Period Authenticity Quotes

I have a visual sense for the music. It has to stay true to a certain sense of period. I rely on a sense of colors and mood in my approach to the arrangement.

You've probably heard about the theory of steam-engine time - that even after the steam engine had been invented, it had to wait until people were ready to make use of it. The same thing happens in literary circles. The truth is, I'm not terribly interested in Victorian times; I'm interested in Victorian writers. I'm interested in most eras of history, but not the Victorian Era especially. I was interested in the John Franklin Expedition. I was interested in these last five weird years of Dickens' life. And I just have to take the age that comes with all that when I write about it.

I wanted to make these people real, not like they were in a painting. Like these are people who don't know they're in a period movie. Those concerns are incredibly immediate.

I remember the first day I was looking at my hands and I thought about my nails. People wouldn't really be paying attention to that, but a Civil War doctor - What would they be doing with their nails? Would they cut them really low? And Dr. Burns said, "No, they would let them grow out so they can scoop stuff out. They would use their nails." So for a while I let my nails grow. They were too long. I kept stabbing myself by accident, so I cut them down, but I was trying to be faithful to the details.

One of the challenges obviously with doing an accent from a time period early in history is that there aren't recordings. You would never really get the opportunity to hear exactly what you were shooting for.

I don't just want my books to be about the '30s and '40s. I want them to read as if they had been written then. I think of them as '40s novels, written in the conservative narrative past.

One test of a great work of history is does it make you feel like you have lived through the period

Movement is very important to a character, no matter what period you're working in. So when it came to playing Emma Jung and lacing up in the corset, it was really not a foreign thing for me.

I hate period films - and there are plenty of them - where they say, "Let's not do contemporary language because the audience won't understand it;" "let's not make the girls wear corsets, because it's not sexy" and all that sort of thing. Gradually it disintegrates into a no man's land: you don't really believe it's a period scene and it doesn't feel like it's now because it's not now. You don't feel it's quite real and you don't believe in it.

There are a lot of historical novelists who do the research about the clothes and maybe even the eating utensils, but they're basically taking modern people and putting them in old drag - it's sort of the 'Gone With the Wind' approach.

With any period piece I think the thing to do is forget that it's not contemporary when you're writing and to have the characters feel as much as possible like characters that you would know.

There are always things I have to remove. I might look at a shot for five months, when somebody new to the screening room will say, 'hey, there's a modern air conditioner in that window.' It's a process.

Ellis Peters's historical detail is very accurate and very minute, and therefore is not only interesting to read but good for an actor to acquire a sense of the period. And the other thing I think is that an actor lives in the land of imagination.

Whenever you're trying to do a film in a genuine historical period, you do have to make sure that you get as much historically accurate as you possibly can because there are thousands of people who are wildly interested in the Civil War. If we get anything wrong, there is no doubt that we're going to hear from them.

The BBC is very good at period drama - world-famous for getting the details right.

The wardrobe guy [of Blow] was a genius. He was so tapped into that period and he brought me the ugliest things I'd ever seen and then they were somehow beautiful.

It's something I'd find rather distracting in a historical piece, looking at characters that have obviously just gotten off their Ab Blaster. You see a piece set in the 1300s or the 1800s, and you've got characters who have perfect abs and are incredibly well-groomed, not a hair out of place, and it just doesn't make sense.

I've done a lot of costume dramas and things that are set in the past, and it's great to be able to have things that you can research and material that you can look at.

It often disturbs me, when I see a film set in a historical time, that the people are too modern.

It's hard to find actors that don't feel contemporary when you put them in a period piece.

Normally a period movie has a lot of problems with the graphics. They look modern made.

That was an amazing time period [ CBGB filming] to transport to during filming - the clothes, the music, the lifestyle - it really helps to get into character when there's so much that changes from the moment you step onto the set.

I'm absolutely delighted if people think of me as a reliable purveyor of quality period stuff.