very well. It is a love story but much more besides. Kevin's screenplay has so many layers and interesting ideas. Apart from the love story I was very attracted by the themes of imagination and experience." The director intended to "bring Austen up to date by roughening her up a bit" and adding "more life and energy and fun," opining that past Austen adaptations had been "a little bit picture-postcard and safe and sweet and nice." Casting Jarrold sought to make Becoming Jane "look and feel" realistic "so everything is not lit in a very glamorous Hollywood way." According to him, "One of the key ideas in the film was to get away from the old, stuffy costume drama kind of feel of what Jane Austen is and to look at somebody before she becomes a genius, when she is in her early twenties and on the verge of writing her great thing; she had a real exuberance for life, intelligent and independent and a sort of outsider in rural Hampshire, more intelligent than the people around her and kicking against all those pressures." To further set his film apart from other costume dramas, American actress Anne Hathaway was cast as the title character. A fan of Jane Austen since she was fourteen, Hathaway immediately began rereading Austen's books, conducting historical research including perusing the author's letters, and also learned sign language, calligraphy, dance choreography, and playing the piano. She moved to England a month before production began to improve her English accent, and attempted to stay in character throughout filming, the first time she had done so for a movie. There were concerns in some quarters that the American Hathaway was playing a beloved English writer. James McAvoy, who plays Thomas Langlois Lefroy, believed that filming in Ireland made her casting "a bit safer" than if they had shot in England. McAvoy accepted the role because he enjoyed Austen's writings and was eager to work with Jarrold, having collaborated with him previously on the 2002 television production White Teeth. McAvoy first assumed that Becoming Jane would be directly associated with Pride and Prejudice, with his character possessing similarities with Mr. Darcy; the actor soon realised however "that the screenplay was nothing like Pride and Prejudice. The screenwriter probably speculated on some of the inspiration for Pride and Prejudice but it is a completely different story." Julie Walters had once