I had it read a little bit to us in school When we were kids and I remember

Some of the comic scenes in it but I didn't have a strong impression of it

it's more than the story of an orphan adopted by an elderly couple

It has a darkness to it at times It has a reality to it and it has a profound

emotional core This is very much the spirit of the author

And then it took me several more readings to get through it and to really understand it

it was a child's voice but it was the voice

of someone who had a greater sense of the the world that they existed in

I think for me reading Anne of Green Gables and understanding what Montgomery was trying

to communicate within the context of the book was an ah-ha moment because it allowed me to go forward with the book

Prince Edward Island was soulless for Montgomery

In that it enabled her to renew herself

to understand herself

It was her roots but it also gave her a spiritual sense of who she was

That great physical sense of what Prince Edward Island was, was what I wanted to enview the

film with And the greater irony was were weren't really

going to be able to shoot at Prince Edward Island

So it had to be very much in my head and it was a concept I was working on

So I didn't really see that as a turret it was just a question of picking the right locations

and being able to capture within my eye and the eye of the camera what I felt was appropriate

for the story

So I found that I ended up playing most of

the characters in my head I knew every moment that they entered, I knew every beat, I knew

every emotional motivation for them That made it very easy to direct everybody

because there was never a false moment in my mind either the actor hit the moment that

I saw in my head or heard in my mind or they didn't.

A great cast is defined as doing 50 per cent of the director's job

if you cast the actors

perfectly, then 50 per cent of your job is done the other fifty per cent is gaining access

to them and to them intellectually Many actors allows a director to walk in to

their persona and into their mind and just muck around and collaborate with them on the

role And the cast was very much like that particularly

Dewhurst Farnsworth and Megan And the joy of being able to do that is that

your in sync with them constantly you're in sync when they get it right and if their not

right you can help find that balance

My paternal grandparents were born in 1855 and 1865

so I knew their whole history and

I had a very strong sense of what living in

that time period was like so it was very easy for me to kind of capture it on screen

I think it began my fascination with period movies because period movies were for me,

essentially an escape into a time period that was part of my family's history

I inherited a whole body of 16 mm films from the 20s up until the 50s and they were my

mother's side of the family actually, and a history of her family

And I had transferred all those films to tape for a lot of the people who were still elderly

in my family to be able to see it and tell me who was in those films.

So when I was doing the series Wind at my Back, the editors and myself decided to intercut

some of those family films with original footage that we were shooting of the main cast and

they both melded together perfectly in an opening sequence that you really can't tell

what's been staged and what was original

I love David Lean's sense of story and his

sense of spectacle He was able to take a huge tableau and play

intimate stories against them and that is a is genius in my mind

I wanted to do that in a smaller way with Anne of Green Gables

because I felt that it was a broad story, it had a lot of characters in it it would

be impossible to simply film each chapter of the book because it was quite anthological

written it wasn't written as a story so I knew from the beginning that I was going to

have to try and kind of make up the story but make an audience believe that they were

watching the book.