The movie was based upon L.P. Hartley's novel of the same name. The opening line of the novel has become somewhat well-known: "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." That same line--spoken by the voice-over narrator--opens this movie.
Regarding filming in Norfolk, director Joseph Losey said in an interview, "Norfolk helped me a lot because Norfolk hasn't changed. Most of the costumes were genuine. We made very few others, and we all lived in the house. They wore the costumes all the time, and ate, as well as acted in their costumes. Once you've got the exact house, accessories, costumes, something then springs to life."
After the novel's original publication in 1953, author L.P. Hartley sold the movie rights to Alexander Korda, who claimed that he wanted to make a movie with Deborah Kerr in the role of Marian. However, some years went by with no movie emerging, making Hartley convinced that Korda had only bought the movie rights in order to sell them to someone else (at a considerable profit). He told an interviewer years later that "I was so annoyed with Korda that I put a curse on him", rather in the manner of his novel's thirteen-year-old hero, and noted, alarmingly, that Korda had died suddenly the following day.
Director Joseph Losey would state in 1971 that producer/director Alexander Korda ]. who had acquired the film rights to the L.P. Hartley source novel soon after its 1953 publication, had commissioned a screenplay from novelist Nancy Mitford transposing the action to a château in France. According to Losey, his own version's second female lead Margaret Leighton had been Korda's choice for the female lead role of Marian. Although Leighton had played what could be termed romantic female leads early in her cinematic career - specifically in Bonnie Prince Charlie (1948) and The Fighting Pimpernel (1949), both of which Korda had a hand in (uncredited) - by the mid-1950's Leighton was well-established as a character actress, for whom the role of Marian would have been extremely atypical.
In his introduction to the Penguin edition of Hartley's source novel, Douglas Brooks-Davies states that John Cresswell was attached as screenwriter to the stalled mid-1950's filmation, whose cast was to include Alec Guinness and Kenneth More.
In his introduction to the Penguin edition of Hartley's source novel, Douglas Brooks-Davies states that John Cresswell was attached as screenwriter to the stalled mid-1950's filmation, whose cast was to include Alec Guinness and Kenneth More.