“Virginia Woolf’s Night & Day” is currently playing in theaters across the United States.
Film synopsis of "Virginia Woolf's Night & Day" directed by Tina Gharavi and written by Justine Waddell:
Set in London in 1910, this story follows brilliant and headstrong Katharine Hilbery, a young woman determined to pursue her passion for astronomy rather than conform to society’s expectations of marriage and domesticity.
When her controlling father, Mr. Hilbery, pressures her into an engagement with William, a longtime family friend, Katharine’s carefully protected independence is put to the test.
Her world begins to open up when she befriends Mary Datchet, a spirited suffragette, and meets Ralph Denham, a working-class editor helping Katharine’s mother, Mrs. Hilbery, write a biography of the family. As friendships deepen and romantic loyalties shift, Katharine is forced to reconsider everything she has been taught about love, ambition, independence, and what it means to claim a place for herself in a world determined to define her.
Tina Gharavi is an Iranian-born British film director, screenwriter, artist, and academic based between Paris and Newcastle. Born in Tehran, she grew up partly in the United States and attended high school in Middletown, New Jersey. Originally trained as a painter, Gharavi was inspired to pursue filmmaking after working on a Hollywood production. She later studied film and contemporary arts at Le Fresnoy, Studio national des arts contemporains, near Lille in northern France.
Here is her Novelpro Junkie interview:
Set in London in 1910, this story follows brilliant and headstrong Katharine Hilbery, a young woman determined to pursue her passion for astronomy rather than conform to society’s expectations of marriage and domesticity.
When her controlling father, Mr. Hilbery, pressures her into an engagement with William, a longtime family friend, Katharine’s carefully protected independence is put to the test.
Her world begins to open up when she befriends Mary Datchet, a spirited suffragette, and meets Ralph Denham, a working-class editor helping Katharine’s mother, Mrs. Hilbery, write a biography of the family. As friendships deepen and romantic loyalties shift, Katharine is forced to reconsider everything she has been taught about love, ambition, independence, and what it means to claim a place for herself in a world determined to define her.
Tina Gharavi is an Iranian-born British film director, screenwriter, artist, and academic based between Paris and Newcastle. Born in Tehran, she grew up partly in the United States and attended high school in Middletown, New Jersey. Originally trained as a painter, Gharavi was inspired to pursue filmmaking after working on a Hollywood production. She later studied film and contemporary arts at Le Fresnoy, Studio national des arts contemporains, near Lille in northern France.
Here is her Novelpro Junkie interview:
1. If you had to describe Virginia Woolf using three words, what would they be?
Virginia is about the intimate lives of women. Those are three words. Intimacy, I suppose, is an internal world of women. I'm failing at this, as you can see. But ultimately, there's also just close reading—looking at the feelings of women as text.
I suppose Virginia Woolf's work is often about the moments in between—the moments in between the things that are just everyday and ordinary. They're really a part of what Virginia's world is: looking at the moments in between important moments, the quiet, the observation of a shard of light, for example.
2. What was it about "Night & Day" that made you want to bring this particular novel to the screen right now?
The novel was adapted by the writer, Justine Waddell. I came on board during that process of adapting the script. Initially, I didn't think that a British period drama was something that would suit me, or maybe even a text that I might understand.
But what really struck me about it were the themes in the film—ambition, the struggle against societal norms, and also a strong female character whose own battles at home echoed things in my life when I was younger as well.
So I really related to the journey of this character and to telling the story of what it means to follow one's dreams, which I think all of us can relate to.
3. You've described the movie as an "unromantic comedy." What does that phrase mean to you, and what attracted you to turning the conventions of the romantic comedy upside down?
Obviously, the rom-com is a genre we're all very familiar with. But I think this was more about the comedy than the romance. The romance is definitely there, but it's not the text of the movie. The text of the movie is about a woman who follows her ambition.
I guess that's why we call it an "unromantic comedy," because even in that space, it kind of breaks a couple of the rules.
4. Catherine is fascinated with astronomy, and that's essentially the center of the film, more so than in the novel. Why was it important for you to make science and her relationship with the cosmos such a huge part of her character?
It's quite small in the novel, this idea of a strong astronomy fascination. Making the mistake that is in the film—the line is there.
In one sense, a woman who wants to be an astrophysicist in 1910 is quite an interesting subject to us today because we want to remember what we know of the universe and what we know about science. Obviously, nobody had gone to the moon at that time. There was such a different moment in history.
But here was this woman who had a fascination with our place in the universe. And I think that's such an interesting jumping-off point for exploring the rest of the story about love.
What does love mean in the universe? What does ambition mean? What does having all these prejudices against Black people or women or queer people mean? How are we so silly in the face of a very giant universe? Where are these silly rules from?
So I think partly the universe, and her looking up at the stars, was a good way of exploring those limitations.
5. How did you approach the challenge of making this period film feel contemporary without losing its Edwardian setting?
It was a challenge because we didn't have the most enormous budget in the world to make this movie. So we had the limitations of really needing to be clever about locations and schedule.
Luckily, what we have in Newcastle, which is where I've lived for a very long time, I knew that we had the backdrops. We had the sets. We had these kinds of chances to make things at a very high production value because there were a lot of those period buildings left and available that could really help serve the film.
6. How did you and Sebastian approach the contrast between Catherine's confined social world and the vastness of the universe that she was fascinated by?
It was really thinking about the kinds of distances that we have in film: the close-up, the medium shot, the expansive wide shot, and obviously the VFX that we were going to create with the stars and the galaxies and what Catherine sees—that kind of far distance as well.
So it's great to kind of interweave those things to make some of the film intimate, to make it touching or really close, but also create that space as well.
Also, the space of her in society in a wider context of the Edwardian-Victorian era. We have her, and we have to recreate that world. We were very lucky to have Beamish Museum as a backdrop because a lot of that recreated Victorian space exists there, and we could really create that universe almost seamlessly.
7. What did you discover about Virginia Woolf through making this film that surprised you?
How funny Virginia Woolf is, actually, for somebody who was quite depressed most of her life, who had a lot of difficulties and obviously ended her life tragically.
She was a very funny person, and her writing, particularly her essays, are hysterical.
And I think also in this, which was her sophomore novel, her second novel, it's just beautiful to see the tenderness of her writing about relationships of a young woman. It's almost like a teen film. Virginia Woolf wrote a very funny teen film.
That's surprising and beautiful.
8. Justine Waddell called the screenplay a "free adaptation." What were the most important liberties you felt you needed to take with the novel in order to make it work as a film?
I think one of the things that Justine and I thought about is that it's probably better to think about what Virginia would do today, right? And not to feel the constraints of trying to depict exactly, one-to-one, what is in the script and what is in the film.
So it can't be that way. You can't make a faithful adaptation of this novel. It's very, very long. There are many different stories in there. Maybe it could be a very long TV series, but it couldn't be a feature film.
So we had to be selective. We had to look at what stories and what threads we wanted to pull out and weave together ourselves from that material.
A lot of the time, we were asking ourselves what Virginia might approve of today. And I think she was a modernist in her time. She was a radical woman writer. So we tried to be faithful to that spirit, rather than to the letter of it.
I think I'm quite happy about that. It worked well to really just be true to what she was trying to do, her intention.
9. During that process, were there any moments when you were worried that a change in the novel might alienate readers who love the original?
All the time. Just thinking, are we approaching it right? Are we casting it right? Are we depicting these moments in the right way? Is the tone correct?
All of those decisions always had some sort of anxiety or stress. But at the end of the day, you have to let go of some of that stuff and just play the jazz of it and try and believe in the experiment that you have, the laboratory of it.
10. You obviously have a fantastic cast in the film, Hayley Bennett, Timothy Spall, Jennifer Saunders, Jack Whitehall, Lily Allen, and others. What were you looking for when you first gathered the ensemble cast?
I would think we've always wanted to find specificity and to draw the cast in a more bespoke way—to make sure that we're not generalizing or making caricatures.
Catherine, I think, is very specific, and Tim also found real beats in the story for the role of the father, as did Sally Phillips, as did Jack Whitehall. And the whole cast, Jennifer Saunders, they were just so brilliant at drawing these characters out in a three-dimensional way.
11. What did Hayley Bennett bring to the character of Catherine that you hadn't anticipated when you first imagined the character?
I always imagined it with Hayley. I must say she was someone that I had a very strong affinity for and envisaged in this role.
But she was really luminous. What I love about Hayley is that she's very thoughtful and she brings an intellect and an emotional intelligence to playing anything. And we see that in the film.
12. Did working with comedians such as Jennifer Saunders and Jack Whitehall change the rhythm or tone of the film?
Oh, incredibly. The way that I like to work with actors is that they are true collaborators, true writers of this as well. They have to build their characters so that it's believable and has that nuance.
I hope actors always bring something of their own lives to a role. So that's always been important for me—to find actors who want to participate in drawing out these characters because they can get more specific and more interesting. There's a richness there.
13. Can you talk about your working experience with screenwriter Justine Waddell and what it feels like to finally have this project come to life and have everyone watching it?
It took a long time to write versions of the script. I think I was on it for six years, from the development of it to the time that it came to film. There were many changes made.
It was a wonderfully collaborative process. And to finally see it come to cinemas and be out there is just really heartwarming because it's great to finally create a story that connects to audiences.
I've seen people coming out of the cinema crying and laughing and talking about all the emotions that they felt watching the movie. And that's just such a great reward for a lot of hard work and a difficult film to make.
14. Has there been any one comment that you've heard about the film that you just want to share in general?
I just love when women say they relate to Catherine and her struggle. I've heard that repeatedly, with women saying that that story means something to them.
They're touched by it, they're moved by it, they identify with it. There's nothing better than that when you're trying to make a film.
15. Can you talk about one specific difficulty you had with the film, and how you overcame that situation?
It's always difficult if you have a large ensemble cast to make sure that everyone's in the same film. Everyone comes with a different rhythm, a different sense of a movie, and you have to try and help align people.
I always think of the director as a bit of a metronome for a movie—keeping the time and the rhythm.
There were moments in which—I won't name the cast—but sometimes different people were in different movies. And your job as a director is to help actors synchronize and be in that same film, like a conductor kind of joining up everything.
16. Was there a scene that came together almost magically, almost seamlessly?
I think that scene on the lawn of the great country house, which we did outside, where they're looking at Halley's Comet. I think that's particularly a beautiful scene.
We did it late at night and it was quite cold. There's kind of a magic about it. I think the way that it was lit, and the kids running around, and the beauty of it all—it was just really touching.
17. Are there any other books, novels, novellas, articles, or anything else that you're thinking about adapting, or do you have planned in mind, in general?
I'm working on a biopic of an Iranian woman poet, Forough Farrokhzad, who doesn't have a biopic. Some of her poetry is in it. So it's loosely an adaptation, I suppose, of her life story.
19. What do you hope audiences who have never read Virginia Woolf's book but have seen your film take away from the film?
I think it's great to reimagine the Victorian era or the Edwardian-Victorian era. I think that it wasn't so rigid as some period films have shown.
It's also so lacking in diversity in some portrayals because when I've looked and researched the past, there's a lot there. There's a lot. It's more complex.
So I think the film adds to that debate about how we see the past. And I hope audiences walk away thinking about that—how do we see the past? How is our sense of who we are shaped by the films that have come before?
20. If you have a talk show, who would be your first three guests (dead or alive)?
I would invite—I mean, I love Anthony Bourdain, so I would probably choose him.
I love Simone de Beauvoir. Of course, Virginia would be there too. I mean, I have lots to talk to her about.
I've always loved Simone de Beauvoir as well. She's an incredibly fascinating character and obviously a really important writer.
So maybe the three of them: Anthony Bourdain, Virginia Woolf, and Simone de Beauvoir. That would be an interesting dinner.
21. If Virginia Woolf herself could sit beside you at the screening of this film, what do you hope she would approve of, or what would you hope she would say about the film?
I think I would love if she laughed. I would love if she laughed at the film—in enjoyment and pleasure—to see her artwork come into a different form.
I hope that she would approve of the delicate way it's told, but also the beauty of it as well.
Virginia is about the intimate lives of women. Those are three words. Intimacy, I suppose, is an internal world of women. I'm failing at this, as you can see. But ultimately, there's also just close reading—looking at the feelings of women as text.
I suppose Virginia Woolf's work is often about the moments in between—the moments in between the things that are just everyday and ordinary. They're really a part of what Virginia's world is: looking at the moments in between important moments, the quiet, the observation of a shard of light, for example.
2. What was it about "Night & Day" that made you want to bring this particular novel to the screen right now?
The novel was adapted by the writer, Justine Waddell. I came on board during that process of adapting the script. Initially, I didn't think that a British period drama was something that would suit me, or maybe even a text that I might understand.
But what really struck me about it were the themes in the film—ambition, the struggle against societal norms, and also a strong female character whose own battles at home echoed things in my life when I was younger as well.
So I really related to the journey of this character and to telling the story of what it means to follow one's dreams, which I think all of us can relate to.
3. You've described the movie as an "unromantic comedy." What does that phrase mean to you, and what attracted you to turning the conventions of the romantic comedy upside down?
Obviously, the rom-com is a genre we're all very familiar with. But I think this was more about the comedy than the romance. The romance is definitely there, but it's not the text of the movie. The text of the movie is about a woman who follows her ambition.
I guess that's why we call it an "unromantic comedy," because even in that space, it kind of breaks a couple of the rules.
4. Catherine is fascinated with astronomy, and that's essentially the center of the film, more so than in the novel. Why was it important for you to make science and her relationship with the cosmos such a huge part of her character?
It's quite small in the novel, this idea of a strong astronomy fascination. Making the mistake that is in the film—the line is there.
In one sense, a woman who wants to be an astrophysicist in 1910 is quite an interesting subject to us today because we want to remember what we know of the universe and what we know about science. Obviously, nobody had gone to the moon at that time. There was such a different moment in history.
But here was this woman who had a fascination with our place in the universe. And I think that's such an interesting jumping-off point for exploring the rest of the story about love.
What does love mean in the universe? What does ambition mean? What does having all these prejudices against Black people or women or queer people mean? How are we so silly in the face of a very giant universe? Where are these silly rules from?
So I think partly the universe, and her looking up at the stars, was a good way of exploring those limitations.
5. How did you approach the challenge of making this period film feel contemporary without losing its Edwardian setting?
It was a challenge because we didn't have the most enormous budget in the world to make this movie. So we had the limitations of really needing to be clever about locations and schedule.
Luckily, what we have in Newcastle, which is where I've lived for a very long time, I knew that we had the backdrops. We had the sets. We had these kinds of chances to make things at a very high production value because there were a lot of those period buildings left and available that could really help serve the film.
6. How did you and Sebastian approach the contrast between Catherine's confined social world and the vastness of the universe that she was fascinated by?
It was really thinking about the kinds of distances that we have in film: the close-up, the medium shot, the expansive wide shot, and obviously the VFX that we were going to create with the stars and the galaxies and what Catherine sees—that kind of far distance as well.
So it's great to kind of interweave those things to make some of the film intimate, to make it touching or really close, but also create that space as well.
Also, the space of her in society in a wider context of the Edwardian-Victorian era. We have her, and we have to recreate that world. We were very lucky to have Beamish Museum as a backdrop because a lot of that recreated Victorian space exists there, and we could really create that universe almost seamlessly.
7. What did you discover about Virginia Woolf through making this film that surprised you?
How funny Virginia Woolf is, actually, for somebody who was quite depressed most of her life, who had a lot of difficulties and obviously ended her life tragically.
She was a very funny person, and her writing, particularly her essays, are hysterical.
And I think also in this, which was her sophomore novel, her second novel, it's just beautiful to see the tenderness of her writing about relationships of a young woman. It's almost like a teen film. Virginia Woolf wrote a very funny teen film.
That's surprising and beautiful.
8. Justine Waddell called the screenplay a "free adaptation." What were the most important liberties you felt you needed to take with the novel in order to make it work as a film?
I think one of the things that Justine and I thought about is that it's probably better to think about what Virginia would do today, right? And not to feel the constraints of trying to depict exactly, one-to-one, what is in the script and what is in the film.
So it can't be that way. You can't make a faithful adaptation of this novel. It's very, very long. There are many different stories in there. Maybe it could be a very long TV series, but it couldn't be a feature film.
So we had to be selective. We had to look at what stories and what threads we wanted to pull out and weave together ourselves from that material.
A lot of the time, we were asking ourselves what Virginia might approve of today. And I think she was a modernist in her time. She was a radical woman writer. So we tried to be faithful to that spirit, rather than to the letter of it.
I think I'm quite happy about that. It worked well to really just be true to what she was trying to do, her intention.
9. During that process, were there any moments when you were worried that a change in the novel might alienate readers who love the original?
All the time. Just thinking, are we approaching it right? Are we casting it right? Are we depicting these moments in the right way? Is the tone correct?
All of those decisions always had some sort of anxiety or stress. But at the end of the day, you have to let go of some of that stuff and just play the jazz of it and try and believe in the experiment that you have, the laboratory of it.
10. You obviously have a fantastic cast in the film, Hayley Bennett, Timothy Spall, Jennifer Saunders, Jack Whitehall, Lily Allen, and others. What were you looking for when you first gathered the ensemble cast?
I would think we've always wanted to find specificity and to draw the cast in a more bespoke way—to make sure that we're not generalizing or making caricatures.
Catherine, I think, is very specific, and Tim also found real beats in the story for the role of the father, as did Sally Phillips, as did Jack Whitehall. And the whole cast, Jennifer Saunders, they were just so brilliant at drawing these characters out in a three-dimensional way.
11. What did Hayley Bennett bring to the character of Catherine that you hadn't anticipated when you first imagined the character?
I always imagined it with Hayley. I must say she was someone that I had a very strong affinity for and envisaged in this role.
But she was really luminous. What I love about Hayley is that she's very thoughtful and she brings an intellect and an emotional intelligence to playing anything. And we see that in the film.
12. Did working with comedians such as Jennifer Saunders and Jack Whitehall change the rhythm or tone of the film?
Oh, incredibly. The way that I like to work with actors is that they are true collaborators, true writers of this as well. They have to build their characters so that it's believable and has that nuance.
I hope actors always bring something of their own lives to a role. So that's always been important for me—to find actors who want to participate in drawing out these characters because they can get more specific and more interesting. There's a richness there.
13. Can you talk about your working experience with screenwriter Justine Waddell and what it feels like to finally have this project come to life and have everyone watching it?
It took a long time to write versions of the script. I think I was on it for six years, from the development of it to the time that it came to film. There were many changes made.
It was a wonderfully collaborative process. And to finally see it come to cinemas and be out there is just really heartwarming because it's great to finally create a story that connects to audiences.
I've seen people coming out of the cinema crying and laughing and talking about all the emotions that they felt watching the movie. And that's just such a great reward for a lot of hard work and a difficult film to make.
14. Has there been any one comment that you've heard about the film that you just want to share in general?
I just love when women say they relate to Catherine and her struggle. I've heard that repeatedly, with women saying that that story means something to them.
They're touched by it, they're moved by it, they identify with it. There's nothing better than that when you're trying to make a film.
15. Can you talk about one specific difficulty you had with the film, and how you overcame that situation?
It's always difficult if you have a large ensemble cast to make sure that everyone's in the same film. Everyone comes with a different rhythm, a different sense of a movie, and you have to try and help align people.
I always think of the director as a bit of a metronome for a movie—keeping the time and the rhythm.
There were moments in which—I won't name the cast—but sometimes different people were in different movies. And your job as a director is to help actors synchronize and be in that same film, like a conductor kind of joining up everything.
16. Was there a scene that came together almost magically, almost seamlessly?
I think that scene on the lawn of the great country house, which we did outside, where they're looking at Halley's Comet. I think that's particularly a beautiful scene.
We did it late at night and it was quite cold. There's kind of a magic about it. I think the way that it was lit, and the kids running around, and the beauty of it all—it was just really touching.
17. Are there any other books, novels, novellas, articles, or anything else that you're thinking about adapting, or do you have planned in mind, in general?
I'm working on a biopic of an Iranian woman poet, Forough Farrokhzad, who doesn't have a biopic. Some of her poetry is in it. So it's loosely an adaptation, I suppose, of her life story.
19. What do you hope audiences who have never read Virginia Woolf's book but have seen your film take away from the film?
I think it's great to reimagine the Victorian era or the Edwardian-Victorian era. I think that it wasn't so rigid as some period films have shown.
It's also so lacking in diversity in some portrayals because when I've looked and researched the past, there's a lot there. There's a lot. It's more complex.
So I think the film adds to that debate about how we see the past. And I hope audiences walk away thinking about that—how do we see the past? How is our sense of who we are shaped by the films that have come before?
20. If you have a talk show, who would be your first three guests (dead or alive)?
I would invite—I mean, I love Anthony Bourdain, so I would probably choose him.
I love Simone de Beauvoir. Of course, Virginia would be there too. I mean, I have lots to talk to her about.
I've always loved Simone de Beauvoir as well. She's an incredibly fascinating character and obviously a really important writer.
So maybe the three of them: Anthony Bourdain, Virginia Woolf, and Simone de Beauvoir. That would be an interesting dinner.
21. If Virginia Woolf herself could sit beside you at the screening of this film, what do you hope she would approve of, or what would you hope she would say about the film?
I think I would love if she laughed. I would love if she laughed at the film—in enjoyment and pleasure—to see her artwork come into a different form.
I hope that she would approve of the delicate way it's told, but also the beauty of it as well.
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