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The director of Billy Elliott on his new Netflix drama The Crown
STEPHEN DALDRY TELLS TEDDY JAMIESON WHY THE SUBJECT OF HIS NEW DRAMA IS THE LAST PERSON HE WANTS TO SEE IT
SO, have you started watching it yet? It is now a week and a day since Netflix launched The Crown, its lavish drama based on the life of the Queen, following her from her days as a Maltese naval officer’s wife to her ascension of the throne and beyond. All 10 episodes of the first series have been streaming since November 4, giving subscribers the opportunity to indulge in a bout of sumptuous binge viewing. It’s a new model for drama that is telling one of the most familiar stories the UK has to offer.
What does The Crown tell us about the ecology of television in 2016, you might ask? What, too, does it tell us about our attitude to the monarchy?
These are the questions I am asking The Crown’s executive producer and director Stephen Daldry. It is November 3, the day before The Crown starts streaming and we are sitting in a plush London hotel a few yards from the Thames, sandwiched in between Horse Guards Parade and the Playhouse Theatre which is now home to An Inspector Calls, a revival of the 1992 production of JB Priestley’s play which established Daldry’s reputation, one subsequently garlanded with Laurence Olivier Awards and Oscar nominations for the first three films he directed (Billy Elliot, The Hours and The Reader) and his role as executive producer of the 2012 Olympic opening and closing ceremonies.
Daldry has taken a break from filming The Crown’s second season to be here. In the next room there is a pack of international journalists waiting to talk to either him or the actor Jared Harris, who plays Elizabeth’s father, King George VI. The range of accents and languages is a reflection that this is a drama with international reach available via an international network.
Yet it concerns that most British of subjects, the monarchy. In our short time together Daldry and I will also run through Brexit, the state of the Union and Ken Loach’s attitude to costume drama. But right now he is telling me about the one person he hopes won’t watch The Crown.
“People say, ‘Do you think the Queen will watch it?’ I so hope she doesn’t,” he tells me. “However well researched, of course we make things up. We are dramatists. I imagine she would be horrified by some of the choices we have made and I sincerely hope she doesn’t watch it.”
If she doesn’t, what will she be missing? A sumptuously realised, rather soapy drama written by dramatist Peter Morgan (who has previous when it comes to royalty, of course. He wrote the film The Queen and the play The Audience, both of which saw Helen Mirren playing the Queen; the latter provides the foundation for this new series). As well as the cream of British acting talent you can also see exactly where the supposed £100 million has been spent. It’s said the makers spent some £30,000 on recreating the Queen’s wedding dress alone.
Daldry thinks the hefty finances of the series can be overstated. That possible ninefigure sum (he’s not confirming one way or another) has to stretch over two seasons after all. “People talk about a vast budget. Actually, if you’re talking about 20 hours for that amount of money you sort of go, ‘Well, not really,’” he suggests.
But the costumes and the settings are the decoration. For Daldry, the key to The Crown is that it gives its creators the opportunity to tell the United Kingdom’s story through that of the royal family and through the relationships between the Queen (played with wide eyes and clipped accent by an impressive Claire Foy) and her prime ministers (an ageing Winston Churchill, as incarnated by John Lithgow, and a drugged-up Anthony Eden, played by Jeremy Northam).
“We’re making 20 hours. We hope in the end to make 60 hours, but in a sense you could make 6,000 hours because the story has so many riches to it, so many tangential characters and themes. You could keep making what is not just the story of a family that happens to be the royal family but postwar Britain and Britain in the latter half of the century.”
It is, self-evidently, a 21st-century take. And as such it comes at a time when the monarchy enjoys, Daldry says, incredible popularity. One imagines The Crown may have been a very different drama if it had been made 20 years ago around the time of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.
“We imagine that the Queen’s popularity has always been at this height but it hasn’t. I think if there was a vote on whether we should keep the royal family – or keep the Queen anyway – the vast majority would vote to keep her. That all might change as the crown is handed on to her son. But we don’t know that yet and we don’t know what that will bring. That might be a very different story.”
And right now, you could argue, the monarch is a symbol of stability when all around is flux. “At a time when there’s been a catastrophic failure of our politicians to lead our country in many different ways there is something reassuring about having a head of state who has not let us down, who has not, in many people’s point of view, betrayed us or had a failure of leadership.”
Daldry, it will not surprise you, was a remainer. He’s a gay man who is married to a woman and a liberal luvvie, according to the kind of columnist who writes for The Spectator. You wonder, then, did he approach the series with a more ambivalent take on the royal family than might a leader writer of the Daily Mail, say? “It’s an exploration and a point of view will emerge. I have a huge amount of respect for the Queen’s longevity and ability to survive.”
You can feel the but coming, can’t you? “If I’m being honest, it is my own exploration about what I really do feel about the monarchy and it is an absurdity that we should have a monarchy.”
It’s an absurdity, too, he adds, that they become public property. “How many hours were and are spent in Cabinet debating the detail of what the family gets up to in not just their bedchambers but also their hobbies, their lives? It’s a wonderfully absurd situation.”
In the Queen he has created for The Crown there’s maybe an element of wish fulfilment. “I would like the Queen to challenge Tony Blair on the war on Iraq. I would like the Queen to challenge Anthony Eden over Suez. Whether or not she did I don’t know and I don’t know whether it’s pertinent to the drama. It is the Queen I want and if the Queen I want is a slightly left-of-centre Queen then that’s just my wish. We all project on to the most visible invisible woman in the world.”
That and in this case a TV network that is ready to fund a hugely expensive, expansive drama. Daldry, fellow executive producer Andy Harris and Morgan had discussed the project with other companies, including the BBC, he says. But Netflix committed to two seasons “after about 40 minutes”. Could the BBC have done it? “Yes. But if we had done the show with the BBC they would have had to look to an American partner anyway to co-finance. The advantage with Netflix is it’s a one-stop shop.”
Also, he says, he had fewer fears of censorship with Netflix. “I’m sure we could have guarded against it, but I was always slightly worried that were we to investigate certain areas of the constitution or the royal family the BBC might have issues with it. We didn’t want any editorial interference.”
THE Crown represents the latest iteration of television. The weekly appointment to view is increasingly a thing of the past. This is a reflection of the fact that, for Netflix, the economic key is churn and how to stop it. They need to not only attract subscribers but retain them too, and while some such as Sky have long opted to use sport as its hook, others in recent years have been using drama. HBO has led the way and Netflix and Amazon Prime are following, offering no ads and the chance to binge on what Daldry calls long-form drama.
“Things are changing in television so wildly, so rapidly and how we – and I hate this term but still use it – consume long-form drama is changing rapidly.
“I imagine what we see as long-form drama and the scale of that drama will continue to expand as people watch in a different way and choose to watch in the way that they want to watch it.”
Is there a danger, though, that, because of the scale of the investment, if television seeks a global audience we will only want to tell global stories? The royals are, after all, an international brand. Does it now become easier to tell stories set in Buckingham Palace rather than, say, Bolton or Bonnybridge? “I think the reverse. I think the specificity of any story is where you find the universal. I’ve always felt it with Billy Elliot which has gone around the world. It’s a very specific story about a mining village in Easington and their particular struggles during the miners’ strike which seems to play incredibly well in Japan, as it does in South Korea, as it does in Australia, as it does in Amsterdam.” Fair point, that.
No, he says, the real worry might be how the new TV impacts on our cinemas. “Of course you probably will go to the major blockbusters for the experience of the large screen but in terms of drama? I don’t know. ‘It’s Friday night. Ooh, let’s go and see a new drama at the cinema. Or we can just watch Stranger Things season two on our TV.’”
Watching the early episodes of The Crown, with their endless shooting
It is an absurdity that we should have a monarchy
sequences and their attention to the faintly ridiculous niceties of royal etiquette, it would be easy to file it alongside such series as ITV’s Downton Abbey and the same channel’s recent success, Victoria, about another queen. In short, isn’t The Crown another, albeit inflated example of heritage telly, full of posh frocks and posh people? Exactly the kind of thing Ken Loach railed against recently. “This rosy vision of the past, it’s a choice broadcasters make,” the director of I, Daniel Blake told the Radio Times. “‘Don’t bother your heads with what’s going on now, just wallow in fake nostalgia.’ It’s bad history, bad drama. It puts your brain to sleep.” Defend yourself, Stephen. “I am in agreement with Ken. I call it bonnet drama. It’s not something I particularly enjoy.” But isn’t The Crown bonnet drama? Not at all, he says. “Because I think this is a story of our country and how we’ve got to where we are.”
He frames the series as something of a post-Brexit drama, a way to explain ourselves to our European neighbours perhaps. “Who are we? This eccentric, ludicrous, constitutional monarchy? We’re now hearing our prime minister talking about ties with the Commonwealth and almost an imperial past. A lot of what Theresa May is talking about seems to me from the 1950s.
“It’s illogical, what’s happened with Brexit. It’s an illogical act by the British people and we will be suffering it for the rest of our lives. How can we possibly return to a period of relying on a lost empire for trading partners?
“Maybe there is a point of interest in these eccentric, ridiculous people who seem to be cutting off their little island and sailing into insignificance politically, culturally and economically. Who were they? And I use the past tense because maybe we’re living only in the past tense. It’s important to look at the past in the hope that we can find something that gives us some kind of faith in the future.”
Any such faith does not stretch, in his case, to faith in the future of the Union. He fears it’s in danger. That’s the consequence of “incredible idiotic leadership from people like Michael Gove or bad leadership from the last government to really talk through the consequences”.
It occurs to me, I suggest, that you could argue that Danny Boyle’s Olympics 2012 opening ceremony, overseen by Daldry, was something of the last hurrah for a particular liberal idea of the United Kingdom.
“Well, there are many stories to tell about that, as you can imagine. My job was to interface with the Cabinet on the ceremonies. There were certain things I did not trust them to keep to themselves, one of which was the Queen jumping out of a helicopter. We didn’t tell David Cameron until quite late. But I didn’t want to tell Gove. You might as well be telling Reuters.”
It’s time to go. Daldry has a second series to shoot, plays to oversee and an adaptation of Wicked to film at some point. One last question though. Who makes the best Queen: Claire Foy or Elizabeth Windsor?
“Truth be known, the Queen probably makes the best Queen. It was a real punt suggesting to the palace that she might want to ‘jump out’ of a helicopter but I think it’s hard to underestimate the family’s enjoyment of practical jokes. And I think Her Majesty had a genuine interest in not telling her family that was going to happen and seeing whether anyone in the family did for a moment believe she was jumping out of that helicopter.” Pencil that scene in for The Crown season six, perhaps. The Crown is available on Netflix.