SOURCE: Burrill, Timothy. “Wessex Tales.” Sight and Sound 6, no. 7 (July 1996): 59.

In the following essay, Burrill—one of the producers on Polanski's Tess—describes the process of bringing the film through production to release.

Roman Polanski first approached me with the idea of producing an adaptation of Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles in 1977. He got in touch while I was in New York and asked if I could work on the film. I'd helped produce his Macbeth and we'd got on very well. So I flew back to Paris and met Claude Berri who wanted to finance Tess with his company Renn Productions. Berri and I were mutually suspicious at first, sizing each other up like dogs, but once we observed each other's quality, we hit it off and have worked together non-stop since.

We felt that Tess would be an ideal Franco-British co-production, but it was clear that...