In an abandoned Gillette razor factory in Isleworth, not far from Heathrow Airport, the British film director Mike Newell wades ankle-deep through mud. The ooze splatters everybody: the 100 or so extras in Victorian costume, the movie’s lead characters, the lighting engineers perched in cranes above the set. Newell is ten days into shooting the latest adaptation of Great Expectations, widely regarded as the most complex and magisterial of Charles Dickens’ works. To create a replica of West London’s Smithfield Market, circa 1820, the set-design team sloshed water across the factory floor—which had been jackhammered down to dirt during a now-defunct redevelopment project—and transformed the cavernous space into a quagmire.

Dickens completed Great Expectations in 1861, when he was at the height of his powers. It’s a mystery story, a psychodrama and a tale of thwarted love. At its center looms the orphaned hero Pip, who escapes poverty thanks to an anonymous benefactor, worships the beautiful, cold-hearted Estella and emerges, after a series of setbacks, disillusioned but mature. In the scene that Newell is shooting today, Pip arrives by carriage in the fetid heart of London, summoned from his home in the Kent countryside by a mysterious lawyer, Jaggers, who is about to take charge of his life. Newell leans over a monitor as his assistant director cries, “Roll sound, please!” Pause. “And action.”

Instantly the market comes alive: Pickpockets, urchins and beggars scurry about. Butchers wearing blood-stained aprons haul slabs of beef from wheelbarrows to their stalls past a pen filled with bleating sheep. Cattle carcasses hang from meat hooks. Alighting from a carriage, the disoriented protagonist, portrayed by Jeremy Irvine, collides with a neighborhood tough, who curses and pushes him aside. “Cut,” Newell shouts, with a clap of his hands. “Well done.”

Back in his trailer during a lunch break, Newell, perhaps best known for Four ...