Exclusive Interview
Inside ‘Pride and Prejudice’s Iconic Hand Scenes With Director Joe Wright (VIDEO)
The hand flex scene from 2005’s Pride and Prejudice is an iconic scene of female-gaze cinema, but Joe Wright, the film’s director, didn’t know that until I told him. You can see his reaction to this information in the video interview above, filmed in our in-office studio in Manhattan when Wright came in to discuss his new Mubi limited series, Mussolini: Son of the Century. In the video, we break down what he finds so romantic about hands.
Hands are frequently featured as forms of expression in Wright’s filmography. There’s the Pride and Prejudice hand flex, where Mr. Darcy (Matthew Macfadyen) stretches his hand in romantic panic after touching Elizabeth Bennet (Keira Knightley) for the first time.
Later, there’s the shot of Mr. Bingley (Simon Woods) yearnfully caressing the ribbons on the back of Jane Bennet’s (Rosamund Pike) dress at his Netherfield ball. In Atonement, Robbie (James McAvoy) grips the handle of a broken vase at the sight of Cecilia (Keira Knightley), soaking wet in just her slip after impulsively jumping into a fountain.
All of these close-up shots are meant to convey what the characters are really feeling, a momentary glimpse of truth that they’re desperately trying to keep inside.
“[Alfred] Hitchcock said, the dialogue is what happens whilst the eyes tell the story. I would extend that and suggest that the eyes and the hands tell the story,” Wright explains to Swooon about his hand motif. “There’s something unconscious about it. It’s a kind of unconscious expression of the interior of what we’re thinking and feeling.”
“I always just love hands,” he continues. “I think hands are so expressive of subtext, and subtext is what we, as filmmakers, as directors, have to play with. We can often be saying one thing, but looking for tell-tale signs of emotion elsewhere, playing in subtext.”
In the full interview above, Wright explains when the ideas for these three scenes from Pride and Prejudice and Atonement came to him. He breaks down in detail why the Darcy hand flex is so romantic to us all. Plus, he reveals the Bingley ribbons shot was born out of necessity and improvisation while creating that beloved one-shot sequence during the Netherfield ball — a scene that is arguably just as romantic as the hand flex, albeit not as frequently discussed in cinema conversation about the female gaze.
Pride and Prejudice‘s 20th anniversary is coming up on November 11, 2025. This scene study with Wright is our gift to fellow fans of Wright’s most romantic films. We hope you swoon over it just as much as we did.
