“I wanted it to be like a pastry shop,” de Wilde said. Goddard’s boarding-school girls move in a flock, à la “Madeline” or “The Handmaid’s Tale,” wearing red capes and pale bonnets the pink-and-green décor of Hartfield, Emma’s home, evokes a layer cake frosted with buttercream. The film opens in a hothouse bursting with orange and pink flowers Mrs. De Wilde’s artful whimsy-evidenced in her short films for Prada, photographs for Rodarte, and album covers for Jenny Lewis, Beck, the White Stripes, Childish Gambino, and Elliott Smith, among others-makes Austen’s familiar tale of youthful meddling in Regency England look pleasingly strange.ĭe Wilde likes to “tell stories with color,” she said. “Emma,” with a screenplay adapted from Jane Austen by the novelist Eleanor Catton, comes out at a particular moment, when a number of female directors and creators are reimagining classic girls’ stories (“Little Women”) and biographies (“Dickinson”), and playing up the boldness and independence of their heroines in ways that feel new. “We only got in trouble when he tried to take his shoes off,” she said.

De Wilde later re-created the Pollock nap image in a photo shoot, with Elijah Wood wearing Rodarte pajamas.

“People started gathering around to take pictures.” Arrow de Wilde, now twenty, is the lead singer in a band called Starcrawler, and six feet three: a very long noodle. She has a special memory of the Met: her five-year-old daughter, asleep-“She was like a long noodle”-on a bench in front of Jackson Pollock’s “Autumn Rhythm (Number 30),” the billboard-size action painting from 1950. “My style icons are two people: Oscar Wilde and Paddington Bear,” she said. She carried an elegant cane (“I have arthritis, and I decided not to hide it anymore”) and resembled an amused Edwardian flâneur. De Wilde, who is six feet two, wore a plum-colored Borsalino fedora (“I was re-upping my hats, and Bill Nighy helped me”), a high-collared pink blouse, a dark A-line jacket, a mango Prada Galleria bag, navy trousers, pink socks, and black oxford shoes. One recent afternoon, not long before the première of “Emma,” the first feature film by Autumn de Wilde, the Los Angeles-based director and photographer visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York.

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