2026 adaptation filmed on Dartmoor, across Yelverton and at Mothecombe Beach.

A new film based on Jane Austen’s beloved Sense and Sensibility is coming to cinemas, with it’s charming and deeply relatable story of love and sisterhood, directed by Georgia Oakley.

The film crew headed to Devon for parts of the location filming, with Dartmoor providing the ideal backdrop, along with locations in Somerset, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire, London and Sussex.

The film stars BAFTA-nominated Daisy Edgar-Jones (Where the Crawdads Sing and Twisters), Esmé Creed-Miles (The Chronology of Water) and George MacKay (Rose of Nevada).

“I was really trying to get into what it might have felt like to live in Devon 200 years ago.”

Although Oakley is a filmmaker known for writing her own material, she was moved by the screenplay and immediately hooked into how she wanted to approach this film, both visually and thematically. She wanted her version of Sense and Sensibility to be grounded, naturalistic, earthy and stripped back. She wanted to foreground the dynamics of the central relationship between Elinor and Marianne. “I was drawn to the relationship between the sisters,” Oakley says.

For Oakley, there was another important character to highlight: the natural world. Putting her stamp on Austen, the filmmaker was determined to emphasise the textural details of the story to make the character’s environments feel that much more real and part of nature – wandering out among the windswept fields, hair unkempt, sometimes barefoot and leading full and rich lives in the countryside.

It was also important to Oakley and the production crew that they could ensure they made the world of Jane Austen come alive in a way that would feel both authentic and relatable to today’s audiences. “I was really trying to get into what it might have felt like to live in Devon 200 years ago, steering away from this preconceived idea that we have about Austen, that everything takes place in a stuffy drawing room,” Oakley says.

“The locations and the set design and the costumes having a loose, unbuttoned feeling, that was definitely part of my overall vision.”

She recruited collaborators who could preserve the novel’s Regency England trappings in a way that felt vibrant and fresh. Her team included cinematographer Arnaud Potier (Dead Man’s Wire), production designer Francesca Di Mottola (I Am Love, The Great), costume designer Grace Snell (Pillion) and Hair and Makeup Designer Nadia Stacey (Cruella).

Key to Oakley’s vision was visiting and using real-world English locations including in Dorset, Knebworth and Devon, and capturing them on 35mm film.

“For a long time now, I have only worked on film,” Oakley says. “There’s a certain look that a 35mm gives you. I love that it’s imperfect. It’s a living, breathing thing. It separates cinema from the little videos that we make on our phones every day. I just love the look of it for that reason. I also love the process of working on film with actors. It intensifies the stakes. The actors know that they might only have three takes to get the scene. When they know that, there’s a certain
amount of pressure, it feels a little bit more like theatre.”

Capturing the wild textures of the natural landscape, too, was a priority as the filmmakers sought to immerse the
audience into the characters’ world. “Since nature is such an important part of the film, that organic feeling was something we really needed,” Potier says. “Georgia wanted nature to feel organic and alive – where you could almost feel the elements: the water, the rain, reflections, the wind, changes in light, and the presence of animals. Whether it was through wider landscape shots or much more intimate details, like a close-up of a flower moving in the wind, the idea was always to make nature feel present and almost like another character in the story.”

This being something Devon’s Dartmoor is well-known for delivering for filmmakers from around the world.

The shoot began at the Kingston Russell House, a mansion and manor near the village of Long Bredy in West Dorset. It was the ideal stand-in for the Dashwood family’s beloved home of Norland Park. “I was looking for somewhere that felt both grand and lived in,” Oakley says.

While the Kingston Russell House was ideal for the initial grand estate manor filming, finding a real-world location for Barton Cottage initially proved more challenging. The crew headed to Devon in South West England: “I wanted the audience to feel what it would have felt like to move from a house like Norland in the book to a cottage in the middle of nowhere in Devon, but there are not many places in England where the countryside feels how it would have felt 200 years ago,” Oakley says.

“Having access to these kinds of locations is an incredible artistic and visual asset. They already carry a story within them, and that gives you a richness that is very difficult to recreate artificially.”

The house location they found in Sheepstor, near Yelverton on Dartmoor, was a single open room with beautiful stone floors but no windows – and initially it didn’t even have a roof. However, production designer Francesca Di Mottola and her team transformed the building into the perfect cottage for filming that would feel appropriate to the period but would communicate the unbuttoned feeling Oakley wanted.

Dartmoor’s Yelverton also provided the perfect backdrop for some of the exterior countryside scenes.

“Having access to these kinds of locations is an incredible artistic and visual asset. They already carry a story within them, and that gives you a richness that is very difficult to recreate artificially.” Potier says.

To bring the locations further to life, the production brought in herds of animals of all shapes and sizes, which added just the right sort of chaos to the scenes. “All the characters have their own animals, and the animals represent their owners in some way, as they do in real life,” Oakley says. “A lot of these animals couldn’t be trained, really, so, you’re working with whatever it is that they do on the day. That throws in a certain level of surprise for the performances and gives a lightness of touch to the overall film.”

The Ditsworthy Warren House location used also has another claim to fame, having been used in Steven Spielberg’s War Horse.

For the Devon beach scenes near Sense and Sensibility’s ‘Barton Cottage’, the film crew ventured to the quiet but stunning Mothecombe Beach which is around 10 miles from Plymouth.

Sense and Sensibility is out in cinemas on September 25th 2026 in the UK and October 16th in the US.

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