Hilary Mantel On BBC Adaption of "Wolf Hall"

“As soon as you decide this is too complicated for the viewer, or history is an inconvenient shape and can’t we just tidy it up a bit, then you fall into a cascade of errors which ends in nonsense,” she said.

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“What was so wonderful and liberating was when I met Hilary and she said, ‘If I can give you one piece of advice it’s to remember that these characters do not know that they are in history,’” he recalled. “For them, this is real life. Henry doesn’t know he is going to have six wives, Anne doesn’t know her end. As far as they are concerned, if they make one decision their life goes that way and if they make another decision their life goes in a completely different direction, as it is for us. And that was what we all tried to do, get that feeling – in the shooting style, in the way the costumes worked – that we were making this exactly as if we were shooting a drama today.”

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