POLDARK PAID FOR THE CURTAINS
THEY USUALLY DO IT FOR THE MONEY, ANNA TYZACK REPORTS, BUT STATELY HOMEOWNERS SOMETIMES REGRET LETTING IN FILM CREWS.
IF YOU’RE LUCKY ENOUGH TO OWN A STATELY HOME, YOU DO ANYTHING YOU CAN TO BOOST THE ROOF FUND ... SO IF SOMEONE WANTS TO PAY TO FILM AT THE HOUSE AND PUBLICIZE IT, THEN GREAT. — ELEANOR, DUCHESS OF ARGYLL
When a fleet of white trucks made its way to Highclere Castle in Hampshire early last year, bearing the crew for the new Downton Abbey film, Fiona, Countess of Carnarvon, breathed a sigh of relief.
“It was life-affirming. It felt as if a bit of normality was returning,” she says. “Everyone was nervous, as we were still in a pandemic, but we loved having them here, and so did the dogs.”
The Countess, who has overseen the filming of Downton’s six seasons and two films at her family’s 5,000-acre estate, is not the only stately homeowner to be pleased to see the cameras. Eleanor, Duchess of Argyll, was delighted when the film company behind A Very British Scandal arrived at Inveraray Castle, her husband’s family seat in Scotland, last year even though the story, which tells of the toxic divorce of the 11th duke from his wife, Margaret Campbell, wasn’t going to be a positive one.
“If you’re lucky enough to own a stately home, you do anything you can to boost the roof fund,” she says. “We figured that there’s no one left to be really upset by the story, so if someone wants to pay to film at the house, and publicize it, then great.”
Since the start of the pandemic, Mark Ellis — a location manager who has worked on such TV costume dramas as Downton, another Julian Fellowes series, Belgravia, and Emily Mortimer’s adaptation of The Pursuit of Love — has regularly received calls from aristocrats looking to capitalize on Britain’s booming film industry, which was worth at least $6 billion in the first half of 2021.
“They all seem to know each other and a lot of them are really (broke),” Ellis says.
“One day you’ll be with the Duke of Northumberland, and the next day a countess will be calling to say she’s interested in having a film crew at her house.”
No wonder, given that visitor numbers halved during the pandemic, and Netflix, Amazon and Disney offer stately homeowners thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars a day to use their homes as locations.
But not every duke or duchess can tolerate a 150-strong crew invading their home. Caroline Lowsley-williams, whose family home, Chavenage House in Gloucestershire, starred as Trenwith in the BBC’S Poldark and is now regularly used as a location, says some are too rich or too precious.
“You have to be the right character to accept it,” she says. Given that Chavenage is also available as a wedding venue, Lowsley-williams says she is used to “people wandering through our house and being sick on the lawn.” While filming doesn’t involve life-changing sums of money — a stately home can cost well more than $1 million to run each year — it still makes a difference. Poldark paid for nine sets of curtains, endless repainting and a new lawn mower, while visitor numbers duly increased.
Such is her experience of handling film crews that Lowsley-williams is now invited to talk on the subject to other stately homeowners. But when the Poldark crew first turned up, she had to get used to a whole new way of working: 13-hour days, the demand for silence when the camera is rolling (not easy when you have free-range chickens) and a maddening amount of waste from the props department, who will call in five bouquets of flowers when they’re only filming one.
For a positive filming experience, you as owner need to be clear about what the crew can and cannot do and where they have access, warns the Countess of Carnarvon.
The rule at Highclere is that the crew never touches anything. If a piece of furniture or a painting needs to be moved, it must be done by the Countess’s staff. Ellis suspects this is because of an incident on the inaugural day of filming Downton, when a turquoise chest belonging to the Countess was knocked onto the floor and broken. “It turned out to be one of her prize possessions and had to be sent to Sotheby’s for repair,” he recalls. There was another disaster at Highclere some years later when hundreds of gallons of diesel leaked from a generator, contaminating the surrounding ground.
All breakages and damage are, of course, covered by the film crew’s insurance, but Ellis dreads owning up. “It’s a tense, high-pressure situation, but we talk it through. I never bluff, I apologize and we get it sorted out.” He remembers a crew member at a different stately location enthusiastically stapling blackout curtains to 15th-century beams, costing the film crew a hefty repair bill, and another occasion when a crew security guard knocked a piece of timber through an oil painting.
“Would I let a film crew in my house? Never,” he says with a laugh.
Karin, Lady Mander of Owlpen Manor, a Tudor manor house in Gloucestershire, which was the location for the 2017 historical drama Phantom Thread, starring Daniel Day-lewis, is inclined to agree. “It was terrible,” she says. “The film crew was utterly charming but they mission-crept over the whole house, taking one room after the next until the only room I had to myself was the back hall.”
She grew fed up with the house being covered in scaffolding and the windows being blacked out, and people and equipment everywhere from dawn until twilight.
It was still worth it, though, Lady Mander concedes, not just for the money that they invested back into the house, but for the friends they made among the cast and crew. “My husband still exchanges letters with Daniel Day-lewis,” she says.