As events get underway to celebrate the bicentenary of Charles Dickens’ birth throughout the year, a new film version of Great Expectations is currently in production. Locations around Kent, such as Rochester, Gravesend and the churchyard at Cooling, inspired the Victorian author to write his story of a humble orphan becoming a gentleman with the help of an unknown benefactor – although it seems there has been little actual filming in the county.
Plans for shooting at Chatham Maritime came to nothing when the producer decided that the scenes should be located nearer to London, although there was some excitement in Oare, a village outside Faversham, in December, when a film crew descended on the marshes of Harty Ferry, for a suitably secluded setting.
Great Expectations has been immortalised on film several times already, with David Lean’s 1946 adaptation starring John Mills as Pip probably rating the most highly.
The new ‘thriller’ version, starring Ralph Fiennes as Abel Magwitch and Helena Bonham Carter as Miss Havisham, is due to be released later in the year, but puritans beware... the film has been given a new ending.
Dickens himself wrote two endings, one bleak and one more romantic and sentimental, but the screenwriter of the new film felt both were unsatisfactory, and so has come up with an alternative. Let’s hope it meets everyone’s expectations! See more on Dickens on page 16.