How Lady Chatterley's Lover Perfected the Period Love Story
Adam Rathe
·5 min read
Set Secrets from 'Lady Chatterley's Lover'Seamus Ryan/Netflix
“I love the detail of period stories,” Karen Wakefield says. “It completely sets the tone, knowing the history of a period and what was possible, or not, then.”
It’s no wonder then that Wakefield was thrilled to land her most recent job, as the production designer for director Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’sLady Chatterley’s Lover, streaming now on Netflix. The film, based on the scandalous D.H. Lawrence novel, follows a young woman (played by Emma Corrin) who marries a British aristocrat (Matthew Duckett) and moves to the countryside only to begin a torrid affair with a groundskeeper (Jack O’Connell) after her husband is injured in World War I. “In this case, we had both the script and the book” to inspire the look of the film, Wakefield explains. “Laure wanted to create something romantic and quite ethereal.”
When Chatterley was first published, the book set off a firestorm thanks to passages that were graphic for the time—and might still cause some readers to blush. And while only partial versions of Chatterley were published until 1959, when the full text was finally printed it was the cause of a sensational obscenity trial in England (and later the U.S. and Japan, among others) and the book was at times banned in countries across the world. The new film isn’t without its steamy scenes, but they never feel gratuitous; every flash of skin feels considered, an effort that’s mirrored in Wakefield’s painstaking attempt to build a world to accommodate the characters.
Here, she explains to T&C how she made it all happen.
Setting the Scene Emma Corrin in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, streaming now on Netflix. The film shot on location in North Wales at a private home. Parisa Taghizadeh/Netflix
“North Wales is a little bit like New Zealand,” Wakefield says. “It’s very ferny, very rich, with amazing moss, brooks, rocks, caverns, and stone. It's like stepping back in time.” Most of the film shot on location there, with the bulk of it set at one privately owned home built in the 1600s. “It had very old parts, Victorian and Georgian sections,” Wakefield says. “That’s where we were able to shoot the main building’s interiors and exteriors as well as [O’Connell’s character’s] hut and the beautiful brook running through.” Still, the production had to work around the historic property’s modern uses. “We were only allowed to do certain things to certain rooms,” Wakefield says, “because the family still lives there.”
If You Build It… Jack O’Connell in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. His character’s home was shot in two locations in Wales, one an existing exterior on a local farm and the other an interior built to match the architectural dimensions. Courtesy Netflix
Whatever the home in North Wales didn’t have to offer, Wakefield and her team were tasked with creating. “Our locations became the stages,” Wakefield says. “That does restrict you, but it makes you work harder because you haven't got a massive stage where you can do anything. You really have to work out how things will work architecturally.”
That meant that anything that needed to be built was done on location. “The bathroom wasn’t as it is on screen, that was a set within the house,” Wakefield explains. We were restricted by where the window was, so we created a dividing wall to have that depth of feel in the bathroom.” Another build was the house where O’Connell’s character lives. “We built that cottage in two different places,” she explains. “The exterior was on an amazing piece of land that belonged to a local farmer, so we have the exterior of that stone building and then we built the interior of it on another piece of land back where the big house was. That was the only time we had to match an interior and exterior.”
Following Your Heart A stream on the property was important to production designer Karen Wakefield, and ended up being a pivotal set for the film. Parisa Taghizadeh/Netflix
A stream on the Chatterley property, where O’Connell’s Oliver Mellors keeps a small hut—a pivotal meeting point for the two lovers—is a key part of the film, but wasn’t a given. “I thought it wasn't going to happen because the stream was live and that's very noisy, we were nearly not going to shoot there because of the noise from the stream,” Wakefield says. “Convincing the director, director of photography, and the sound team that this is where we had to be, that we couldn’t do that setup anywhere else, was probably my biggest challenge.” Or at least, part of it. “We also had to get the equipment down there for construction and get it all done,” she adds. “But it was beautiful, and we all loved it.”
The Character of Place The interior of the Chatterley home, where Matthew Duckett’s Clifford Chatterley and his wife live, was meant to feel heavy and old-fashioned to help reflect the experiences of the characters who live there.Parisa Taghizadeh/Netflix
Part of Wakefield’s job on Lady Chatterley’s Lover was designing spaces that help tell the story of the film’s characters. While Corrin and O’Connell’s characters spend time in nature enjoying their young love, Duckett’s character needed a more traditional setting to reflect his own experience. “There’s a stuffiness to that traditional space where we've got all the dead animals,” Wakefield says. “He has lots of trophies, but all his trophies have been fought for, they’ve died and been stuffed because they look beautiful. To me, that was how he perceives her as well. She's a beautiful creature, but he doesn't want her to escape. He wants her to become part of that house, so it had quite a heaviness to it.”
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