Sense and Sensibility (film) editing process: It was the first film that I had done with Ang that was all in English, and it's Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet, Alan Rickman, and Hugh Grant — these great, great actors. When you get footage like that, you realise that your job is really not technical. It was my job to look at something that Emma Thompson had done and say, "Eh, that's not good, I'll use this other one instead." And not only was I allowed to pass judgment on these tremendous actors, I was required to. Scholar Louise Flavin has noted that Thompson's screenplay contains
Sense and Sensibility selfish," lacking the honesty and forthrightness with which Austen endows other "exemplary gentlemen" in her work. Johnson's comparison of Edward and Willoughby reveals the depressing picture about gentlemen presented in the novel. Mary Poovey's analysis in "The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen" confers with Johnson's on the dark tone of "Sense and Sensibility." Poovey contends that "Sense and Sensibility" has a "somber tone" in which conflict breaks out between Austen's engagement with her "self-assertive characters" and the moral codes necessary to control their potentially "anarchic"