posey who is one of the producers, saying, 'Look, there’s a film in here'. She agreed and with Finola Dwyer, her fellow producer started thinking about writers. I was aware that I was becoming envious: 'what do you want that loser for!?'; that sort of thing. So I said I wanted to have a go at it." "I always thought I must remember at some point to write the whole story of my first boyfriend as I always thought it was extraordinary," says journalist Lynn Barber of her brief memoir. "The only person I’d told was my husband because it was such a long and complicated story, you couldn’t really just tell someone casually over dinner or something. It was almost like a secret I’d been carrying around with me." "Perhaps what drew me to the piece most of all was that Lynn Barber has a very strong, sometimes confrontational voice in her profiles so when I saw that she’d written about her early life, I thought, Ah, I’d like to know about that!" says Hornby. "People who read her have a lot of interest in her, but Lynn has always kept herself out of her journalism and I was fascinated to find out about this story." Describing the period in which "An Education" is set, all of the filmmakers are quick to point out that Britain hadn’t actually started swinging in 1961. Four years on from Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s claim that 'most of our people have never had it so good', the average English family continued to lead buttoned-up, thrifty lives. Preoccupied as they were with changing social and sexual mores, most people were in no hurry to embrace them. "Every time people talk about the Sixties I want to scream," says Barber. "The Sixties didn’t actually start until around 1963 or '64. It was still pretty drab before that." Hornby quotes Philip Larkin’s, 'Annus Mirabilis': Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three. Between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles first LP. "For me, one of the points of the film and one of the attractions of the setting was that in 1962, we were still stuck in post-war austerity Britain," says Hornby. "At the time, England was an extremely insular country, quite a poor country. The Second World War made America and their 50s; those big cars and the rock ‘n’ roll, were a product of doing well. Over there, it was all about Cadillacs. Here in Britain, we were still waiting for a bus." "I previously made a film which took place in Denmark in 1957 so I know something about the fear of excess, the shadow of the war and the very simple fantasy lives that people led then," says director Lone Scherfig ("Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself"). "But of course, I didn’t know London so I was cautious, careful to get everything right. I was watching carefully to make sure that anyone who wasn’t English or from Twickenham or 16 years old in 1962 could understand what was going on. We tried to really get the flavour of the time because, to a certain extent, we all believed that the story could only take place then if audiences were expected to identify with it now." "It’s very hard for us now to realise how close together things happened. If you look back from now to the late 80s, for example, it seems incredibly recent times to those of us of a certain age," says Hornby. "That’s the distance between this period and the beginning of the Second World War. We had rationing into the mid-50s; it was very hard to travel abroad because of currency regulations, very little variety of food was available: there were so many things we didn’t have in this country." "Jenny’s parents, Jack and Marjorie, are very much a product of their time," says Hornby. "But Jenny is just beginning to chafe against it and David is the perfect conduit; somebody to lead her out of the '50s and into the '60s. It’s almost as if the 'Swinging Sixties' are arriving in Jack and Marjorie’s kitchen in Twickenham a few years before they arrive in anyone else’s." "We’re right at that moment when the door is just being pushed open," says designer Andrew McAlpine. "We’ve stopped having to use coupons and we’re just starting to become ourselves again. The mum and dad in our film know something is about to change but they don’t know what it’s going to be; they use their daughter as a conduit to understanding the future. And that future, as we know now, was pretty astonishing." "Everything was grey," says 2003 Imagin Award winner Alfred Molina ("Frida"). "And then, into Jack’s monochromatic world comes this rather exotic figure, David. It’s a bit like a pigeon coop into which a peacock suddenly arrives, this colourful, slightly scary figure." "To me, beginning around the time of the arrival of the Pill, it’s as if a bowstring has been pulled all the way back, preparing for an explosion of everything that’s been pent up for so long," says 2005 Glitter Award winner Peter Sarsgaard ("Kinsey") who was cast as David. "The people are starved for fun and loads of them are about to have it. And they are going to have it without caring about any rules. There’s something about David that’s like that: he needed to have waited about eight years and then he would have had tons of fun." "The way that the character of David was originally written about in Lynn’s piece, it would perhaps have been harder to persuade a cinema audience that this was a relationship that made sense," Hornby notes. "Quite rightly, Lone wanted to soften that relationship, to take some of the edges off David and make a proper connection between the characters in a way that would sustain an audience’s attention and sympathy." "Each actor is in some ways the lawyer for their character; they see the script from their point of view," says Scherfig. "My job is to see that but also to see it from the audience’s point of view." Sarsgaard was able to leave aside any judgement of his character and his actions. "When David is with Jenny, it’s as though he were experiencing everything for the first time again: 'it IS a nice car, isn’t it? Paris IS a great city, isn’t it?' It’s not about sex, it’s about life. He’s not a pervert; he’s just a guy who wants to live life to the most." "Peter has a lovely, childlike quality as David," notes co-star Dominic Cooper ("Mamma Mia!") who plays Danny. "He’s kind of giggly. There’s a hint of menace but mostly, he seems to be a completely trustworthy, very giggly guy." Sarsgaard and the star of the film, Carey Mulligan, decided that he would have to charm her into the car in the scene of David and Jenny’s first meeting; she would not do what was written for her character in the script unless he actually succeeded in persuading her to do it. He did. Mulligan who plays suburban schoolgirl Jenny, recognises that the journey of her character, although based on Barber’s real-life experience, can be seen as a metaphor for the period: "As well as being a coming-of-age story for Jenny, it’s a coming of age story for the Sixties." "Part of my job was to seduce the audience the way he seduces Jenny," says Scherfig. 2005 Emmy Award winning Costume designer Odile Dicks-Mireaux ("The Lost Prince") took a lot of inspiration from films of the period and the role model for David’s wardrobe was the star of the 1962 hit "Dr No", Sean Connery, in the very first James Bond film. "It seemed like a new look of the time, coming out of the '50s into this very '60s look," she said. For Mulligan (twenty two years old at the time of shooting), the idea of playing a sixteen year-old initially inspired a degree of panic. "I was worried about coming off as a twenty two year-old just pretending to be a teenager," she said. "Then I thought about what I was like at sixteen and I really wasn’t that different. I imagined that I’d had had a higher voice and been really giggly all the time, but I wasn’t. The only thing that changes between being sixteen and being a little bit older is that when you’re younger, you don’t realise that you can hurt people by what you say and you’re less able to put a lid on things; you’re less able to measure yourself." "Carey is spooky," says Hornby ("Fever Pitch"). "I hadn’t seen her and Finola said they were going to cast this girl Carey Mulligan. I said, how old is she and they said twenty one or twenty two and I was like, oh, okay, that’s it then, you’ve ruined the whole thing because she’s supposed to be sixteen. I can see why you’d do it but it’s not going to work. And then when you see her in the schoolgirl scenes, you think Hey! You can’t have someone sleeping with her! That’s indecent! It’s sort of freakish that she’s able to play a sixteen year-old girl and you never doubt for a moment that she is that age. And yet, with a bit of makeup and a different hairstyle, she becomes Audrey Hepburn." Jenny’s transition from bored teenager to (almost) credible grown-up is encouraged by Helen, Danny's gorgeous, dippy girlfriend. "I think when meeting Jenny, Helen thinks oooh, good! another puppy for me to play with!," says Rosamund Pike ("The Surrogates"). "I think she’s a very affectionate sort of person but Helen’s protective only as far as giving sartorial advice is concerned; she will protect anyone from looking too awful at a party but I’m not sure she would protect anyone from having unprotected sex, for example." "I never got into the situation that Lynn Barber or the Jenny character gets into," says 2003 British Independent Film Award Olivia Williams ("The Heart Of Me"), who plays Jenny’s English teacher and mentor, Miss Stubbs. "But a girlfriend and I used to go out together and pretend we were much older than we were. We’d go out drinking and dancing with men in their early thirties. Looking back, you have to ask yourself: what were they thinking? What were they doing with girls who were clearly fifteen?" "Amanda and I exchanged experiences we’d had with older guys when we were at school," says producer Finola Dwyer ("Dean Spanley"). "The more we talked about it, the more we discovered that almost everyone has some such experience including men sometimes, with older woman. I think it is universal, when you are young, to want something other than what you have, to escape what seems like a boring existence and meet someone glamorous and funny who turns you on to another world." "Hopefully, this film is as moving as one in which something much more drastic happens because for Jenny, it’s a major turning point in her life," says Scherfig. "I hope that not too many people have experienced what she has to experience in the film but I think the audience will identify with it." Posey recalls Lynn Barber saying that, "on watching the film for the first time, she became so involved in it that she wanted to know what happened at the end. She had quite forgotten that it was her own story." Synopsis

It’s 1961 and attractive, bright schoolgirl, Jenny is poised on the brink of womanhood, dreaming of a rarefied, Gauloise-scented existence as she sings along to Juliette Greco in her Twickenham bedroom. Stifled by the tedium of adolescent routine, Jenny can’t wait for adult life to begin. On a rainy day no different to all the others, her suburban life is upended when she first meets, by chance, urbane and witty David. To her frank amazement, he even manages to charm her conservative parents, overcoming any instinctive objections to their daughter’s older, Jewish suitor. Very quickly, David introduces Jenny to a glittering new world of classical concerts and late-night suppers: replacing her traditional education with his own version, picking her up from school in his Bristol roadster and whisking her off to art auctions and smoky clubs. Will David be the making of Jenny: or her undoing?

The Verdict "Carey Mulligan, after minor roles in "And When Did You Last See Your Father?" and "Pride & Prejudice", is the new buzz word around theatres and in Hollywood. Besides the fact that "An Education" is a damn good film, it will always be remembered for Mulligan's debut lead performance as 1960's schoolgirl, Jenny. No doubt, many will also notice the twenty two year old actress appears at times, to look remarkably like a young Audrey Hepburn. Mulligan gives such a strong and captivating performance, critics are already talking Oscar nominee. What makes Mulligan's performance even more remarkable is the fact that this young actress is surrounded by a strong and easily recognizable support cast. Peter Sarsgaard who gave outstanding performances in films such as "Shattered Glass" (2003) and "Garden State" (2004) is indeed, totally convincing as the disarming and charming seducer, David. Alfred Molina (memorable as Doc Ock a.k.a Dr Otto Octavius in "Spider-Man 2"), Cara Seymour (Hell-Cat Maggie in Martin Scorsese's "Gangs Of New York"), 2003 Empire Award Best Newcomer Rosamund Pike (Miranda Frost in "Die Another Day"), who appeared as Jane Bennet with Mulligan (Kitty Bennet) in "Pride & Prejudice", Dominic Cooper (Charles Grey in "The Dutchess), Emma Thompson (sensational in "Nanny McPhee") and Olivia Williams (Mrs Darling in "Peter Pan") add great weight to "An Education". If you are an avid fan of quality British productions then look no further than this picture perfect example. Great direction. Glorious soundtrack. Super cast. Excellent period piece. 5 STARS." The Production Team

Director Screenplay Adapted from Producers Original Music Cinematography Film Editor Casting Production Designer Art Direction Set Decoration Costume Design

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Lone Scherfig Nick Hornby the Lynn Barber memoir Finola Dwyer & Amanda Posey Paul Englishby John de Borman Barney Pilling Lucy Bevan Andrew McAlpine Ben Smith Anna Lynch-Robinson Odile Dicks-Mireaux

Run Time 95 minutes Rated M [AUST] Copyright ©2009 - Paramount Pictures - All Rights Reserved ©1999-2009 All Rights Reserved The Movie Pages - Protected by Australian & International Copyright. Trademark Laws Apply.