Virginia Woolf’s Night & Day
On September 4th, a new cinematic adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s classic novel, Night and Day, releases in U.S. theaters. Set in 1910 against the backdrop of Edwardian London, the film delves into the interwoven lives of passionate individuals wrestling with romance, intellectual independence, and social tradition.
SBC organizers got an exclusive early screening of the film at summer camp this year, courtesy of Quiver Distribution. Our campers were thrilled to experience Woolf’s timeless dialogue and complex relationships brought to life on the big screen before its public release—making for an unforgettable movie night under the stars.
Watch the trailer of Night & Day, and find showtimes in your area!
An interview with screenwriter Justine Waddell
Silent Book Club co-founder, Guinevere, had the privilege of interviewing Night & Day's screenwriter and producer, Justine Waddell.
SBC: When people think of Virginia Woolf, it’s usually Mrs. Dalloway or To the Lighthouse that come to mind. How did you discover Night and Day, and what compelled you to make it into a movie?
JW: I’ve been reading Woolf since I was a teenager. It was only in my mid 30s though that I stumbled across Night & Day. Katharine Hilbery, the heroine immediately ‘spoke’ to me. Here was a youngish woman trying to negotiate her way through the rings of career ambition, romantic love and family commitment. It felt real and relevant. Added to that, many of the characters around her existed in a kind of quasi Shakespearian comedy universe. William Rodney… Bess Hilbery… I was laughing out loud when I read them. Funny Woolf! It felt like an oxymoron and something wonderful to explore and then show the world.
And also, let’s be clear, as a debut screenwriter, I like to think I’ve got nerves, but attacking one of the masterpieces, I would be terrified. The fact that Woolf herself was always so dismissive of Night & Day, that dismissal gave me permission to take on the adaptation and be free with it.
Virginia Woolf’s characters are renowned for spending so much of their time stuck in their own heads. How did you approach the challenge of transforming all of that silent internal drama into a movie script?
Well, luckily, this is probably Woolf’s most realist novel. You can definitely feel the ghosts of Austen and Dickens stalking its pages. I often refer to it as Woolf’s teen novel, in as much as it is the novel she wrote while she was on her way to becoming what we would consider mature or adult Woolf. There are all sorts of gangly arms and legs and a lot of experimental writers’ energy buried within Night & Day. And this really translated into my approach for the adaptation. Tina Gharavi, the director, and I spent a lot of time talking about John Hughes and his classic rom-coms, Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, etc and what made them work as a way to guide how the adaptation translated to the screen.
The book deals with women in struggling to fit into the traditional roles assigned to them in Edwardian London. How did you make the characters feel real and relatable for a modern audience?
Woolf was a radical writer and she lived a radical life and we tried to infuse that curiosity into the film. I was also always guided by the question of ‘What would Woolf write now? What would she be interested to explore now?’.
I think by giving Katharine Hilbery a tremendous ambition, a tremendous goal in the screenplay, ie to get to Cambridge and to study astronomy, we hopefully created a heroine who women can identify with as she battles to create her own space in the world, to mark out her own journey
And then of course we were completely blessed with our cast, Haley Bennett is a radiant and totally immediate heroine, and Lily Allen is so blisteringly relevant as Mary Datchett and then Jennifer Saunders gives a masterclass as a middle-aged woman who has forgotten her own genius… They’re absolutely wonderful actors and hopefully also inspirational and relatable as characters.
What do you hope Woolf fans will get out of seeing this story brought to life on screen?
I hope readers will come away with an appreciation for Woolf the comic writer. And Woolf the romantic even. The book in the end is swooningly romantic. And I think the film is too. Comedy and Romance. Those are not words we associate with Woolf. But we should!!
Anything else about the film you’d like to share with readers?
Forgive us for adding a Jack Russell. My own is called Rex and I took my inspiration from Flush, Woolf’s book about Elizabeth Barret-Browning’s dog, arguably the best dog book ever. It just felt like a Woolf comedy needed a dog. Someone should adapt Flush some day.
About Justine Waddell (writer & producer)
Justine stumbled across Night & Day while browsing the shelves of her local bookshop and was determined to bring the feisty, spectacular Katharine Hilbery to the screen. This is her debut screenplay.
Through her production company, Asterisk Films, Justine has produced award-winning documentary feature films including “Janine Jansen: Falling For Stradivari,” about violin superstar Janine Jansen and a performance on 12 of the world’s greatest violins as well as “Force Of Nature Natalia,” about prima ballerina, Natalia Osipova.
After graduating from Cambridge University, Justine first became well known as an actress with film work including lead roles in films such as “The Fall” and “Chaos.” Her television work includes leading roles in period dramas “Wives And Daughters,” “Great Expectations,” and “Tess Of The D’Urbervilles.” She is also the founder of Klassiki, a streaming service, bringing the best of Eastern European classic and contemporary cinema to UK and US audiences.