An Education is a perfectly detailed, very stylish period piece set in 1961 England, but do you want to know a secret? Director Lone Scherfig freely admits she cheated with the period details. "Even if it's not right for the period, I would find a pair of Prada shoes and a pair of Jimmy Choo shoes [for star Carey Mulligan]," she told me in an interview this week. "She's going to walk nonstop for 6-8 weeks, and she should be comfortable. So that's what she's wearing, even if it's wrong."

Scherfig won't cope to feeling a motherly sense of pride at Mulligan, who has become a breakout star even before An Education opens in theaters this Friday, but there's clearly an affection there that goes beyond a professional director-actor relationship. You can see it in the film, in which Mulligan is in nearly every frame as Jenny, a 16-year-old girl testing the limits of her middle-class life by dating a 30-year-old hustler (Peter Sarsgaard). But you can also see it in my interview with Scherfig, as she talks about Mulligan's and the film's success and helping build the relationship between Mulligan and Sarsgaard on-screen. Then again she claims that Sarsgaard's character David is her favorite, so maybe I've got her all wrong.

The below video interview with Scherfig is a long one, 14 minutes, but well worth watching-- Scherfig is warm and funny and self-deprecating, particularly about being a Danish director of an English film (written by author Nick Hornby, no less). We'll have more from Scherfig later this week from an roundtable interview with her and Hornby, but in the meantime, enjoy the interview below.