Luhrmann knew he couldn’t cast someone terrified of horses—and the actor would need a bearing that could accommodate armor. (He knew what that was like, having tried armor on at the Royal Armouries museum in Leeds.) He also wanted to emphasize that Joan was a teenage girl—not even from an elevated rank—who plunged herself into a brutal battle. “I’ve had a teenage daughter,” Luhrmann says, and “there’s a certain chemical energy. She could lift you up and cut you down with her tongue the next moment.”
To help him capture that audacity, he worked on the screenplay with Ava Pickett, the 31-year-old playwright and screenwriter whose play 1536 imagines the reverberations of the execution of Anne Boleyn among ordinary young women, and was staged at London’s Almeida Theatre earlier this year. “The thing that we really bonded over was Jehanne d’Arc the teenage girl, rather than Jehanne d’Arc the cultural icon or the legend,” says Pickett. That thematic emphasis didn’t mean that Pickett and Luhrmann were playing fast and loose with history. They consulted with academics, and Luhrmann says that he’s “taken every step that Jehanne d’Arc has ever taken in France.” Catherine Martin, Luhrmann’s wife and frequent collaborator, describes to me compiling an “encyclopedic study” of the period that ranges from “the breeds of dogs popular in her era, to comparative studies of medieval and modern horses, to furniture, textiles, and even details of interior painting.” (Martin, whose mother is French and father is a retired academic specializing in French history, also points to one reason Joan might have dressed herself in male clothing: It was tied together with laces, which made it “far more difficult to undress someone against their will.”)
Pickett also traveled with Luhrmann to Paris and Rouen, where Joan was eventually burned at the stake—“to look at the sky and have it be the same sky that she would’ve looked at,” she says—and finally the two spent weeks writing together on Australia’s Gold Coast. At the end, Pickett read him the entire script out loud.