Conception and adaptation
In 1989, Lindsay Doran, a producer of production company Mirage Enterprises, was on a company retreat brainstorming potential film ideas when she suggested the Jane Austen novel Sense and Sensibility to her colleagues. It had been adapted twice, most recently in a 1981 television serial. Doran was a longtime fan of the novel, and had vowed in her youth to adapt it if she ever entered the film industry. She chose to adapt this particular Austen work because there were two female leads. Doran stated that "all of [Austen's] books are funny and emotional, but Sense and Sensibility is the best movie story because it's full of twists and turns. Just when you think you know what's going on, everything is different. It's got real suspense, but it's not a thriller. Irresistible." She also praised the novel for possessing "wonderful characters ... three strong love stories, surprising plot twists, good jokes, relevant themes, and a heart-stopping ending."
Prior to being hired at Mirage, the producer had spent years looking for a suitable screenwriter – someone who was "equally strong in the areas of satire and romance" and could think in Austen's language "almost as naturally as he or she could think in the language of the twentieth century". Doran read screenplays by English and American writers until she came across a series of comedic skits, often in period settings, that actress Emma Thompson had written. Doran believed the humour and style of writing was "exactly what [she'd] been searching for". Thompson and Doran were already working together on Mirage's 1991 film Dead Again. A week after its completion, the producer selected Thompson to adapt Sense and Sensibility, although she knew that Thompson had never written a screenplay. Also a fan of Austen, Thompson first suggested they adapt Persuasion or Emma before agreeing to Doran's proposal. The actress found that Sense and Sensibility contained more action than she had remembered and decided it would translate well to drama.
Thompson spent five years writing and revising the screenplay, both during and between shooting other films. Believing the novel's language to be "far more arcane than in [Austen's] later books," Thompson sought to simplify the dialogue while retaining the "elegance and wit of the original." She observed that in a screenwriting process, a first draft often had "a lot of good stuff in it" but needed to be edited, and second drafts would "almost certainly be rubbish ... because you get into a panic". Thompson credited Doran that she could "help me, nourish me and mentor me through that process ... I learned about screenwriting at her feet".
Thompson's first draft was more than three hundred handwritten pages, which required her to reduce it to a more manageable length. She found the romances to be the most difficult to "juggle", and her draft received some criticism for the way it presented Willoughby and Edward. Doran later recalled the work was criticized for not getting underway until Willoughby's arrival, with Edward side-lined as backstory. Thompson and Doran quickly realised that "if we didn't meet Edward and do the work and take that twenty minutes to set up those people ... then it wasn't going to work". At the same time, Thompson wished to avoid depicting "a couple of women waiting around for men"; gradually her screenplay focused as much on the Dashwood sisters' relationship with each other as it did with their romantic interests.
With the draft screenplay, Doran pitched the idea to various studios in order to finance the film, but found that many were wary of the beginner Thompson as the screenwriter. She was considered a risk, as her experience was as an actress who had never written a film script. Columbia Pictures executive Amy Pascal supported Thompson's work and agreed to sign as the producer and distributor.
As Thompson mentioned on the BBC program QI in 2009, at one point in the writing process a computer failure almost lost the entire work. In panic Thompson called fellow actor and close friend Stephen Fry, the host of QI and a self-professed "geek". After seven hours, Fry was able to recover the documents from the device while Thompson had tea with Hugh Laurie who was at Fry's house at the time.
Taiwanese director Ang Lee was hired as a result of his work in the 1993 family comedy film The Wedding Banquet, which he co-wrote, produced, and directed. He was not familiar with Jane Austen. Doran felt that Lee's films, which depicted complex family relationships amidst a social comedy context, were a good fit with Austen's storylines. She recalled, "The idea of a foreign director was intellectually appealing even though it was very scary to have someone who didn't have English as his first language." The producer sent Lee a copy of Thompson's script, to which he replied that he was "cautiously interested". Fifteen directors were interviewed, but according to Doran, Lee was one of the few who recognised Austen's humour. He also told them he wanted the film to "break people's hearts so badly that they'll still be recovering from it two months later."
From the beginning, Doran wanted Sense and Sensibility to appeal to both a core audience of Austen aficionados as well as younger viewers attracted to romantic comedy films. She felt that Lee's involvement prevented the film from becoming "just some little English movie" that appealed only to local audiences instead of to the wider world. Lee said,
I thought they were crazy: I was brought up in Taiwan, what do I know about 19th-century England? About halfway through the script it started to make sense why they chose me. In my films I've been trying to mix social satire and family drama. I realised that all along I had been trying to do Jane Austen without knowing it. Jane Austen was my destiny. I just had to overcome the cultural barrier.Because Thompson and Doran had worked on the screenplay for so long, Lee described himself at the time as a "director for hire", as he was unsure of his role and position. He spent six months in England "learn[ing] how to make this movie, how to do a period film, culturally ... and how to adapt to the major league film industry".
In January 1995, Thompson presented a draft to Lee, Doran, co-producer Laurie Borg, and others working on the production, and spent the next two months editing the screenplay based upon their feedback. Thompson continued making revisions throughout production of the film, including altering scenes to meet budgetary concerns, adding dialogue changes, and changing certain aspects to better fit the actors. Brandon's confession scene, for instance, initially included flashbacks and stylised imagery before Thompson decided it was "emotionally more interesting to let Brandon tell the story himself and find it difficult".
